Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 3/3/23 Richard Booth: Honest OKC Bombing Coverage Finally Goes Mainstream

Episode Date: March 8, 2023

Richard Booth joins Scott to talk about the surprisingly good CNN article on Oklahoma City cop Terry Yeakey. Scott and Booth give an overview of Yeakey’s story and praise CNN for publishing such a fair piece about him. They then embark on a broader conversation about the bombing, play some relevant audio clips and also discuss Booth’s recent article about the FBI’s failure to comply with FOIA requests. Discussed on the show: “Why did this cop turn up dead?” (CNN) OKC Bombing Archive at the Libertarian Institute “The Death of Oklahoma City Police Officer Terrance Yeakley” (Washington Weekly [Archived at the Libertarian Institute]) Booth’s Youtube Channel “Did agents bungle US terror bomb?” (Daily Telegraph [Archived at the Libertarian Institute]) “The FBI’s Failure to Comply with FOIA: Reform Necessary After Lawsuits Detail Pattern of Deception” (Libertarian Institute) Richard Booth is the Glenn D. Wilburn Fellow at the Libertarian Institute and an independent citizen journalist and member of the Constitution First Amendment Press Association (CFAPA). You can find Richard’s journalism at The Libertarian Institute, and on his Substack. Follow him on Twitter @booth_okc This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show all right you guys on the line i've got richard booth he's our glen wilburn fellow at the libertarian institute and keeper of our great archive on the oklahoma city bombing at libertarian

Institute.org slash OKC, the world's greatest collection of primary sources, documents from all different government agencies, as well as all of the very best articles and none of the goofy stuff on the Oklahoma City bombing. Welcome to show. How are you doing, Richard? Pretty good. How are you, Scott? I'm doing great, man. And I'm having a hell of a day today, starting this morning. I just couldn't believe it. Jesse Trinidad sent in the email brand new out in cnn.com of all places an article called why did this cop turn up dead a heroic police officer rescued at least three people after the 1995 oklahoma city bombing a year later he was found shot in the head by thomas lake at cnn i'm working on getting this guy on the show but it hasn't worked

yet because of CNN bureaucracy. So hopefully we'll have that interview for everybody here soon. But I figure I'll go ahead and go over this with you now. I don't know where to start. I'm fascinated, of course, by CNN making the decision to publish this. I don't want to speculate on what's behind that. It could just be that it's solid journalism and his editor had some courage and went for it. It could be something else, but I have no real cause to speculate about that, but I can celebrate the fact that it's being published. This piece is being published at such a high-profile website. And I guess I have to presume they've been talking about it on TV today, at least did one segment on it or something, right? If it's CNN, do you know?

You know, I don't know if they had any coverage on the network. But anyway, you know, I'm convinced it's all social psychology, so I put out a tweet. I should have tagged a bunch of a minute. I couldn't think of who to tag in the thing, but, you know, attention to all mainstream newspaper or, you know, mainstream media journalists, you can talk about this now and without getting, you know, conspiracy theory cooties on you or anything, because look at this solid piece by CNN. I couldn't find a flaw in the thing. Ah, they decided of Ben Parton. I might have left that out. But one important piece, so I'm going to be quiet now, and please tell us what was your impression of that story and what do you know about what's

behind it, if anything? Yeah, I thought the piece was actually really solid you could tell from reading it that he had interviewed several people you know he'd spoken to the people who were involved in this um he talked to terry's ex-wife talked to his his sister and so he definitely it's more than just a surface level thing the guy actually said you know this is from my investigation so he must have been working on it for some time uh to go to that level and of course he interviewed Bob Rick's too just awful but my impression was I thought

it was really good it was good journalism and I think it's brave and it makes me wonder how did he get it past his editor but you know however that may be whatever it is I'm not going to question it because it's it's great to get more attention on this subject yeah absolutely right

all right so for the new people I mean first of all you know before you even tell us about Terryakey You just tell us, you know, basic overview. There are people who have no idea that there's another story at all behind the Oklahoma bombing and what it might have to do with this dead cop. Absolutely.

So, yeah, Terry Yakey was one of the first, the first person to arrive at the crime scene right after the bombing. He was nearby a police officer in Oklahoma City, and he responded, you know, and immediately went to work going through the. rubble saving people. He saved a number of people that day, and he actually injured his back while doing so. But yeah, he's pulling just pulling people out of the rubble and doing everything he could just to help out. And I guess he was really sort of traumatized and very upset by things that he saw that day. And what we know about that comes from his ex-wife, Tanya Yeki, because he was talking to her about it. And one of the quotes, you know,

is that he said they're lying, it's not what they say it is, or something along those lines, that what happened isn't what they're saying happened. So evidently, he saw something that upset him greatly. And part of that involves, researchers believe, that he may have had access to surveillance tape. He actually, he had a VCR himself, which folks out there back when we used VHS tapes, You had to use a VCR to play them, and to make a copy of the VHS tape, you actually had to have two VCRs. And while Terry had a VCR, he borrowed his ex-wife, Tonya Yakey's VCR, so that he could be in a position to have two of them, which, of course, you know, makes one think that he probably was going to try to dub a tape. And that's what a lot of us believes that he may have been referring to what he saw in the surveillance tape, but it might have been what upset him so much.

right now you know i've known about this story for a long time i know that i talked about terry yakey back on free radio austin in 1998 and 1999 and you know i don't know i guess you probably would know better than me whether we talk about him in my archives at all i don't he's not been the biggest piece of this puzzle to me in my coverage of it in this century i don't guess but um yeah if someone searches the libertarian institute for yakey actually a really good article the one i prefer people to the most comes up and that's an article by david hoffman uh it was published and i want to say washington weekly and it has the basic details of the yakey story and hoffman is the same guy that wrote the politics of terror right

yep same guy okay um and so uh but now well can you tell us because you know i remember that you know the story was that he was suspicious about something about oklahoma that the crime scene, you know, was impossible. He was like, you know, of course, all these self-inflicted knife wounds, but then he was on the other side of a chain-link fence and shot himself, but there's no gun and all these things. I remember all of that. But the stories really developed much further than I had realized here.

