Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/17/26 Michele McPhee on the Unanswered Questions about the Boston Marathon Bombing and Why They Still Matter

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

Scott interviews author and journalist Michele McPhee about the extensive research she’s done on the Boston Marathon Bombing that happened exactly thirteen years ago this week. Scott and McPhee dig into the background of the Tsarnaev brothers, the holes in the story that they carried out the bombing entirely on their own, how the Russians warned the FBI about the brothers before the attack, the broader political and geopolitical context that the Tsarnaevs and the US and Russian governments were navigating at the time and much more. Discussed on the show: Maximum Harm: The Tsarnaev Brothers, the FBI, and the Road to the Marathon Bombing by Michele R. McPhee Mayhem: Unanswered Questions about the Tsarnaev Brothers, the US Government and the Boston Marathon Bombing by Michele R. McPhee The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (IMDb) The Terror Factory by Trevor Aaronson Michele R. McPhee is a screenwriter and best selling true crime author; five-time Emmy-nominated television investigative producer in Boston for ABC News; award-winning columnist; contributing editor to Newsweek and writer for Boston and LA Magazines. Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! For more on Scott's work: Check out The Libertarian Institute: https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott's other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott's books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest. Reporting to the American people, what's going on in this country. Because the babies are making this. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show, Libertarian Foreign Policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not illegal. We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing.

Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host. Scott Porton. All right, everybody. Introducing Michelle McPhee, she is the author of two fantastic books about the Boston Marathon Bombing of 2013,

Mayhem and Maximum Harm. And they are both so good. I forgot which one came first, but I read them both. And Michelle, I don't know, you probably don't know this, but I'm the author of a book called Provoked about the New Cold War with Russia,

and I have an entire chapter, kind of subchapter, on the Boston Boston Box. bombing, which in which I relied very heavily on your work for not just in your books, but for the Boston Globe and interviews you did on the radio in Boston and all of these things. I have, you know, multiple, multiple footnotes. In fact, I poached some of your footnotes and some of the research that you beat me to and everything there too. So I want to thank you very much for your fantastic work on this. There's nobody else who compares to your output on this story. And I don't think hardly anybody knows unless they read your books or mine.

which borrow so heavily from yours, I don't think anybody knows anything about this case. And it's such a fascinating case, and especially because of the importance of the role of America's relationship with Russia in the thing happening in the first place and in the aftermath and everything. So it's just a fascinating story.

It was, you know, the anniversary was just two days ago here. So that's the occasion for having you on here. And so thank you very much for joining us. Very happy to have you on the show here today. Thank you so much. First of all, I cannot wait to read Provoked, because it is interesting. Like the whole Russia relationship is so central to this entire story. And you know, you remember that the parents are back in Russia now. The parents of the Boston Marathon bombers are in Russia. I mean, this was fascinating. You immediately remind me that I still kind of chuckle when I think

about the last time Congress behaved in a bipartisan way before the Epstein Transparency Act with Roe-Kana and Tom Massey. was with the Boston Marathon bombing, and they were united in their absolute apoplectic fury at the FBI because of the FBI's steadfast refusal to cooperate with a congressional investigation, which to me is staggering. That should be illegal.

If you are a member of the intelligence services for the United States of America, how dare you ignore a congressional subpoena when the goal is to make sure that we don't have further terror attacks? So I think that's the last time we saw Congress actually act in unison. And it's when they went to Russia with Stephen Segal, the actor, and came back and said that they got more answers from the FSB than they did from the FBI, which is kind of an incredible statement,

you know, better than me, to have Democratic and Republican lawmakers united and saying the FSB was more cooperative with us than our own FBI is really crazy. Yeah. Well, except, I mean, on the face of it, they don't, It sure doesn't seem to me like they have much to hide here, and the FBI surely does. Although, I have to say, I just reread my section this morning. And I remember asking myself, WTF a few times through here, where I still don't understand the story, just to skip ahead, just to give an example, like, I still don't know if Zarniav was

an informant working for, I know he was an FBI informant, but I don't know if he was an informant for the Russians helping to identify this guy Plotnikov. It seems halfway that that's the case. On the other hand, I believe I learned from you and from the firsthand sources here that, no, the Russians first learned about Zarnia from Plotnakov, who was working for them. So the whole thing is still very confusing. I don't know. So in fact, I'm glad we have time.

I'd like to really just start and go through this. In fact, there's even grown adults listening to this now who won't even remember this. They were little kids at the time and don't even know anything about it at all. So let's just start with who are the Zarnayevs? Where are they from? How much do we know about how they did this and the go ahead and tell the story of the killing of the older brother and the capture of the younger and all that and get us started here on what happened? And then we'll break in all the follow-ups here. Okay. So I guess we should start with how they got into the country in the first place.

Okay. You're talking about a family that is from Russia, from Dagestan, which you know is a war-torn area. But somehow they all got visitor visas from Ankara, Turkey. Now, that's important. Why? Because the CIA station chief who was in Ankara, Turkey at the time, is a guy named Graham Fuller, who allegedly just passed away. His obituary showed up this month. He died apparently in Canada.

But Graham Fuller is an interesting character because the Zephyllar. the Naya family's uncle, the two brothers. So the central figures in our story are Tamerlian and Jokar Zanaev. And they came to America with their parents and their two sisters, and they did so with visas that they got from Ankara, Turkey. So right away, that's the PIA. You mentioned that they're from Dagestan, but they're ethnic Chechins. They're ethnic Chechens.

So just that was part of it, right? Yep, they're ethnic Chechens. They moved around all over the place, and I think they, you know, they went back and forth. They had family members spread out everywhere, but they, yes, they're Chechens. And, you know, I think that Graham Fuller, if you look at some of his writings, he had long believed in fighting Russia by using the Mujahideen. So he has these ties already to using Mujahideen, these young, you know, angry Islamic kids to, you know, fight back against the Russians. So it's an interesting tie that Graham Fuller's daughter was married to Ruslan Sarni, who was the brother of their dad.

So right away, you have a CIA character that comes into the mix. And then they moved into a house in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was owned by a defector who was a Russian studies professor at Harvard University in another tie to Graham Fuller. And they settled into this rent control department in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And at that time, they looked like all American kids. You know, the Tamerlin was sort of a dandy dresser who hung around the Euro Cafe on Boston's Newbury Street, now defunct. You know, these kids really, I think, wanted to be American. Tamerlin, obviously, was an accomplished boxer who wanted to box for the United States Olympic team.

He wasn't able to do that because he wasn't a citizen. So there was, you know, a lot of, that's just like the back story of how the brothers got into the country. Now, leading up into the marathon is a different story. We all know on April 15th, 2013, Patriots Day in Boston. I'm a Bostonian, you can probably hear in my wicked pisa accent. These two pressure cooker bombs were detonated at the finish line, killing a little boy named Martin Richard and two young women in their 20s, Crystal Campbell and Lindsay Lou, and dozens of people were maimed and wounded, more than a dozen

people left with amputations. It was a horrific, bloody scene. And as somebody who had been at the ground, Scott, on 9-11, this scene was different because on 9-11, you didn't see this kind of carnage. It wasn't with grisly, bloody violence. Boyleson Street, after those bombs went off, was a completely different story. And right away, you know, there was some sort of tension between the FBI and local police that was palpable, like almost immediately after these bombs were detonated. So right away, you know, cops were kind of looking askance at feds and how they were behaving. And pretty soon some real serious questions were raised.

I think the first one I'll bring up is, okay, so we know that the FSB had warned the FBI that they had intercepted communication. between a Canadian runaway named William Plotnikov, who you mentioned, and Tamilin Zayev. And obviously, they picked up Plotnikov. His parents were desperately looking for him. He was at that time training in the forest in Udamesh. They picked him up. They went through his phone.

