Attorney accuses FBI of deceptive practices in Oklahoma City bombing records case

By isabelle // 2024-07-29

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Utah Attorney Jesse Trentadue has accused the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of making misleading statements pertaining to documents from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Trentadue filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit against the FBI earlier this year to obtain recordings pertaining to Roger Edwin Moore. Moore was the business associate of bomber Timothy McVeigh who also served as an FBI informant and an asset for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Trentadue also sought records about the neo-Nazi gang of bank robbers involved in the attack, the Aryan Republican Army. He filed the suit after spending nine years waiting for them to process an FOIA request for the records, which was followed by the FBI requesting that a federal judge give them another 12 years to release all of them. Last month, the FBI told a federal judge that the records the attorney seeks existed on their website. Trentadue said that is simply not true, however. In his court filing, he noted: “That statement is so misleading as to merit sanctions. The BOMBROB records posted by the FBI, for example, consist of just 5,514 pages, not the 36,795 pages of responsive documents that the Bureau claims to possess.” BOMBROB refers to the FBI investigation of the Aryan Republican Army. Trentadue goes on to note that just 51 of those 5,514 pages have references to McVeigh. Moreover, although the FBI claims that it has located more than 31,000 pages of records on Roger Edwin Moore, their website has just 229 of them, none of which refer to his participation in the FBI operation where Moore served as an informant known as Operation Punchout.

Rate of records release was misleading

Another point of contention for Trentadue was the FBI’s insistence that the attorney agreed to receive the records at a rate of 500 pages per month. This would means that it would take 12 years to get all of them. Although he said that he accepted this arrangement with the understanding that it would be on a rolling basis, the FBI instead intended to gather the records at that rate but send them all together in a single batch at the end of the time period. The filing asserted: “Plaintiff agreed to receiving the documents in 500-page increments on a CD as they were processed, whereby he would not have to wait until all of the records were processed before receiving them. Plaintiff NEVER agreed to the FBI processing the documents at the rate of only 500-pages per month.” Trentadue is no stranger to getting the runaround from the FBI and the DOJ. In fact, he filed a different lawsuit that seeks to obtain surveillance footage of the bombing in which a federal judge is looking into claims that the FBI tampered with one of his witnesses. He touched on this in his response to the FBI, noting: “It can fairly be said that the only difference between the FBI and Russian KGB is that the KGB never claimed to be a legitimate law enforcement agency. It can also be fairly said that in cases such as this involving an overarching specter of government malfeasance, the FBI has been and will be anything but honest and candid with the court.” Trentadue noted in his filing that with the 30th anniversary of the bombing approaching, public interest in the case is high. He’s requesting that they release the records at a rate of 5,500 pages per month, along with interim releases at the end of each month containing all of the documents processed that month. This would mean he could access all the records in 13 months instead of upwards of 11 years. Trentadue has been seeking the records for nearly three decades as he investigates his brother’s mysterious death in a federal penitentiary that appears to be related to the bombing. Sources for this article include: HeadlineUSA.com HeadlineUSA.com

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Rate of records release was misleading