A part of it from the work of Craig Roberts, who I know of, but I never really paid too close of attention to him. You know, when I was mostly interested in, the story was before I had the internet. I'm old, see. But anyway, so this guy, you know, writing for CNN, he's essentially piggybacking on the work of Craig Roberts in a way. And that's just not Paul Craig Roberts, the nut. Different guy. Yeah.

And anyway, so they really have developed this story further. Like, it's not just, oh, I heard somewhere that this guy had something on the Oklahoma. bombing or whatever like this guy's really developed the story about everyone around terryiki knew that he had a problem with what happened at that bombing that apparently he had his own investigation going on and then you know he even talks to this lady i guess who had been kind of a big champion of the first responders and that kind of thing who was like the last guy to see him the last lady to last person to see him a lot That's right.

And he went, yeah, I'm going to go meet with these feds and show them what I got. What? I mean, this is really an incredible story, man. This is something else. I should have read it twice. You know, it really is. And you're right, this person that he was talking to, Ramona, was kind of a confidant for Terry. And when you read it, when you read that article or read the Hoffman piece, the picture that emerges, it almost looks like these feds that he was going to meet, it seems like,

they lured him, you know, because he goes to, to meet them, and then he's dead. And what we find, and you'll see this in the coverage, is not only what was Terry's apartment broken into and tossed, obviously someone looking for something. Same thing happened to Tanya's apartment, to Ramona's, and then his storage unit in Kingfisher was emptied out. And so we believe that the folks who killed him did so because, uh, He may have had the surveillance tape or a copy of it, and they were desperately trying to retrieve that. And as, you know, if Terry had taken that to the media, they, of course, would have run with it.

And given his position, really, he was distraught and upset about something. And so that's what we think it is. And you can see that in both the new CNN piece and in Hoffman's piece, the level of harassment that went on with the family. And like I mentioned, the break-ins, you could see all that. And really, it is a huge story. People should look at it. It's going to open some eyes, I think. Yeah.

I mean, I still can't believe that they published an article that's this good. Nobody took a hatchet and cut these great paragraphs out or anything. I mean, this stuff is where they talk about how, what do you mean there was no autopsy? for a cop who died violently and where there's no direct witnesses or, you know, this kind of thing, no investigation? And then also the Oklahoma City Police Department taking immediate control of the investigation. Now, it's interesting, you know, because this murder happened in El Reno, which is a different county, different city than Oklahoma City. And they were asked, you know, for, in the CNN piece, the writer reached out and asked, you know, why, why did you guys take control

of this investigation? And they actually said, oh, oh, we don't know. You know, it's just amazing. Yeah. Well, and seriously, who had the juice to make the Oklahoma Police Department cover up the murder of one of their own guys? You know, that's a pretty tough one. Not impossible, just tough. that's all I'm saying there um now so what about the gun did I have it right that we knew for fact that there was no gun the way it says here is just that they don't talk about in the reports they don't mention whether a gun was found or not or whether it was fingerprinted or any other thing it's just sort of well he was shot right credit to to Craig roberts for that because he actually began writing letters to the he's a former police officer Tulsa PD and so he knew um who

police authorities were and who to go to and that sort of thing. So he was writing them letters about this because he wanted to know what firearm was recovered at the crime scene. Was it, you know, whose firearm was it? Because we still don't know that. And what we know from the reporting is that initially when law enforcement showed up and at the scene of the crime where they've got his body now and his suicide, you're typically going to find the firearm right away right there by the body. and that wasn't the case with Terry Yiki. And so initially there was, you know, they didn't find any sort of firearm. And it was only after the feds had began, from what I read, it said that after the FBI got involved and the Oklahoma City Police Department have secured the crime scene, now all of a sudden they find a firearm, that it's still not been sufficiently explained what type of weapon, whose weapon it was.

that's still very much, I think, a central question that deserves to be answered, even if the position is, oh, this was just a suicide, well, if that's the case, and they should have no issues answering such a simple question. All right, now, so there were, you know, the CNN story did bring up that there were some trouble in the guy's personal life, that they have court records that say that his wife had divorced him and put a protective order against him. And so he had a problem with his temper and he was having these problems and this kind of thing. I wonder what you know about that. And, you know, he also does report in here, though, that that's all disputed and that, well, not that there was a

protective order, but it says here that they were getting remarried here and this kind of thing. So the story that he was having a real bad time right then was not really true. But I just wonder whether you've really looked at any of that at all. I have just kind of cursory, but what I do know about it, though, is that his ex-wife had filed a, like a protective order against him about two years before all of this happen, before he, you know, was murdered. And so they had, you know, people in relationships will go through strife and trouble, and not to minimize anything, but what I think probably happened here is,

is they were going through, you know, having some problems. And she did, you know, go and take out this protective order. But whatever problems they had, they resolved that. And they had reconciled. And they actually were very much on friendly terms with one another. And actually, like you said, talking about, you know, getting married again. And so they were really kind of back together. And what's interesting there is that after he was murdered, the police were very much pressuring