They find all of this correspondence with Tamilin Zayev. And they warned the FBI Adash in Moscow, which has passed along to the Boston FBI field office. we're expected to believe that the most elite unit, the counterterrorism investigators from the FBI, interviewed Tamerlin multiple times, interviewed his family members, but didn't recognize him when his photo shows up? Right away, that's a giant red flag for me,

because that is complete BS. If I had interviewed somebody who was a subject of a story a year ago, and then their photo shows up as a suspect for detonating these deadly bombs to create maximum harm, would remember them. So right away, we're like, this is a complete nonsense story.

And their story is that they didn't know even who they were until they got the thumbprint off the corpse of the older brother, right? I mean, does that stretch its credibility in my mind. And if it is true,

then that FBI agent should be canned anyhow because you don't recognize the guy that you interviewed multiple, multiple times as part of the same. The other explanation is, I mean, And let's just, oh, this FBI, the FBI agents, plural involved, were all just on vacation that week or whatever.

The other explanation is that they reviewed the surveillance footage. They saw the two brothers and they said, uh-oh, that's our informant guy. And then they started lying and they started pretending that they didn't know who it was. They did not put those photos out to the public immediately saying these are the two guys we're looking for. They pretended to not know who they were looking for while they were getting away. and which, by the way, and people will remember this, they locked down the entire city, three cities, right, Watertown and whatever,

all these, you know, adjacent cities, as though they could be anywhere when, in fact, they knew how, you know, limited their search area really was in the first place. They knew exactly what was going on. And then as you say, and as you report in your books, freezing the local cops out the whole time. Freezing the local cops out enormously. the key video, the one that we all saw was suspect white hat and suspect black hat that was released in this dramatic press conference on Thursday,

which was, of course, days after the bombs went off. You know, that video was seized not by the FBI. That was a restaurant on Boylson Street called the BPD, the Boston Police Department, and said, hey, we have this video. I think it could be of interest. It looks like the guys are hustling away from the marathon. And a Boston cop went and picked up that video and that's key video. So it's almost like they intentionally didn't pick up the video that was going to be the most useful in this case.

You know, I had a podcast, Mayhem with Michelle McPhee. And I'm laughing because a friend of mine is a CIA former officer who teaches my book at Boston University. And he always tells his students, Mayhem is Michelle McPhee, which is not untrue. It's not untrue at all. But when you think about this, you know, that BPD goes and picks up this video, and that's the key video that shows these guys in the seconds after they detonated these deadly blasts. But here is a big question. It brings other people into the mix.

Anyone who has been to the Boston Marathon bombing knows, I'm sorry, to the Boston Marathon itself, the event, knows that it is impossible to move around. You know, you can't just get in and out of that area, you know, smoothly. So how did these guys, these two brothers, get out of this crime scene in two whole foods in a matter of minutes, which would be hard on the best of traffic days. But on this day, you know, the entire area is on lockdown. It raises some, I think, serious questions about who else was there? Are there other people involved?

Someone had to provide a getaway vehicle because we do have video of Jihar Zanaev walking around to Whole Foods buying milk. Well, they could have stashed a car before or something like that. I don't know. But well, and there are other indications of other people involved, too, though. So maybe let's follow that trail right here. You write in your book that there's real strong reason to believe. Let's not get sued or whatever. But there's reason to believe that we know who helped them build the bomb.

And then that same person apparently was also part of helping them get way on the night that the older brother was accidentally run over and killed by the younger brother trying to escape, which remind me please how many days later that was. So in hours after that press conference we just talked about, where the FBI came out and released these two armed and dangerous suspects, within hours, there was a murder. And this is really what got cops involved in helping me with my reporting because people were furious. You know, former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis, he said on my podcast that the day after

the event, he was at a high-level meeting with some U.S. attorneys and FBI officials and Department of Justice officials. And they had the photos. And Ed Davis said that he was the skunk at a picnic because he said, wait a minute, if we have photos of these guys, let's get them out. Because, you know, this is a manhand. You know, I have cops everywhere. You guys only have a few dozen FBI agents.

I have cops everywhere. My cops are the guys who are the eyes and ears of these streets. Let's get them out. He was shot down, obviously, and then we do know what happened on Thursday. There's days after the marathon. Sean Collier was sitting in his MIT cruiser and the Boston Marathon Bombers went to MIT, where the person that we're going to talk about in just a minute, Daniel Moli used to work.

And they shot him. They executed him in his vehicle. And so a cop was killed that night. And that sparks a wild chase. They track the brothers. So they kill Sean Collier. They carjack a young Boston University student. They take his SUV Mercedes.

They take him on a wild ride all over the place, pulling money out of ATMs. They go to a house on Dexter Ab and Watertown. We still don't know why. the carjacked young victim would tell police that they carried something out of a house at 89 Dexter Avenue and put it in the back of the SUV. That night there was a wild shootout. Tamerlin is shot multiple times, nine times, and then he is run over by his brother

who gets away in this missing SUV. Now here brings up a big question. When you talk about freezing out the cops, you know, Johar was shot in the face. he's bleeding. So there is a blood trail. He is leaving bloody handprints on his way as he races away from the scene. I was getting text messages from sources saying, hey, we have the dogs on them. We're going to grab this guy.

We have a blood trail. And then suddenly I got another text saying, we've been pulled off. The FBI has shut down the scene, FBI only. So there was just so much that just pointed to malfeasance, disorganization. but what we do know for an absolute fact is that this guy was bleeding, left a blood trail, and somehow he still managed to get away. And, you know, the author Michelle Gessen concludes here that there's just no other explanation for what's happening at this point in the story

other than a massive cover up by the feds because the kid has, I guess, crashed the car, just pulled it over and got out and ran. So they know, cops already know, how fast a guy can run, especially if he's jumping fences or whatever, trying to hide and get away. He can only be so far away. They can just create a perimeter and block and sweep until you find the kid.

That's easy to do. And instead, they lock down millions and millions of people all over the place. They drove around. They call out every SWAT team to patrol up and down, pointing their guns at citizens looking out the window,

which we have footage and still pictures of them, doing terrorizing the entire population. Some old man walks outside, and they completely accost him as though he must be some terrorist threat or else why would he be outside? When they know good and well, this old man none had the first thing to do with these two Chechen terrorists, you know, an FBI informant and his younger brother.

And they, you know, essentially it was almost like in Katrina, where they were like, let's see if we can go door-to-door seizing guns. We have a crisis. Let's get away with something here. So here they had a crisis. They knew this kid is within a few square blocks or a few square miles. and they locked down everybody, just essentially as an experiment in totalitarianism. There's really something to see.

When you look in the book, there is a map. You know, it's like a grid search. And I spoke to many members of the SWAT teams, the police SWAT teams that were sent out. And a good friend of mine, Jim Baglia, who was a former Waltham police sergeant who was on this elite unit, you know, the North Shore Task Force, he was on the SWAT. and he said that they intentionally gave the SWAT teams a grid search, and the only place that was not on the search for these SWAT teams was the exact home where this guy, Dave and Hennonbury, lived,

where they found Jahar on the boat. And when they were finally pulling him out of this boat, and the only reason he didn't see out, what was that? I'm sorry, Michelle, you're saying the one thing that was excluded from their search was not just that block, but that one half. house? No, it was that block. Oh, okay. Okay. No, it's a suburban area. So it's not like you're not building to building to building.