Tanya, to basically, they wanted her to say that she wanted to have the protective order reinstated and that she, you know, she was asking them to do that right before, you know, he died to really what they wanted to look like was to create a narrative of an unstable individual. And she refused to go along with that, to her credit. Right. Yeah, that's really the narrative that you get out of theirs. They very much wanted for that to be the story that this guy was having. some problems but meanwhile all the people who saw him in you know the time leading up to his death

none of them believed that this guy was suffering some major depression right none of them did and in fact terry had spent a considerable amount of time with his wife and children since the the issues that they had in the the year and a half to two years before um going out on family outings all of them together and everybody who knew terry and knew the family none of them believe it. They straight up say that, no, absolutely not. If he was upset about anything, it wasn't personal matters. It was professional. He was upset about something that related to the folks he was working with and specifically something that he saw and he knew to be a fact. And I've thought about that and thought about it. And the only thing that I can think of is, you know, it goes again back to,

I think he probably made a copy of the surveillance video. And of course, I'm just speculating here, But if a person had that, I think there's some things would be very clear to them rather quickly. And that also would be the kind of evidence, given what we've seen to cover that evidence up and deny that it exists, it would show the premium the feds would put on that kind of material and shows how far they would go to keep a lid on it. All right. So there's too many things that I keep remembering them and forgetting them again. So let me go through real quick. We had this eight-page report that he had given and turned in to the Oklahoma Police Department

that had disappeared from the records that no one could find. But then this lady, the last person to see him alive, she said that she had a copy of it, too. But I guess it's implied that it was stolen when her house was ransacked. That's right. But it's severe independent confirmation of the existence of this eight-page memo, which he was said to have been told, rewrite it, make it a page long, and take out all the good stuff, which is one of the things that he was said to be upset about. Yes.

And then... He was upset about his superiors wanting him to alter a report, you know? He didn't like that at all. Right, and then two more things, and I'll be quiet, you can address all three of these things, but then we have a medical examiner's report. This is how we know that he did have these cuts all over his body. and then but there are witness statements help clarify for me why it is that we're led to believe that there was much more than just cuts and a gunshot but that he had been tortured and had had been

bound and these kinds of things and then also if you could please talk about this and this is something that i didn't know either if i knew it i forgot and i'm sorry but that he had a friend Steve Vassar, who was also a former cop, which is, you know, pretty good for the same thing with Craig Roberts, that CNN can go, well, I don't know, he's a former cop and talked to the guy, and that he had done kind of his own investigation and come to his own conclusions about what had happened to Terry, too. So I was wondering if you could talk about that. Yes, so in terms of the wounds and what that evidence tells us is, you're correct that, yes, of course he had the he had these cuts you know to his wrists and to his neck but also he had very

much like kenneth trinidou and this other case he had ligature marks on him to show that basically he had probably flex cuffs or zip ties on him and leaves those marks you know on the body and that's very that was very evident in this case uh to the medical examiner and that's why the family said they tortured him and killed him because they're seeing you know evidence here that he was restrained. Oh, and it's important to note, right, that I guess, I don't know if they attempted to get away with cremation here or something, but in this case, his family got to see his body

and essentially take notes on the damage that's right. That's right. The family knew as well from the medical examiner's report who he would, you know, in that report, although it doesn't say suicide, you're talking about a guy who has two razor cuts to his neck he's got razor cuts on both of his wrists he has ligature marks on his body and they found actually dirt and grass embedded in some of these wounds which led which i think would lead any reasonable person to conclude that the body was dragged you know across the

ground and that's how this material gets embedded right in the wounds so the picture that emerges is very much similar to the Kenneth Trinidadue case. And you have an individual who clearly was murdered, who was beaten, and who was restrained. And in this case, it looks like they were looking for something as well, because they, and you can see this, and Craig Roberts talks about it a bit. And he's got a book. And I definitely do not endorse a lot of the stuff in that book, some of those theories. But it is particularly good on Terry. Yiki and what he did. And in that book, he talks about how Yiki's car was just covered in blood and that evidently the police had tore the car apart and were looking to see if he had maybe hidden

something in his vehicle. So they were clearly looking for something. And then we also have the statement by the lady that he had told her, you know, I guess that he was trying to decide whether or not to go meet with these cops he was worried about whether he should or not but he decided he was going to go but he was going to leave his gun at home that way they wouldn't be able to use his own gun against him

that showed very good thinking I think on his part you know at least in terms of knowing that something is off if you're going to think that through he should have met them at a Denny's or something right in front of everybody I don't know yeah yeah it's just he clearly

We had some gut instinct that this isn't right, you know? Yeah, yeah. Oh, man, what a story. And they got the giant picture of the dead baby in the firefighter's arms again. Thanks a lot, guys. We've seen that before CNN. What a horror show. People can find some of his written communications with Ramona.

This is this person who is kind of a confidantatory where he told her a lot about. the troubles he was having at work with his superiors. You can find some of the excerpts. We got that in the archives? Yeah, well, there are excerpts from the letters he wrote to Ramona in the David Hoffman piece, and that's in the archive. And also, if you search Yeeke, there is a very good article written, I want to say around 2009 or 2010, I believe, from windy painting one of her earlier pieces and so people can find that and uh yeah you i urge people just go back and read the original hoffman article it lays it all out and that was april 21st of 1997 okay i guess that must have been either what i read or i knew secondhand about it from

listening to him talk about on the wigglesworth show or something um also that hoffman article It is very strong when it talks about the harassment that the family faced from the police, which you don't see that as much in the CNN piece, although the CNN piece I thought was very good considering, you know, that they even went there. And the fact is, well, they not only did they go there, but they were largely accurate, you know, there was no agenda being pushed. It was good journalism. And it was just shocking to see that. And I think it's fantastic. Hey guys, check out my new sponsor. It's Peacehawk Coffee at Peacehawk. Coffee. First of all, business. You have to drink coffee in the morning. And you want it to taste good. Well, Peacehawk Coffee is the best from around the world.

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proving that marriage isn't always a bed of roses. See The Roses, only in theaters, August 29th. Get tickets now. You know, it's interesting that part of the story here is that apparently what he had said was he thought that the building was blown out from the inside rather than the other way around. Is that, where do you see that? Like in the article? What does it say specifically about that?

Yeah, let me see here. I'm scanning through. So they talk about Benton Parton. We can get back to that in a second. But here he says, for his part, Terry Yeke, believed that some government employees had lied about their whereabouts during the bombing. Yeah, it's in that same. paragraph. He had questions about the source of the explosion. According to his

sister, Lash on Hargrove. There we go. You know how they said the truck bomb blew in? He saw evidence of blowing out. And so this is someone who presumably, she's just going off of what he told her. She's not been reading Prison Planet this whole time and fleshing out the rest of the story

herself or something. You know, presumably this is all she knows about it is what he told her. That he might maybe hit it blown from the inside out. So you know, I'll go. Go ahead and say, because we're getting into this, that I can make a case for this. I used to make a case for this. And I actually have, I found the one tape of my first radio show that survives is me talking about Oklahoma. And I do a whole presentation on Ray Brown and the seismologist and Ben Parton and column B3 and all the reasons to believe that there were demolition charges inside the building, as Benton Parton said. He was the former chief of Air Force weapons development. But I'll say two things about that, which is one, I saw. I saw him give a speech about the satanic New World Order plot at a, you know, like a gun show, you know, right-wing patriot militia type thing of a jig in Denver one time. And I thought, ah, this guy's a little crankier than I thought, you know, thought really he was a munitions expert and he was going to give a speech about Oklahoma City.

And now we're talking about the devil and stuff. I don't know. And then, J.D. Cash, who's still by far the single greatest hero journalist. this story and always will be, no offense, Richard, because you're obviously second place here, bud, but, but J.D. Cash told me, you know, on a phone, I don't think this is in our interview. It could be in our interviews, but I know for a fact he told me in private conversation as well that he thought Benton Parton was a total nut and that when he told Parton, the crater wasn't there,

the crater was here. He said, oh, I don't care. He just moved it, but he didn't change his math and was just, you know, and he had, I always thought it was weird the way he just knew and determined that it was just a fact that it had to have been a sophisticated fuel air explosive and that's what explained the double blast on the seismograph and and never even addressed well it could have just been another bomb on the seismograph or something like that and so now we're not even talking about anfo at all or a homemade bomb by some Nazis at all but now it's you know this sophisticated air force munition and you can tell that he's just ad lib in this stuff at that point So, you know, I don't take part in seriously.

I definitely take J.D. seriously when he tells me not to take part in seriously. So here's where CNN's even more of a conspiracy, nothing me. How do you like that on that part of the story? That's right. But if Terry Yakey thought that there was a concern, then I shouldn't be so prejudiced in closed mind. You know, the 9-11 truthers poisoned all conspiracy theorizing for me. Because they're so wrong about 9,000 claims they make that it just makes all good conspiracy theorizing seem retarded. And in fact, why do they assume there were bombs in all the towers?

Because everybody knows there's bombs in Oklahoma City. They must have done it again. And that was the assumption like from day one without stopping to wait and see. So then that made me more like, well, you know, more skeptical of whereas before maybe I'd wanted to believe they were bombs in the building because that helps prove the case even more because who could have put bombs in the building or something like that, you know what I mean? But so now I don't know what to think, and I wonder what you think. Yeah, I think we can take Benton Parton and his analysis and we can just toss it to the side, okay? Now, that doesn't mean, though, that we need to throw out analysis

of what we're seeing here. And so, for example, I think it's entirely possible for someone to look at the asymmetrical blast damage pattern that they're seeing in the Oklahoma City bombing and have questions about that. And I think that we probably should be consulting with other experts, maybe who are a little bit more credible than Benton Parton. And I've always been open to that, not being an expert on explosives. I'm not going to completely write it off. Now, of course, when I hear stuff about, oh, it was a super bomb and all this kind of nonsense like Ted Gunderson proposed. I don't even, you know, I don't even pay any attention to that. But in all seriousness, I think it's something that should and can be looked at.

And when you have, for example, here where Terry Yiki's sister, Lashon Hargrove, saying that he told her, you know how they said the truck bomb blew in? He saw evidence of blowing out. Now, I think that, I mean, again, it's just kind of speculating, but it sounds a lot to me like she might be talking about Terry seeing the video footage, because if that is what happened, that would be readily apparent on the surveillance video, you know? And so I think it's something we should pay attention to. And we don't have to rely on Benton pardon, you know? Yeah. We don't have to rely on him, you know. That's true. Well, and look, we have V. Z. Lawton, and I forget the guy's name now, but if people go back and listen to my interview of VZ Lawton, then, um,

They'll be able to hear, he does say the name of the guy in the news clip who tells the same story as VZ that the building was shaking first. And then the glass blew in second, like 10 seconds later. And in fact, VZ said that a plaque had fallen off the wall and hit him in the head. And so he had fallen on the ground and then was protected by the flying glass coming in because he'd fallen behind a desk. and then his buddy who we have the news clip I might play the clip here as long as I'm babbling about it

so that I'm making sense You know we have a document in the archive that actually is directly related to what we're talking about here now Jesse Trinidoo got a whole batch of documents that came from the Oklahoma City Police Department and one of his FOIA requests

and I was going through these one day and you see there plain as day on one of these articles that there was an eyewitness who actually he was looking at the Murrah building at the time that the bombing happened and this this guy reported that he saw a massive fireball coming out from like the fifth or the sixth floor he saw some type of you know not the sort of thing that you would expect to see if you've got a truck bomb and a blast pressure wave outside the building and I always thought that was really interesting and I wish I knew, you know, the name of that witness and more like him because it certainly raised my eyebrow. All right. So listen, I have a clip here. Let me play. And I'm sorry, I don't remember the guy's name, but VZ. If you go back and listen to my interviews of VZ Lawton, he says the name of this guy. My floor was okay, and the ceiling had come down, but there was still concrete above. So it was just a corner of the office that was left that we were in. Everybody else that we work with is gone. Are you okay? Just the corner of your office was okay.