It's like suburban houses. So it was a small little block where that house happened to be. Okay, I'm sorry. I raised some questions for these guys because they were like, hold on a minute. We went door to door to door. And this is a frantic search. This is a guy who, you know, murdered a police officer, killed two women, a little boy. This is a, this is a very desperate search. And then, And they felt infuriated. Like, wait a minute, how did we miss this guy? He had a blood trail. You know, by then, they would just be misdirected.

So Jim Boglia will tell you on the record that he was being misdirected from that boat. Right. And now, so wait a minute. Because we skipped a part, which was at the assassination of the cop, oh, sorry, I'm very bad at producing this thing live, aren't I? At the time of the assassination of the cop, you write in your book that here we have, a guy rob a 7-Eleven nearby in a way that it seems kind of absurd for different reasons. Like maybe there was something going on besides just a robbery here, and that in fact, maybe the simplest explanation was that it was a distraction

while the boys were trying to, the brothers were trying to accomplish something at MIT, such as, for example, possibly stealing more bomb material precursors or something like that or some other business they had at MIT, and that then I believe you have in one of your books the stepfather of the guy who is suspected for other reasons of potentially being the maybe the primary bomb builder. The stepfather, I believe you say, identified his stepson from the footage of that robbery.

So that would, you know, seem to be one direct tie between this alleged, or at least, let's say, potential participant in this plot and builder of the bomb, and then a tie not just to that, but then also to later helping them, you know, when they needed a distraction while they were, you know, doing whatever it was they were doing at MIT. So I'm sorry, I'm, you please take it away from there. You're absolutely right. So that night, in the minutes before Sean Collier was killed, there was a robbery, a very strange, robbery at a 7-Eleven in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And it was close to the MIT campus. We have a

guy who's on his phone. Now, I got a video of this, which you will never, ever see again. But I got a video and I still have this video. And in it, the robber is on his phone. And behind him, we believe we have the younger brother, Jiharza and I, of walking in wearing the same clothes he was wearing when he was pulled off that boat the following day. And why is this critical? Because the identified robber is a guy named Daniel Morley. And Morley used to work at MIT in the lab, which happened to be very close to the spot

where Sean Collier was executed. 55 days after the marathon, the Massachusetts State Police Bomb Squad are called to a domestic call for an elderly woman who was sitting in the street in her pajamas. Her companion, the stepfather, is sitting next to her. They are both terrified. They said that Daniel Morley had had a meltdown,

that he was screaming, I have done something. I have to answer to God for. And then they blurred out to a very astute Toffield police sergeant at the time, who later got elevated, Gary Hayward, that, hey, He was friends with Tamlins and Iev. He disappeared for days after the Boston Marathon. He came back. He was acting erratically.

He's losing his mind. So this turns into a very long standoff. Morley refuses to come outside. They have to cancel church at the nearby Catholic Church. They evacuate the block and they finally get him to come out. And the mom and the stepfather allow the police to go in and search. his bedroom, and what do they find? A terrifying arsenal of bomb-making materials, including signatures to the actual pressure cooker bombs that were detonated at the Boston Marathon,

ball bearings, green circuit boards, and most terrifyingly, they recovered a box top with scribbled writing on it. The box top was to a six-quart Fagore pressure cooker, which is the exact size and brand that was used at the finish line of the Boston Marathon and scribbled on the top of this ripped off box top is a recipe for thermite, which we would know is an explosive accelerant. So, you know, my sources immediately started to think was Danny making thermite at this MIT lab? That's what the brothers were. Why else? I mean, the story that the FBI gave is that they were trying to get Collier's gun is ridiculous. They had a gun. They don't need a gun. Collier's gun is in a locked belt.

They didn't get the gun. It's nonsense. What they did find that you don't hear a lot about on the MIT campus is burglary tools. Because Morley had been fired. His ID would no longer allow him to get into that lab, but the materials are still in the lab. And we know now, as a matter of public record, that they had planned to go to New York City and detonate more bombs, which were found at the scene of the Watertown firefight. So that's a huge question.

Morley was never charged with a single crime, not with having bomb-making materials in its bedroom, which in Massachusetts under the bomb component bill is completely illegal. He had a Russian rifle that was unsecured in his house. He had ammunition that was unsecured. All of this is in Massachusetts a major crime. But what happens next? In the middle of this chaos,

somebody in the Massachusetts police turns to a buddy and says, who called the Fibs? miraculously the FBI shows up even though nobody had called them and suddenly they're taking over this scene they're grabbing the evidence Daniel mollie is never even arraigned not for beating up his mother not for the attack on you know david gloss his mother's boyfriend not for the guns not for the bomb making materials he's never even arranged instead he's bundled up into a institution for a hospital for mental health treatment. And I went to this hospital to try to interview him.

And it was very much like one flew over the cuckoo's nest. It was, you know, this was clearly a lockup for people who were having serious struggles. He's a big guy. He ambles down the hallway. And I said, Danny, did you build the bombs? And his response was startling because he didn't say, what bombs? What are you talking about? He said, shrugged, smirked, and said,

wasn't me and turned around and walked away and that was it and morley somehow was able to stay in this hospital for two years even though we all know that the way insurance works today who's paying for that who's paying for that commitment morley is now a free man he was never charged and shockingly you know his original the original call the 911 call was for elder abuse he attacked his mother he broke on her face he broke her glasses But he is now, the last time I checked, driving for the state-owned ride, which is in Massachusetts, a service that picks up elderly people and brings them to the doctor's appointments. Of course, yeah.

And now, was I right that his stepfather identified him from the surveillance video at the 7-Eleven? I have it, and I'm happy to share it with you. But, you know, the Massachusetts state police, Tim Alvin, who was then the colonel, came out and said that they believed that the 7-Eleven robbery was tied to the assassination. hours later, they never, hours later, they adamantly say, oh, no, no, no, no, we were wrong. No, no, nope. That had nothing to do with anything, which usually they just let it go. They mean, but they were very adamant about saying, no, no, it has nothing to do with the 7-Eleven robbery.

The Massachusetts state police had put up a most wanted poster for the robber and then quickly deleted it. You cannot find that now. It's called a mass most wanted. I have it, of course. And I took that mask most wanted, not only to. to his family members where they said, yeah, that's Danny, but also two friends of his, and they all said, that's Danny. But try to, that 7-Eleven robbery, unsurprisingly, remains unsolved.

Did you show the pictures to the, or pictures of, that you know are of Danny, to the 7-Eleven guy? And then did he recognize him? Well, the 7-Eleven, it was a female attendant, and she was no longer working at that 7-Eleven. when I started to write this book. So you weren't able to find her and contact her? I wasn't able to find her.

But, you know, what's interesting is the Cambridge police were not that interested in hearing that, you know, Danny was a suspect in this. Now, you remember that same night, you had a, it's in my book that there was a Cambridge police sergeant named Rob Lowe who was pulling over these undercover FBI cars all night long. Before the shootout, you know, they clearly was sitting on the Zanayev. they had a car sitting on the Zanaya Brothers property in Cambridge. And they had these, you know, surveillance vans all over Cambridge. And it turned into a big standoff between the Cambridge PD and the FBI who refused to identify themselves.

And so one guy finally said, beat it with the FBI. So that night was mayhem, hence the name of the book. There was just so much going on with like the Cambridge police commissioner was called out of bed to have an alter. in the middle of the street with an FBI special agent in charge. There was just a lot of different things that went on in Cambridge that night that remains unanswered. But the most important question is, during Jarz and Ives trial, the government said unequivocally they don't believe the brothers built the bombs.

They never found a bomb-making factory for them. They couldn't tie them directly to the bombs. So the immediate question is, then who did? And why are we not looking for them? Right. Hey guys, Scott here for Moondos artisan coffees. It's the Scott Horton Show flavored coffee breakfast blend. It's part Ethiopian, part Sumatra.