And the rest of the floor was completely flattened. We go over the edge of look and you can see the sky and as far down as you can look. Just a hole. And which floor were you on? Fifth. Fifth floor. Just the one corner of the fifth floor wasn't completely flattened. Come on.

I don't know what the west end of the building looks like. How did everybody just crawled out of the desk after? It was like slow motion. We crawled under before the glass part was coming and everything. It just seemed to roll in on us. I thought it was an earthquake when it started. It was just a kind of a shake and then everything started going like this. And I dove under the desk and then all the glass came in and the ceilings came down.

I probably got cut worse if I hadn't been under the desk. I just got little scrapes and scratches. I was really lucky. Really lucky. Yeah. All right. So there you go. Anyway, there's the chronology.

Is, you know, the earthquake was going on long enough for him to hide under his desk before the windows shatter. That's right. And a blast pressure wave is just instantly. It's immediate. You're not going to have multiple seconds where it feels like an earthquake. That speaks to something different, you know, and I think that that's something that is worth looking at. Yeah, for sure. All right. Well, um, yeah, what the hell, you know? I'm willing to, uh, return to open-mindedness

about that. I mean, J.D. said that what, well, actually, before I get to that, the day of the Oklahoma bombing, you know, I was a senior in high school. And what I had heard was they bombed Oklahoma City and Salt Lake City and some other place. It was, you know, two or three of them across the country was the way I had heard the story at first. So, wow, man, what's going on and I went to half day so like at noon or so I was off of school and went to my buddy's house up the street and his friend was over there a guy that I knew pretty well his name was Richard and he had been forced recon in Vietnam the Marine Corps and had you know according to him taught bomb making school you know and knew exactly what he was talking about and when I came in the door he's pointing at the TV saying there was a bomb here and here and here and that was my red pill on Oakland. Mama City was the first time, the first moment I even saw that building. I had a demolitions expert telling me, this is where the charges were set. And they were saying, man, you should see it.

They've been talking about the building was bombed from the inside out all morning long, and they just now switched it. And they're not even saying they were wrong before. They're just going, oh, those bomb was outside, which there clearly is a crater out front, and there clearly was a truck bomb. That's right, yeah. And then, by the way, as long as I'm rambling here, they said, you know, from, I guess ATF was the original source for this.

Maybe not. But anyway, it was the FBI or the ATF that said the original estimate was it was a 1,200-pound car bomb outside. And then later that day they doubled it and said it was a 2,400-pound car bomb. And later, of course, they said it was a truck bomb. And then they just doubled it again, exactly double again to 4,800 pounds. And that stayed the official story for 20 years. Well, no, that's say the official story until McVeigh did that official story book with the local newspaper reporters, and then he upped it to 7,000 pounds. But the 4,800 stuck, and you can tell they're just making it up from the very first day.

That's right. This story pisses me off still. I remember Frederick Whitehurst, you know, I interviewed him, and he talked about how they just lied and said that they found all these. particles of ammonium nitrate in the plywood inside the rider truck that that was just the deal this is our story and we're sticking to it and very well may have been an info bomb but they just lied called it science if you ever heard such a thing that was his key complaint with the crime lab is that this guy david williams what he would do is he would look and see okay uh what what did mcvay and nichols buy okay they bought info okay so it was an info bomb and he's he's just kind of working backwards from some of the material they have when really in it you know a crime lab what you should be doing is doing scientific analysis of the material you know rather than just speculating and and saying oh this is what it had to be or doing things like uh even lying in their reports the fbi crime lab reports were altered you know to initially he said that the presence of p et n could not be confirmed uh on mcvay's pocket

knife. And Whitehurst testifies that, you know, David Williams had his guy, Steve Bermeister, alter his lab report to go from saying it could not be confirmed to saying that it could be confirmed. And, you know, that's just how the FBI does things. They'll fabricate evidence, no problem. But one other thing I wanted to mention that relates to what we're talking about here is recall, though, that there were at least two bomb scares, you know, that more and we have news footage of it. I have the transcript of CNN's broadcast from April 19th. That's on the archive.

People can go read it, and they can see quite clear as day there that all of the rescue operations had to be halted, and everyone was pulled out of the area because they had found explosives. And, of course, you could be talking about training devices or things that were found in the ATF evidence locker. Certainly that's possible. But it was enough that it happened at least twice that morning. And I think that that is also worth looking at.

You know, it's never a bad thing to analyze something and to look at it, you know. So now, so JD's interpretation of that was that, you know, it was unfortunate that this had led to this whole kind of red herring rabbit trail about bombs in the building when what it really was, was the ATF had a bunch of contraband in their office. that they should not have had, including explosives, ammunition, and even a tow missile that they were using. They must have got from their CIA buddies for some, you know, entrapping somebody or another. And so that they called off the rescue efforts just to get rid of this stuff. And that's entirely possible. That would fit their MO perfectly. Right. And then that would lead that, you know, evidently did lead to the deaths of people who were being rescued. I know that there was at least one report of a guy who was in the middle

of saving a lady and was called back and when he got back to her she was dead oh god i mean we know i know i don't remember my footnote anymore but i know that there was at least one of those um and i don't want to sit here and play all the sound bites but we have in the archive we have all my audio clips too right i um i don't have a folder for mp3s you know i've scott i've got your audio clips and i could make a folder there would just be easily just to have hard Harley put a link on the page to, okay, here's the audio clips. I've got them all. I've got them organized on my PC.

I just don't have a mechanism by which to distribute them on the archive. But it's simple enough to create a new cabinet, drop them all in there, and just have Harley put a link to them. Right. Yeah. And that'd be worth doing, too, because you've got a lot of really good stuff that's just kind of lost. Yeah, I mean, some of it is just junk. You know, I don't know if I ever even sent you these where Ed Bradley is. asking McVeigh what he wanted to be when he grew up and all this crap this makes me so angry

let me play this this is Michael Hinton and if I remember right this is eyeball witness to the bomb squad being there that morning do I have that right is this the guy you know I think he was a guy who he was on a bus and I think he did say he saw feds out there right let's try that here it's just one minute and looking at my one in the afternoon it's about between 1.30 and 2 o'clock I noticed a large gathering of people outside the building. Well, it's about two to 300 people. And when I looked at these folks, I said, well, my, what could be going on at the federal building? Right.

Did you think that this could have been a bomb threat or a fire drill? Initially, there was several questions came to remind what it could have been, but at that time, like I said, I had no idea. Did you notice any extra precautions being taken at the federal building during the week on or before the day of the bomb? An interesting observation I did notice, on the morning of the bomb explosion, the TB networks locally were carrying the statement that the federal billing had received a bomb threat one week prior to that morning of the bomb explosion. So in my mind, when I heard that, I'm saying, well, what I observed one week earlier

out my window could that, and then the next question came, if so, what security precautions had been taken if they knew this. so that part is important i think i'm glad and that's our hero jd they're interviewing him um it's important because he's it's not just that he recalls yeah i saw some cops out there early that morning or something but he had connected it in his mind with what he'd been told previously that there was some kind of bomb threat or something on that building so when he saw them he thought oh i wonder if this has something to do with that which is you know an extra tidbit and i'm not going to sit here and play all my damn clips i got a bunch of stuff but um there are a lot of very

credible witnesses though who did see the bomb squad out there that morning debby nakanashi worked for the u.s postal service um you know she saw bomb sniffing dogs and uh guys right outside the courthouse that morning a number of these people all interviewed by abc news 2020 in a piece that the great roger charles was a co-producer for called the families want to know We do have the transcript of that on the archive, and people can find the full video on my YouTube page, which is linked to on my Twitter profile. But, yeah, that ABC 2020 piece is great because it covers these very credible people who were very perplexed to have seen the bomb squad. That's not something you see every day. So they had a reason to remember that, especially after the events of that day.

man it makes me wonder how many other mysterious deaths you have involved you know on the local fire department and police department level there from people who might have talked but you know their mysterious deaths never got as much coverage as yakey did for whatever reason or something like that because that's a lot of people to say geez if only we had hung around for another 15 minutes you know because that's the story right they were there at eight but left before nine that's right well they left before nine they um the people who did see them i know saw them around seven outside the courthouse and so anytime i'd say between seven and eight this is when people were seeing the bomb squad out there and then they up and leave almost as if maybe they were out there because they were expecting something to happen during the night and then And morning comes, and no one has showed up. They do it once over with the bomb-sniffing dogs.

Call it good. Now, notice these bomb-sniffing dogs that were not at the Murrah. They were on the courthouse across the street. So if there were any kind of explosives, these dogs were, you know, a little kind of farther away from where those set explosives might have been. Yeah, they seem to have it in their head that it was going to be the courthouse was going to be the target rather than the Murrow building, right? That's right, yeah.

which is strange because the ATF was stationed at the Murr Building, even though none of them were there that day for some reason. They weren't there. Supposedly, they were out on an all-night surveillance operation. And one thing that is very interesting, though, they're kind of clues into this, is if you look at the Aryan Republican Army, their so-called recruitment video,

in that video, they make mention of a courthouse massacre is what they kind of threaten. and take into account that and take into account to the fact that this judge, a judge from, he was from Oregon and he actually took April 19th off work that day due to threats, you know, and it was published in his hometown newspaper that there was an interview with him saying, yeah, that there was some kind of threat for that day. And so he did not go to work that day. and he worked in the courthouse right there. Yeah. Yeah. Hang on just one second.

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Oh, hungry, oh, Henry. Man, that's funny. I'm looking at my file of audio here, and I got, there's great stuff from this BBC documentary, but I have a file called 10 hours of OKC interviews.mp3. And I don't remember merging them all together, but maybe somebody did or maybe I did. And this is 10 hours of interviews that I did.

I don't think I have that one. I've got a bunch of MP3 clips, but I recall them being, you know, shorter pieces here and there. I'd be interested in just taking a look at that. Yeah, I'll upload it. I'll make sure that it's on the server. 10 hours of OKC interviews.mp3, everybody. Well, it'll be on my Twitter, I guess.

I'll link to it there. And now, so listen, an academic but a sharp one, and one that I respect asked me the other day. All right, what's the single best piece of evidence to make me believe that there was something going on with Oklahoma City. The FBI was responsible to whatever degree or whatever it is. And I wasn't sure because there's so many very incriminating things,

but there are a few extremely smoking guns here. I know one of the things was I said, well, the ATF had infiltrated the FBI's ring. And there was an informant there. We know all about that. And frankly, the most suspicious of the undercover operatives here, not even an informant, but just a fake Nazi all around. this guy, Andres Strasmeyer, virtually admitted it?

I don't want to say all but admitted it because I think he more admitted it than that, even. I think he admitted it to Ambrose Evans-Prichard of the Daily Telegraph. That's right. He practically admitted it. I mean, if you read that interview,

it becomes very clear that he's speaking from a position to where it says that he knows what he's talking of. He's speaking from experience. And he basically is kind of saying, there was an informant inside the operation and, you know, the informant bungled it. And you really get the impression that he's talking about himself in that. And I would direct people to that into looking at Andy Strassmeyer.