It's really good. All you do is go to Scott Horton.org slash coffee and it'll forge you on there to Moondos artisan coffees. Get it. They hate Starbucks because they represent the war party, of course. And so they're Moondos and they support peace. And guess what? Scott Horton Show coffee is the number one bestselling coffee at Moondos Artisan

coffees right now. just go again to Scott Horton.org slash coffee. All right, Michelle, so it seems like the only reason for them to want to cover up this one local guy that, you know, may very well have been involved in this, which, and I think you show that there's some connections. They went to the same gym and the same community college and things that they could have known each other. It's not exactly proven. And maybe, you know, cops have found out more than that about it. But it's not like this guy was a Chechen terrorist who used to work for the CIA or some kind of thing. He's some local bum friend of theirs who.

Well, he's actually a little more thing than that. He's a British, he was a British citizen. Okay. He moved to Massachusetts with his dad who worked at MIT in Lincoln Labs, which we know is kind of a shadowy organization that does a lot of, you know, defense work at MIT. So there is some, you know, I have no direct ties to say anything about Daniel Wolley other than Tamelin and Daniel shared a surprising interest in anarchy. Among the items that were recovered at Tamerlian's home were stacks and stacks of sovereign nation, which is, you know, a newspaper that's put out by anonymous, you know, Antifa fringe organizations. These are a sort of anti-government organization. And Daniel Morley was a card-carrying member of this organization,

and Tamerlin definitely dabbled because he had all of these sovereign nations. You know, it's part of the evidence that was photographed in his house in Cambridge. So, you know, there's a lot of overlaps between Tamelin, Danny, and some anarchist groups. And, you know, it's just an aside. and I've been looking into this a little bit more lately, but, you know, that same... Maybe he was an informant.

I'm sorry to interrupt. Go ahead. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's what I'm wondering, too, about Daniel Wally. Because during that same era, there was Aaron Swartz. Do you remember him? He was one of the founders of Reddit. Yes, and in fact, let me just say,

it's so crucial that everyone watched the absolutely important documentary about him called the Internet's own boy about how the national government just destroyed that kid. And it was just the worst crime what they did and such an important documentary. Anyway, go ahead. You know, I've never seen it. I'm so glad you told me. I've not seen it.

Oh, it's just horrifying. It's like equivalent to the Waco mask or someone. Just directed out one kid here, but just the entire way to the national government for a guy who never even did anything to anyone at set. Yeah, it was like a Robin Hood. I mean, his crime, which he got locked up for in Cambridge on MIT's campus, was trying to download free textbooks because no one can figure out why you have to buy a textbook for $300 And he never did upload them to anything.

All he did was download the material and then he got caught before he had a chance to even do anything with it. Yeah, and then committed suicide. Yeah, I mean, they were going to give him 30 years and, you know, put him in the cell next to Ted Kaczynski, you know. I mean, it was an, it's an interesting parallel because if you look at the timeline of the Aaron Sports case in the, in the, you know, unfettered fury that had unleashed in the hacktabist world, you know, was anonymous.

that so right around the time of the Boston, Anonymous was very busy on the campus at MIT. They were doxing the professor who they think ratted out Aaron Swartz. You know, they took over the DOD's website. There was a lot. I mean, look, I'm not correlating the two, but I'm looking a little more closely at Tamerlian's ties to this outfit. Danny's ties to this outfit. So maybe the connection with Daniel Morley and Tamerlin was not Chechen-Dihadi terrorism, but, you know, more of an anonymous Antifa sort of connection.

Or at least... Yeah, I mean, we're going to... We got a lot of Chechnya to cover here still, but, like, it would make sense that, you know, it's jihadists over there, and then he comes here, and he knows the leftists who knows how to mix chemicals, you know, then he could go that way, too. But again, well, not again, I guess the only obvious reason,

other than him being an informant himself, Morley, that is, for the feds to cover that up would just be that overall, they just want to cover up the entire case. They don't want any loose threads or ends or anything. They don't want any more attention on what's going on other than just hitting the whole thing on the younger brother, the surviving brother, and then calling it a day rather than exploring any of these things. I mean, there's also the apparent murder of a guy during interrogation by the FBI, who was apparently involved with helping the older brother, Tamer Lane, murder some guys.

What, a year before? This is another big, unanswered question in this case. On September 11th, 2011, the 10-year anniversary of 9-11, I get a call from a source who says, you have to come over here to Waltham. It looks like an al-Qaeda training video in this crime scene. And there, there were three young, mixed martial arts fighters. They had been slaughtered. Their throat slashed. A couple of them

have been hogtie, but these are big like MMA fighters. And immediately after this murder, the bodies were found by this woman from Sudan who had attended the same mosque as Tamerlans and I have in Cambridge Mass. Tamerlin had introduced this woman to his buddy named Brendan Mess, who was an MMA fighter. Brendan Mess was at that house with his two roommates when somebody comes and murders them. At the time, I was working for a Boston television station. I did an on-air report about this brutal triple murder. That's still, by the way, it remains unsolved.

And I went back. After the Boston Marathon, I got a call from another source who said, hey, do you remember that murder case you did years ago with the three fighters? and I remember meeting Brendan Mess, one of those dead guys, with Tamerlans Zayev. So it turns out that the family was well aware that Tamerlans and I have was very close to Brendan Mess. Brendan Mess and was looking at apartments with Tamerlin, as a matter of fact, they were tight. Brendan was teaching Tamerlin MMA, Tamer was teaching Brendan how to box.

These are two very, very close friends. and at that time I had interviewed, you know, the district attorney who said that they believed it was two men who murdered these guys and fled in a white Mercedes. What a shocking coincidence. Tamerlind always drove a white Mercedes. And that was exactly the same time that the FSB had reported this correspondence between Tamerlian and William Plotnikov over in Russia. So there was all of these things coming together. Tamerlin was never seriously questioned despite the fact that Brendan Mess' brother, Dylan, told me at that time,

off camera, the cops should look at his girlfriend and her friend Tam. I had written it down in a notebook. And apparently, her friend Tam was never seriously considered a suspect. And so this raises some more questions because not only was he, now, remember, the information that the FSB had given to federal authorities

here in the United States did lead to a little bit of action. You know, the feds put Tamerlin on texts, a watch list, a travel watch list, and he should have been flat because one of the things that the FSB told the FBI is, we think he's going to come to Russia and join the jihad. Now, remember, they got asylum, the entire family, saying, and that if they ever return to Russia, they will be murdered. But successfully, they got asylum, you know, they all got green cards. Johara had even become a citizen by 2012. So these guys, you know, they said, if we go back to Russia, we're going to be killed.

The Russians tell the FBI, we think this guy's going to come back to Russia and hang out with some very dangerous characters. Yet, despite him being named by family members as a suspect in the triple murder, He never showed up at the memorial service for his buddy, Brendan Mess. He was still allowed to leave the country, and he lands a few months later in this war-torn region where he spends six months, which is significant because a guy without a passport and his traveling on a green card, the minute he stays over six months, he should have been immediately flagged. He's on two-tare watch list by the time he flies back to the U.S.

doesn't have a passport. He's overstayed the six months you're allowed to travel. He traveled to a place that he told, you know, immigration officials he'd be murdered in if he ever went back to. And yet he breezes through customs, no problem whatsoever. And the next thing you know is on the fast track for citizenship that he was not eligible for because he was in violation of the moral turpitude clause. Okay, so I'm going to have you essentially repeat

all of that again and go that entire direction over to the other side of the ocean here and what all happened with that in a moment. I want to stick with the implication for here, which, and I believe you have in one of your books,

I believe you cite local police told you that they know that Zarnayev was a federal informant and that he was, it was working a drug case and informing on some what, Eritrean or Somali or something drug dealers. And that,

um, and that then that would explain why, well, partially, I guess, why they would be allowed to get away with murder. There are other examples of this where an FBI informant kills somebody. And then the same way that they've compromised their informant,

they're sort of compromised by their informant. If they're informant does something that it reflects bad on them. So then they just want to cover it up, uh, something like that. But do I have that right that we know for a fact that he was. No, I wouldn't say, I wouldn't say we know for a fact. I know that there has been some, there's definitely.

A cop told you that, though, right? Well, a cop had, I think there's, Bruce Gellerman has done a lot of work on the drug angle of this. He was a WBUR reporter. He's done some great work. But there was an Eritrean drug case with a guy from Portland, Maine who got locked up right around this same time, who was connected to Stephen Silva, who was Jahar, the younger brother's friend. So there's definitely like a, there is a connection through this other drug gang that was in Portland, Maine, and it was run by Eritreans. And then the thought was that the Eritreans

were using the money to fund Jihad in their native region. So that's why it would become an international thing. And so, look, nobody has said to me, Tamlins and I have his top echelon informant number is blah. Right. We don't have the records like we do with Whitey Bulge of when we know he was a top actualon informant. What we have is, you know, indisputable evidence of him getting a pass on some pretty serious things, including a triple murder, where he should have been seriously eyeballed as a suspect. And to go back to the shooting that you mentioned with the FBI agent, um, officials, that he committed that crime with another Chechen named Ibrahim Todashev, who just happened to be a very prolific MMA fighter as well.

You know, MMA fighting is all over this case. Abraham Totashev, on the night of 9-11, after these murders, went back to his house, gave his roommate his EBT card, which is, you know, his welfare card to pay the rest of the rent, packed up his bags and drove to Orlando, Florida. that very night. And in May, after the Boston Marathon bombing took place, you know, they want to talk to Ibrahim Todashev.

Now, obviously, they know that Totasheb was there at this triple murder. They want to know what Totashev is going to do. Totoshev by then had already booked a flight back to Chetcher. He just didn't have a chance to get on it yet. And the FBI shows up with two Massachusetts state troopers. This agent has an interesting, colorful background. He had been a cop and Kelchurch. in a small town in California, he was out on 100% disability.

So he was too disabled to be a cop in California, but he was hired by the Boston FBI field office. He shows up at this home of Todashev. Now, I think any cop would say this is a very unusual way to interview a murder suspect. Because now they're taking a second look at the murders, why I started to report about Brendan Mess, that story and his ties to Tamlins and Ayat.

Now the feds have taken a closer look at this triple murder again. It's May. They go to Orlando, Florida, and they decide to interrogate him at his home. And, you know, things went south real fast. Here's what's extraordinary. Can you imagine police reports where the weapon? So in one report, the FBI says that Ibrahim Todashev lunged at an FBI agent with a sword. Another FBI report says,

Abraham Todashev lunged at the agent with a table leg. A third FBI report says Abraham Todashev grabbed a brumstick. Like this, can you imagine any world where a police officer will get away with this? Like, what is it? Is it a sword? Is it a brumstick?

Isn't a, you know, with table leg? But... Well, I can imagine any cop getting away with it. No citizen, though. Well, yeah. I mean, perhaps. But I just think that there would have been a lot more scrutiny for a police officer

who tried to get away with this on police report. And they're obviously lying and they don't have their lie straight. Didn't we agree to say broomstick? I thought we said broomstick. Yeah. Well, whatever it was,

we know that Ibrahim Totashev did not get out of that interrogation a lot. He was in the process of writing out a confession. On a yellow, I have a picture of it. It was a yellow legal pad just like this. He's writing out on September 11th, 2011,

me and Tam went to the house at 89, I'm sorry, I'm Walt Ham. We murdered these guys. He's in the middle of writing. and then, boom, it's something goes fast, something goes bad, and now what's left is a blood splattered, hand-scrawled confession, and Todashev is dead. And as we know, dead men tell no tales.

I read a thing that said, and who knows, right, this spin, this is my question. The one thing I read said that, you know, there were four cops there, and then was it two or three of the cops, went outside for a phone call or smoke break or something, and let the one cop alone with him. And that was why the guy decided to lunge at him and something. But I wonder, how many times of that story change?

It changed multiple times. But what the official version was, if you read the Attorney General's report in Florida, is there were two state troopers from Massachusetts and there was this FBI agent who, I don't know, where he, well, how he got hired, but the three of them were there. one of them had gone out to buy the perp cigarettes.

The other one was tying a shoe and didn't see what happened. And then the FBI shoots Torto show with no witnesses because one guy was tied to shoe and the other guy had gone out for cigarettes. So it sure sounds like they just murdered this guy rather than put him on trial. I mean, maybe he just started a fight in some weird circumstance where he was a tough guy and they just weren't and he got the upper hand on them or something and they killed him in some sort of self-defense, but I don't know.

It sounds more like they assassinated him. Well, I mean, no one was ever charged. I can't say for sure. It wasn't in the room. This guy definitely was a very prolific fighter. He had been arrested for a minor road rage incident in Boston, and I interviewed the cop who grabbed him and said, Michelle was like fighting a refrigerator.

This guy was ridiculous. He was a brute. So who knows what happened in that room? We know no one was ever charged, and we know that the one witness, to the triple murder is now dead. Tamerlin is now dead. And no one is reopening that investigation.

So that triple murder remains unsolved. And the family, I just keep going back to that notebook. You know, think about it, was 2011. Two years later, this Boston Marathon takes place. The suspect's name finally comes out as Tamerlans and I have. And I, boom, you should look at his girlfriend. and her friend, Tam. Now, by the time, you know,

the woman from the Sudan immediately left the country after finding these three bodies. So he couldn't interview her. And, you know, Tam didn't mean anything to me in 2011. But certainly it meant something to the FBI. So if Dylan Mest told me that

about his brother's killers, I'm pretty sure he passed that same information along to law enforcement. Yeah. Okay. What a screw story. All right. Now let's switch back.

to Chechnya. So if we zoom out a little bit, and this is, I know, beyond the purview of your reporting here, but I have quite a lot of it sourced in my book, where not in the first Chechen war, but beginning in the second Chechen war, the Bill Clinton government backed both sides. They were helping the Russians fight the Chechen terrorists, but they were also helping the Chechen terrorists fight the Russians. And that policy continued into the W. Bush years through at least like around 2005 to varying degrees. And this is, I'm sure you're familiar with this. At least I don't know if you've done any reporting on it,

but the famous story of Colleen Rowley, the lawyer for the FBI in Minneapolis, who wanted to search the computer of Zacharias Masawi. The French had told the FBI agents that this guy's a recruiter for al-Qaeda in Chechnya. And that should have been all they needed to get a FISA warrant. But their supervisors wouldn't even let them ask them, the court for a FISA warrant to search Musawi's things. This is a so-called but not really 20th hijacker.