I know that there's going to be a new piece coming out on him by the gentleman who wrote the recent article on Roger Moore. His next piece will be on Andy Strassmeier. Oh, right. Great. Yeah. And he definitely, though, is one of the first. the key areas you want to look at in terms of Fed involvement

and you also want to just look at the nature that the fact that the ATF wasn't at work that day you know, and that's on record we have the witnesses to that and also the fact that they had the bomb squad out there. This tells us they knew something. At least

they had the date right and they were close in terms of the location and with Andy Strassmeyer they had someone who was directly around the suspects, you know you know what i don't think it'll bore them it's a minute and a half a little more but this is about the ATF being warned on their pages not to come to work agents forewarned about a bomb in oklahoma city did they know the mural building was a target the ATF says no absolutely not but tonight in a story

you'll see only on the news channel you're about to hear otherwise from people who are at the Murrow building that morning. We're asking simple questions and we can't get any answer, so it makes us that much more curious, you know. Where the hell were they? The News Channel did ask for a private meeting with ATF officials to discuss the credibility of these witness reports. But the ATF refused, saying they had no more to say on the subject.

What he told him is that he thought that they had received a tip that morning of the bomb. Yet another witness, a rescue worker says after she talked with an agent at the bombing scene, She also suspected the ATF was warned, and agents stayed away from their office that morning. I asked him if his office was in the building, and he said yes, and I asked if there were any ATF agents that were still in the building, and he said, no, we weren't here. Witness number one approached an ATF agent nearby. He claims he asked the agent what had happened,

and witness number one says this is what the agent told him. He started getting a little bit nervous. He tried reaching somebody on a two-way radio. I couldn't get anybody, and I told him I wanted an answer right then. He said they were in the briefing. No, the agents had been in there. They had been tipped by their pagers not to come into work that day, plain as they out of his mouth.

They were tipped. Why wasn't anybody else? There was a lot of people, good people, died down there. and if they knew, they should have let everybody else know. Yep, yeah, it seems to be the way it goes. Yeah, you know, the daycare didn't get a warning, you know. Yeah, hey, let me ask you this, man. I used to have a tape, and it was a tape that a guy I think in Dallas had made

that was a collection of all these news clips from that day. You know, you've heard all the clips I have of the doctor interview saying, Yeah, our rescue efforts have been delayed. The clip I just played of the guy saying it seemed like an earthquake at first and all that. That came from this videotape. Okay. I don't have that anymore. I wonder, is that exist on YouTube anywhere?

Do you know that's still a thing somewhere online? Is this collection? You know, I have not seen anything like that. That certainly would be something very interesting because the early reports are often a very good source to find details before an official narrative sets in. You know what? I know where you might be able to get it would be, I mean, I don't even know if this exists anymore, but if you could contact the Austin Access Channel, they used to have it and play that from time to time. And if they have it, you know, if they have an archive that goes back to the 90s somehow, you know, they were very librarian-y about all of their stuff back then, so I don't know, they might have it. But that's where I got all these clips from Channel 4 and Channel 5 and Channel 8 and Channel 9 there in, I don't know. in Oklahoma City from that day. I had coverage of a few probably about four hours worth of material that was on different networks to include CNN on the days after the bombing. And I did review all of that and pulled from that a couple of great clips where the announcer says that the FBI now has surveillance video of the bombing.

you know or it's just reported straight up the FBI has the surveillance video of the bombing you know yeah well so no this one is the one I'm talking about is all from that day that day yeah so listen this is a call out to people out there maybe someone has this video or they know what I'm talking about they know who has it the video that has all these different news clips and I mean man there's some really good ones here I mean these are you know uh here's here I think is where where they first say it was a car bomb. Evan, we're getting more word on that car bomb now. Let me read this straight from the wire.

You talked about it a minute ago. The head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms now says it appears it was a car bomb with as much as 1,200 pounds of explosives packed inside. 1,200 pounds of explosives packed inside that car bomb in front of the federal building. We heard earlier off the wire from the governor that some of the fatalities were outside and across the street

from the building, and now it all makes sense. And here's the governor, Frank Keating, calling Channel 5. The reports I have is that one device was deactivated. Apparently, there's another device, and obviously whatever did the damage to the Murrah building was a tremendous, very sophisticated explosive device. Anyway, I just, I'm playing those just so it sounds familiar to people. If anybody goes, oh, I recognize that. I do have that videotape back, you know, in my attic or in my closet somewhere.

I have heard those clips before. we need that and that's it's really important man there's so much good stuff on there and when i got these clips off of that tape was literally in 1998 1999 something like that i haven't had the video since then you know what okay i'm only 99% sure of that i guess i could i could check my tapes again but i'm almost positive that i lost my copy of that back a long time ago yeah if anybody out there has anything, you know, audio, video, anything that you feel is worthy of preserving, you know, reach out to us and we'll, you know, we'll put it on the archive. Yeah, for sure.