He was here for another mission later, but he was a real al-Qaeda guy. And they were denied permission to search his things because the supervisors in Washington said, no, we like the terrorists in Chechnya. They're not bad guy bin Ladenites. We're on their side against the Russians. And so that doesn't count. It was like politics in Washington prevented them from giving the warrant. And then we know now, and I've interviewed Colin Rowley about this numerous times,

I know her well, that the papers in his pockets and at his apartment led directly to the 9-11 hijackers in Florida. And if they had done their job, they would have been able to prevent the September 11th attack. Hey, I don't know about you guys, but I don't even have health insurance anymore. The system is so rigged and the prices are so high. Insurance for just my wife this year cost as much as it did for both of us last year. something like that pretty close anyway and so i've just opted out i don't even have health insurance right now but i signed up with crowd health and it is a great alternative to health insurance and what it is

is it's just crowdsourcing you help crowdsource other people's bills and they help crowdsource yours the more people who sign up the less any of us have to chip in uh to help the other guys down and it just helps drive down costs for everyone oftentimes you can negotiate a cash price if you're paying with insurance you can get a good discount from your health care providers and then you can crowdsource those bills through crowdhealth.com it works really great I was skeptical at first but Tom Woods explained the whole system to me and it's really great and I do hope that you will look into it and if you use the promo code of Horton when you sign up at crowdhealth.com then you will be charged only

$99 a month for the first three months get a great discount there at crowdhealth.com use the promo code Horton. That is an interesting story. Last month I had a big investigative piece to Mount Los Angeles Magazine where I'm a senior editor. And it was about how the Malaysians had videotaped and documented a summit in Malaysia with Al-Qaeda, where they were grooming the hijackers.

And a short time after that, two of the participants in this Al-Qaeda summit, we're able to land at LAX where, according to a civil suit, the Saudi government was ready to prop them up and set them up in Southern California. So there are so many missteps when you look at this. That's why this reporting that you are doing the reporting in the marathon, look, mistakes happen. Informants go bad. This happens all the time. It's not a slight. We need informants. This is an important part of doing business. But when it goes wrong, we should absolutely be, holding people accountable. And clearly, you know, they made mistakes with what the 20th hijacker,

the so-called. They made mistakes with the Zaniah brothers. And the idea that they can ignore congressional subpoenas and refuse to answer questions, you know, two of the major people who are involved in this case have died in recent weeks. One is Bob Mueller, Robert Mueller, who was in charge of the FBI, when the Boston Marathon bombing took place, and Graham Fuller, who was a longtime CIA official, who very much believed in the idea of arming the Chechens to fight the Russians. Like he was probably one of the masterminds of that plot. Yeah. And then as you said, his daughter married the of the bombers.

Okay. Correct. Which, yeah. Okay. So and then, but that goes to the whole conflict of interest here in the FBI doing their job right. Right. That's my point here. I'm not saying that there's, you know, trying to extrapolate out that like CIA was behind this or anything like that.

But just the point is that I think, you know, probably to a great degree, the enmity between the United States and Russia at the time prevented the American government from wanting to listen to advice and warnings from the Russians. You know, there's this interview with James Clapper, who was the director of national intelligence at the time. And Reuters even wrote, he says this. with shrug. Like, well, I mean, come on. What are we supposed to do? Just believe the Russians. We're just supposed to trust them.

I was like, well, yeah, I mean, if they're warning you that there's a potential terrorist on your territory, then yes, you are supposed to not just take their word for it, but go do your job and verify whether that's true and then prevent that from happening. That's exactly the job. But his attitude is like, oh, no, when I hate Putin, so I don't want to hear it about two Chechen terrorists who, who are blowing back against the United States of America here.

And then, so now help me with this timeline because it's almost straight in my head, but not quite. I believe I have it, right, Michelle, do I? That the first time they talk, the FBI, talked to the older brother, Tamer Lane, was in January of 2011, which preceded the first Russian morning. And that's the first time they admit talking to him at his house. was even before the first Russian morning.

Do I have that wrong? I, you know, honestly, I haven't looked at that timeline in a while. Actually, I think I do have that wrong. I thought that didn't come out right. I'm not sure. But I know that the, I'm not sure that the, I'm not sure if, like, Graham Fuller wanted the FBI involved. You know, you know what I mean?

Like, they have 16-year-old Tamilin-Iev, if you look at the insert in the book, his State Department records are a little odd. There's a photo of Tamerunz and I have, his name, his photo, He's 16 at the time when he first arrives into the U.S. There is a nearly identical, but not identical, photo of a completely different human wearing the same shirt on a different identity, with a different identity.

It's in the insert of the book. And so you have to wonder, like, you know, Tamerlin lived with Graham Fuller for his first six months coming into the U.S. So maybe when the FSB alerted the FBI, that set off alarm bells for the... the Pentagon, who knows? You know, but there's definitely something very odd about the way Tamerlans and I his case was handled.

But most importantly, and I don't have answers to these questions, when he goes to Russia, we know this. We know that he was wiretapping members of his family who were part of an org, his mother's relatives were part of an organization called Union of the Just. They weren't bomb throwers. They were money. They were fundraisers for, or terrorism.

And the union of the just leader, Tamerlin was, I mean, that's what you do when you go home and visit family, right? That you never met before. You wiretapped them. But these wiretaps were sent back to the United States. We know that that cousin, that he was wiretapping, got picked up immediately after Tamerlin left Racha. And we know that William Plotnikov, the guy who set off this morning in the first place,

was tracked and killed during a fire. fight in the forest of Udamesh, where he was being trained. So, you know, it seemed that everywhere Tamerlian went in Russia, high-level terror targets were tracked and killed. So on paper, this guy is an excellent asset. They knocked out some very dangerous jihadi while Tamerlin's help. He met with another guy who had been a recruiter. That guy gets tracked and killed.

So on paper, it looks like Tamerlin helped out. But who did he help? Was he helping the CIA? Was he helping the Russians? That's the part I think no one can really wrap their arms around. Yeah, I mean, I guess now that I think about it, it makes it sound more like, I guess this is in there. There's just so many facets of this story.

I can't keep my head straight around it. But I guess it does sound, and this is what I alluded to at the beginning about the things I'm confused about. It sounds like he was working as an informant for the FBI. Maybe the FBI and the FSB were working together and decided, hey, instead of this guy blowing up America, let's recruit him and send him to Chechnya and get him to make contact with these jihadists

and help us track them down and get them and make them useful for us. I mean, you even have him coming back to the United States and his passport and everything sure seems like that was what was going on. But then I know I have this in here somewhere and I believe you're the citation for it. I'm sorry, I don't have it right in front of me,

but then ain't I right to be confused? Because then wasn't it Plotnikov that turned the FSB, the RRSAB, the Russian police on to Zarniav in the first place? No, it wasn't like he was, I don't believe that, I think Plotnikov was hostile. He got picked up because his parents were looking for him. And they said, we think he's doing dangerous things. He's with dangerous people.

They call the Russian authorities. The Russian authorities pick him up and go through his phone. They snatch his phone. There's no such thing as like a search warrant in Russia. You know, they just, they want your ball and they go through your phone. they went through his phone and found Tamlin. So I don't believe that Plotnikov was being cooperative. I think they snatched his phone and there were a ton of text messages between him and Tamalin.

And how did Tamerlin meet William Plotnakov? Well, through this organization that is tied to Graham Fuller, world Muslim youth, I believe. That's not accurate, but it's something along those lines. where, you know, that group had ties to Rand, which we know is, you know, a civilian sort of intelligence agency. Rand had something with some world Muslim youth organization. We know that Tamerlin went to an event of theirs while he was in Russia. It happened in Georgia.

And we know that there was another CIA agent who was slated to testify in the Zainayev case who was in Georgia as a keynote. speaker at that event. So there's all these weird ties. So it's very plausible. You know, the FBI can't really operate overseas, you know,

the CIA can. So was there some sort of cooperative agreement here? If there was, it was successful because they got some very dangerous people who were plotting, you know, this is at a time when you know better than me, what was happening in Russia. I never went to Russia to report out the story.

But at that time, officers were being killed in alarming numbers. There were, you know, bombings of civilian locations in the region. So I imagine if you are, your Russian counterterrorism official, you'll take any help you can get to track down the people that are responsible for those kinds of atrocities. Okay, I see where I got that from now. And this still would make sense, right? I mean, hostile or not, because the story was, at least if I read it right,

my citations are ABC News and the Boston Herald here, where they say that it was the jihad. In fact, this is even the headline in the Boston Herald. Jihadi told Russians about Tamerlane. So it was under interrogation by the Russians that Plotnikov revealed the name of Tamerlane to them. And then I guess they let him go. And then later the tables turned and they used Tamerlane as the informant

to track down Plotnikov and kill him? Correct. Okay. That's what I believe. Because remember, the day after this big raid in Udamesh, Tamerlian, in the words of Bill Keating, puttails it out of Russia. Without a passport. Right.

Right. And can you imagine, you know, you're, think about these two, this crowd, right? You have William Keating, who's a big progressive from Massachusetts. You have him traveling with some right-wing Republicans from Texas. they're all following around Steven Seagal and talking to Chechens to get more information than they could extract from the FBI who was stonewalling them.

Okay. It's kind of extraordinary. I mean, that to me was one of the most disturbing parts of this case is that the FBI was allowed to, look, in the context of Epstein now, and these subpoenas that are going out, no one should be allowed to ignore a congressional subpoena. Most certainly not somebody.

who is employed by the United States government. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, or they should just go straight to jail. FBI agent or Department of Justice official that think that they're above answering to the House committees or Senate committees? I mean, this is completely crazy. Well, I remember that Congressman Michael McCall said at the time,

this information belongs to the American people that does not belong to the FBI. Bill Keating talked just as, you know, ferociously in a fiery way about how he, He was a, so this is, I mean, think about this. This is probably the last time we saw our United Congress when they were angry about this, right? And it's, it's. And it still didn't go anywhere.

No, it still hasn't got anywhere. 13 years this week, which is startling to me, 13 years and we still don't have the answers. But then again, it's been 25 years of the Boston. I mean, of 9-11, we still don't have those, a full picture that happened there either. And so, no, this really. It reminds me, though, of, you know, an explanation that you have in your work here in, again, the books are maximum harm and mayhem, where you have a potential motive here. It makes perfect sense that, first of all, step one, one of the ways that they recruited him to be an informant in the first place was by promising him citizenship, even though he had a domestic violence record and all. of these kinds of things, as you say, the FBI is trained to do that.

This is a good way to get and inform it from a foreign national is promising citizenship. Screw the American people, right? The people in Boston, Massachusetts. But we'll give you citizenship if you'll do what we say kind of thing. But then you explained very well in this, in one of those books or both, that he mistakenly believed after he got back from Russia and helping do his duty for the FBI and FSB there, apparently, when he got home, he thought mistakenly that he was being screwed out of his citizenship.

And it was really just he was dealing with bureaucratic red tape down at the DMV type situation like any of us. And essentially he just had to come back one more time to get the right rubber stamp on the damn thing. But apparently they say that he flew off in a rage, right? And it was shortly after this that he committed to then launching this attack, apparently. Well, so, you know, it's interesting. There's a lot of clues in his A-file, heavily, heavily redacted A-file.

I mentioned the professor from BU, the former CIA officer John Woodward. He assigns my books to his intelligence class at the party school at BU every single year to see if anyone can find a hole in the reporting. No one has to date, I can probably say. But what's interesting for me is that there are so many smart, intelligent. and tapped in students, and one of them had some insight into the A file for me recently because they had had some experience in USCIS.

And, you know, there's a lot of things that are on the answer to that. Number one, you know, becoming a citizen is expensive. Tamara Lynn's unemployed. Who's paying for this? That's redacted. You know, why was USCIS?

The bureaucrat did a good job. They reached out to the FBI and said, hey, this guy is not eligible for citizens. He doesn't have a job. He has this, you know, arrest. What is going on here? And the FBI just kept blowing off the bureaucrats saying, just give it to him, just give it to him.

And they were like, no, we're not going to just give it to them. What should have happened here is that the FBI agent who was assigned to this, David Cedeleaf, should have walked down to USCIS with Tamerlin and made sure that this was a smooth process. It wasn't. And you know this better than me. But the Chechens believed that it is better to be a dog than the youngest son. And the idea for Tamerlin ego-wise in this system was his little brother became a citizen

on which is a date that really makes my hearter. But he became a citizen on September 11th, 2012 at the Boston, the very revered Boston Garden. So this kid becomes a citizen. Tamerlin was getting jerked around with his citizenship, which he desperately, wanted, I mean, we know this because he participated in that BU photo essay will box the passport. He wanted to become a citizen so he could box for the U.S. Olympics. There is the motive. He desperately wants to be a citizen. Then he feels like he got jerked around. He was promised

this, you know, golden ticket. He keeps going down to this building, you know, the federal building and dealing with the DMV like you pointed out and then he gets pissed off. And by then, you know, this is what happens. My grandfather used to say all the time, if you go to a barbershop enough, you're going to get a haircut. And this guy has spent the last six months listening to jihadi rhetoric in Russia. All he's doing is hanging around with these pro-jihad people in Russia for six months. He comes back. And, you know, Doko Umarov, now dead, but he was like the Chechen Osama bin Laden, as you know, he has that portal, like the drudge report for terrorists, Cav cats, and Cav cats had posted about the raid in Udamesh that left Plotnikov dead and said there was an American

informant. So he knows everyone in Russia knows he's the rat. He did this because he wanted to be a citizen. His little brother's a citizen. He's getting jerked around. He keeps going to this building. They keep telling him to come back later. And he gets mad.

And the next thing you know, we have the Boston Marathon attack on April 13th, 2013, exactly 13 years ago. And by the way, in the background of this, too, is the absolute ultra-violence of Obama's dirty war in Syria and the rise of ISIS and the Al-Nusra Front and all that, the Al-Nosur Front, which now rules Syria

with the help of the United States. And so, and it was also the height of the, or just coming off of the tripling of the Afghan war as well. And so this is a crucial part of this story, that is often ignored is that the younger brother when he was cornered

and hiding in that boat, he wrote a message on the wall of the thing. And it wasn't about how Muhammad says kill Whitey. It was about how this is revenge for the U.S. government delivering high explosives onto the heads of innocent people

killing them. And that then, yes, therefore their religion mandates that they defend the innocent. Not that that's what he was doing, bombing, a marathon and killing civilians himself. I'm not saying that he was

about what I'm saying that was how he justified it in the other definition of that term. That was how he justified it to himself, how they justified what they were doing was they were getting revenge for what America had been doing in the Middle East. And of course, again, you have the whole double game in Chechnya

where hell you probably wouldn't even have Al Qaeda in Chechnya if it wasn't for the United States. United States, Britain and Saudi Arabia in the first place for any of this to be going on at all. So I know. I can't wait to be a job book. This is, I mean, I literally ordered it when we took a little break. Oh, that's good. That's cool. I hope you like it. I mean, this is, this whole thing is very, and by the way, this is totally out of sequence. This goes back to when we're talking about the, the potential bomb maker that you mentioned. This is such a crucial piece of information. This saw, like, any cop is watching this, you know what this means, man, that the stepfather started getting mail.

He got added to the mailing list of the fireworks stand in, you know, a couple of hundred miles away where they bought the fireworks for the explosives, the stepfather of the friend. I mean, come on. There's a band of fireworks in Salem, New Hampshire, which is right over the border from Massachusetts. But yeah, there was a lot of evidence that ties Dan Amwally to these bombs, but he was never charged.

never did a, you know, a single minute in a courtroom, not one. And now he's like just a free man. You know, I tried to interview him. He led us on a slow speed chase. I was with Bruce Gellerman, the great reporter from WBUR, now we're tired. And he kept like laughing maniacally in the rearview mirror. And finally, we just had to call it. But he was in a state-funded ride van as he's like driving around.