All right, listen, so you have this really great essay at the Libertarian Institute, the FBI's failure to comply with FOIA, reform necessary after lawsuits detail pattern of deception. This is really good stuff here. And you start off, you know, you're talking about sting race and flight 800 and all stuff. So this is, first of all, really focused on FOIA before you changed the subject to Jesse Trinidad. So tell us a little bit about your research here. Yeah. So basically, I wanted to write an article that explained kind of the FBI's posture and pattern of behavior when it comes

to the Freedom of Information Act. And so what I did was I did look at, for you mentioned, the stingray devices. And the reason for that is through any of the various lawsuits or legal cases involving a stingray, you can really get a good measure of the FBI's, how they respond to things. And ultimately, what you find is that in these stingray cases, the FBI will, they'll actually drop charges against, well, they'll see that they'll ask the prosecutor to drop charges against a person rather than having to answer questions, answer a judge's questions about the stingray or provide any information about it to a defense counsel. They've gone so far as to instruct local law enforcement to lie on applications for warrants. If you're going to get a warrant for

someone and you're using information that you glean from the stingray, they're telling law enforcement to lie and say it came from a confidential informant, which that's probably a felony lying to a federal judge. But you just see this overall pattern. deception from the FBI on that. And as far as like TWA 800, what I did there is I wanted to illustrate how in FOIA cases, in other subjects, not just Oklahoma City, we see kind of the same thing. Like they've got on their website a whole batch of FOIA documents for many different subjects, and one of them happened to be TWA 800. And I happen to be familiar with it. They've got like 700 pages of documents. And when I went through it, what I noticed is they did not include,

any of the witness 302s. And when I say that, I'm talking about the witnesses who saw the plane explode. They saw it, and they were interviewed on the news. We knew there were many dozens of them, yet there were none of them in their FOIA release. And so this pilot, a veteran pilot, commercial airline pilot named Ray Larr actually had to file another Freedom of Information Act request. and had a lawsuit going in order just to obtain those witness accounts. So it just shows this overall pattern of deception where the FBI will lie. They will lie to judges.

They will even instruct people to do things that are unethical and wrong, all in the name of hiding things. And that's just their default position. Yeah. And just, you know, like if you grew up on Matlock and stuff like that, believe that there's anything like a rule of law in America or something like that, it should. sound shocking and crazy that the cops would bring a case and then the defense would say yeah but you know they broke the law to get this evidence we want to find out more about how they got this

evidence and then the cops would say you know what we're dropping the charges yeah and then just skate with that and instead of even pretending to come clean to the judge about what's really going on here you know what your honor they're right we're criminals so but fair compromise we'll go ahead and let him continue to be a criminal as long as we can continue to be criminals. Is that fair? Right. That's how far they'll go.

Absolutely. There will. No shame at all. Yeah, indeed. All right. Now, well, I'll tell you what, once we're done solving Oklahoma City,

I'm putting you on the Flight 800K, son. I've got some work to do for us there. All right. Now, so tell us about the great Jesse Trinandu and, well, his importance to even the FOIA movement, you could say, right? He's a very important FOIA guy that's trying to do. Absolutely. He's been engaged in multi-decade lawsuit against the FBI for their failure to comply with FOIA.

And what happened here ultimately is he submitted a FOIA request in 2008 for the surveillance videos of the Oklahoma City bombing, of which he knew the FBI had those because Roger Charles had given him many documents when Roger was on the defense team he had access to these documents and so he's got all these documents that say the FBI has these surveillance videos some of them describe what is on the videos

it shows exactly where they came from so the bottom line is Jesse knows these videotapes exist and what he's interested in is he wants to you know have proof here that Tim McVeigh had an accomplice with him because he believes his brother was murdered in an interrogation because his brother was considered to be possibly John Doe 2. And so he's wanting to prove the existence of John Doe 2 by getting these surveillance tapes. And so he filed his FOIA request for the tapes and ultimately the FBI also for any documents relating to those tapes. And what he got from the

FBI was absolutely incomplete. He didn't get, first of all, many of the documents he already possessed that he got from Roger, and he knew they had, they did not turn over to him. So he knows that they're hiding something by that fact. Also, the tapes that he did get, none of them show anything before 902 a.m., and none of them show anything at all of interest. And to him, and to I think any other reasonable person looking at it, They can tell that these have been sanitized.

They've been edited. He's been given a little bit of, okay, this was after the bombing. But we know, for example, that the FBI had video that had time code on it, and you could tell the passage of time into relation to what it appears on the video, because the Secret Service document says that what they saw in the videotape is the bomb detonating so many minutes or seconds after the suspects exit the truck. And so these are very specific documents, and none of the videos he got to pick what you see there. And so he did file a lawsuit to get from the FBI the materials they were withholding.

And what he was able to do is present to the judge, introduce as exhibits at trial, the various documents that he got from Roger. And to show, okay, here's a document that shows there's a surveillance video from the Regency Towers. I did not get this one. Here's one that shows surveillance video from the public library. I didn't get that one. And ultimately, what the FBI did in this case is they failed to search their three primary record-keeping databases, which he was able to prove that through eliciting testimony from FBI agents in court as showing their failure to search.

And he was able to prove that they did not turn over many, many relevant documents relating to the subject. And I think made a strong case for the fact that the videotapes that he did receive, received were edited because they just don't show what appears in the documents. And it's still the battle is still ongoing. We're waiting now on a ruling from the judge, but we believe that it's coming soon. And we also believe that the judge will probably rule in a manner similar to what Jesse put in his proposed findings of fact document, which that document my article was largely based on. And we believe the judge will probably reach this.

same conclusions that Jesse did in his proposed findings document. Yeah, good times. Okay, well, listen, everybody. This piece is at the Libertarian Institute. The FBI's failure to comply with FOIA, reform necessary after lawsuits detail pattern of deception. And there's just all kinds of great stuff in here, of course. And then check it out.

Behold, show it to your Democrat friends. CNN.com. Why did this cop turn up dead? By Thomas Lake, March 3rd, 2003. I'm standing here beside myself. I can hardly believe that this happened

at all, but this is just something. So, uh, history made. Uh, thank you very much. Uh, really appreciate your time and your analysis as always, Richard. Thank you very much, Scott. I appreciate it. It was great to be on. All right, you guys.

That is Richard Booth. find out everything he knows at libertarian institute.org slash okayc the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kfk 90.7 fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scot horton dot org and libertarian institute dot org