You know, it's been 13 years and I so appreciate your time on this. For me, it's about answers. You know, look, we need to have true accountability or these kinds of missteps so that it doesn't happen again. Because if you remember the Pulse Nightclub shooter, when he was ripping bullets through those poor victims, he was calling 911 and saying, I want to give a shout out to my homeboys,

Tameran and Jhars and I have, the Boston Marathon bombers. Right? So this, you know, this kind of, and it turns out that his father was very likely a CIA asset, It was definitely an FBI informant at least. And in that case, he also cited revenge for Obama's bombing of Iraq and Syria as well. And so this is what we're talking about. Like, unless we take a closer look at this, it's going to happen again and again and again.

And I feel like the victims, especially in my hometown of Boston, they deserve better. We need the truth. We need to know what really happened here with the Boston Marathon bombing. We need to know, you know, why we continue to kiss up to the, the Saudis, you know, like it's unbelievable to me when we look at the history of, all you have to do is read Ashton versus the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and go, what the actual hell are we doing in this country? But we're taking advice from MBS on what to do in Iran when MBS in his family,

very likely had ties to what happened on September 11th. To me, it's mind-blowing. And then we have Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein, tying. all of this together by being in direct correspondence with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with the help of Obama's former White House counsel, Catherine Rumler, writing to MBS saying, don't worry, we have Jastah handled for you, Jasta being the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which allowed the families of 9-11 victims to sue the Saudi government for their role in funding the hijackers. And you're like, you see, Howard Letnik, the Commerce Secretary, is a plaintiff

in the lawsuit who's paling around with MBS at the White House. Like, this makes absolutely no sense to me. And this is why it really has started to illuminate. The cases like this have shown that we don't have a true party system here. We just have billionaires and the rest of us. Yeah. And boy, when that came out, the Epstein was involved in delaying the civil suit against Saudi for 9-11.

Like, you can't make this stuff up. And then you see Ken Starr, who took Bill Clinton down and led to his impeachment is now paling around with Epstein and Bill Clinton and Ken Starr, who's the Republican special prosecutor, is working with, allegedly, according to Epstein, Catherine Rumler, who just had to give her a job at Goldman Sachs, who was Obama's White House counsel. She also had a role in the Clinton White House. And then she gets, and she writes to Epstein, I just got an award from John Brennan, the CIA director. Isn't that cool? For what? Why is a white shoe lawyer getting an award from the CIA?

Yeah, wow. CIA work. One last point here before I let you go, Michelle, which is that the great Nick Ters, who's the author of the book, Kill Anything That Moves About Vietnam. He also is the author of a book called The Terror Factory about the FBI, and it's about how in the earlier years of the terror wars, al-Qaeda really got their dirty work done on September 11th, provoking the invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq. And then it took a while for all the killing of the new wars

to generate new terrorist attacks like Orlando and Boston and the others. And so the FBI had to fake it. And so the FBI entrapped something like 300 nitwits into 300 fake plots just so that they could parade these guys across the TV, especially in the run-up to Iraq War II. Orange Alert, Orange Alert, the FBI got another one. and they were almost all fake. There were some real ones, you know, Zazi who wanted to blow up the New York subway and a couple

others, but there are many, many fake ones. The Liberty City 7 and the Detroit 5 and the Fort Dix pizza plot and the Portland Christmas tree and the Lodi, California, pole vaulting plot. And there's a bunch of them were fake. And one of them was the FBI in Boston was in the middle of entrapping some idiot into a fake plot where he was going to attack the Pentagon with remote control planes. And the whole thing was a put on, but they had the entire boss or some major portion of the FBI counterterrorism division was working on and trapping this retard when they had a real

ass dangerous terrorist, their own informant who was blowing back turning on them. And I'm not saying anything like that Zarniav was a sting. There's no indication that he was put up to this by the FBI at all, but that they were busy in trapping this other guy while Zarnayev was plotting his very real attack right under their nose? I mean, there's just a lot of unanswered questions, Scott, really. And I think that the public is deserving of answers. Jahar, you know, was shut off from civilization.

He's locked up for life. If, you know, the death penalty, which he received, that fight continues, which this is one of the reasons why I don't believe in the death penalty, because it is a boom. doodle. All this is is a way for lawyers to make a lot of money to fight against the death penalty. And that's the case with Jahars and I have. You know, like, I think there was some people that are very tight to Attorney General Eric Holder who got assigned this case. And the bills are so staggering that they're sealed. We can't get a price tag by how much money the taxpayers are paying to save this guy's life. So that to me has just become.

a big blank check for lawyers to fight against the death penalty. This is just another way. It's an industry. Right now you have the death penalty industry where a blank check is being written to these lawyers from all over the country to protect this kid from the needle when, you know, look, I think dying a very slow death at ADX Supermax is probably a more just punishment anyhow.

Well, and there really should be, I don't know why there's not. It really should be a shadow of a doubt standard, beyond any doubt standard for capital cases. And then, but if we know that you set off a bomb that killed a little boy, you're dead. You're convicted, and then we hang you to death. And you're dead because we know you did it. And, you know, if we could get him to squeal and testify to Congress first, that'd be great. But otherwise, you know, it's just like this UPS driver that murdered the seven-year-old. everybody knows, knows he did it, not believes he did it, knows he did it.

It's okay to put him down. He doesn't get to live anymore. And no, you don't get any appeals. That's not one where it's like, well, we have a blurry eyewitness statement, and it's a circumstantial case, and we're really pretty sure we're willing to say beyond a reasonable doubt. But no, on some of these, where it's just, we know for a fact that the younger brother was in on the older brother's plot to blow up these people at this race. off with his head. That's it.

And that should not be, no lawyer should be able to cash in on appealing that. He shouldn't get any appeal on that. Well, it's interesting because, you know, any mention of Tamerlin was barred from the courtroom. And so, you know, when the lawyers tried to bring up the fact that Tamerlin was an FBI informant, they got shut down.

So there's just a lot of unanswered questions, but I am- That's a good point. He maybe didn't get a fair trial, no matter how guilty he was, because it's the USA, and we don't do fair trials. So interesting.

We can talk forever, you and I. Yeah, I love your books. I'm so grateful for the work that you did on this. Nobody else even tried. So you just absolutely killed it on like 150 sub subjects within the story of the Boston Marathon Bombing. It's incredible work. And I'm eternally grateful for you writing it all

and doing the show today. So thank you very much. Honestly, I can't wait to read your book and I'm really appreciative of the time. And I'm appreciative that people are still asking questions. So thank you. Yeah, absolutely. All right, so Michelle McPhee, properly spelled with one L, that is.

She writes at LA Magazine. In the past, she's been at the New York Daily News, ABC News, Boston Globe and Newsweek and all of these other things. And she does great investigative journalism. Check out her website is Michelle McPhee. That's P-H-O-M-C-H-E. Michelle McPhee.com and thank you again. You're the past.

Thank you for having me. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts & Roberts, Brokerage, Inc., Moondos Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom, and APS Radio News.

Subscribe in all the usual places and check out my books, Fool's errand, enough already, and my latest, provoked, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above at Scott Horton, and I'm serializing the audio book of Provoked at Scott Horton Show.com and patreon.com

slash Scott Horton Show. Bumpers by Josh Langford Music, intro and outro videos by dissident media, audio mastering by Potsworth Media. See you all next time.