Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/4/26 Scooter Downey on Waking People up to the Truth About the OKC Bombing

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

Scott interviews Scooter Downey, a producer at the Tucker Carlson Network, about his new documentary series on the Oklahoma City bombing. Discussed on the show: The OKCBOMB Files An American Bombing: The Road to April 19th (IMDb) Tucker’s interview with Margaret Roberts The OKC Bombing Archive  Scooter Downey is a filmmaker who, more recently, has been producing documentaries at the Tucker Carlson Network. Follow him on X @scooter_downey. Sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com 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/43D82oY (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/4eMQblu Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/4a5fKvx 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: Tax Attorney Matt Sercely https://agoristtaxadvice.com; 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; and Crowdhealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/ (use promocode Horton) You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/ or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow 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! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yes, sir, it's the Scott Horton show brought to you by expat money. That's expatmoney.com slash Scott. 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 I'm anxious. 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 only... 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 Horton. All right, you guys, introducing Scooter Downey. And guess what?

He produces documentaries for Tucker Carlson, namely this one on the Oklahoma City bombing files, the OKC bomb files, in fact it's called. and it is now available on Tucker Carlson.com for members. And I don't know if it's, I guess it's probably not out on the YouTube yet, but for members at Tucker Carlson it is. And I've got a chance to watch the whole thing yesterday.

And I have to tell you, as I introduce you here, what an absolutely fantastic job you did. And whichever, you know, video editors that you had helping you put that thing together is a masterful, you know, piece of work there. And speaking for everyone who ever cared about the truth about this issue, and I know a lot of people are like this about a lot of things. But this is, for me, this is one.

And I know a lot of people feel this way. We're like, we're always kind of holding out hope that a documentary about this will somehow be enough or even a book that possibly could somehow be enough to sort of break the proverbial dam open where now the minority report becomes the official story. and real calls for accountability, you know, go out and that kind of thing. And we have had some great documentaries in the past. HBO did one recently that had a lot of truth in it, I believe just last year. And there have been some others in the past of varying degrees of quality.

There have been books by, you know, Roger Charles and Andrew Gumbull did a book that because of who Gumbull was, he was able to be noticed by the center left. officialdom at the New America Foundation and Peter Bergen interviewed him for two hours all about it, whatever, they got the story right. And so there have been times where it's like, oh, it's going to happen now. The thing, and hell, even years ago, I remember reading a giant thing in the Associated press all about it. And I thought, well, there you go then. Like, that's the official history then. It was like, here's the story. It was right there in the AP. And no, it never quite takes off. So here's hoping that yours really does.

I think there's a very good chance that it could because of just how well done it is. So anyway, that's my ridiculous rambling introduction. Welcome to the show and thank you for doing it. Well, amen to that. And yeah, thank you, Scott. It's great to join you as somebody who's been interviewing all of these people, an amazing roster of people close to the case. So kudos to you.

And yes, the hope is eventually somehow this moves the ball down the field. and I think what's interesting about this case, as far as that goes, is that there is forensic evidence that could be released that might shed some light. Like there was the missing leg. There is a leg that doesn't belong to any of the known victims of the bombing. And so some speculate this might belong to the bomber or it might give some more evidence.

And Kathy Sanders is currently, in a lawsuit now to get that DNA evidence exposed. And then there's, of course, the videotapes that Jesse Trinidad has been a FOIA lawsuit to have the government provide them. So I think there is, you know, it's been 30 years. So maybe people within the Department of Justice who are looking at this documentary might be interested to help out in some way. Yeah.

I hope so. All right. So there's so much to this story. And I believe you told me this is eventually going to be. a nine-part documentary series here. Is that correct? That's right, yes. Okay, so I appreciate that.

I'm glad you're taking your time on it because what the hell? Might as well do a nine-hour thing if you're going to go ahead and get to the bottom of it. It's a huge story. There's so many complicated facets to it. So I appreciate the fact that the first episode is really just an introduction to the story. This is ancient history, as Jimmy Carter might say, you know what I mean? This is so long ago. So many people aren't familiar or need a real refresher.

that, well, here's what we know happened, and here's what the government says happened, and here's the beginning of the discrepancies. And, you know, I actually remember standing in line, I think of what my job, it was probably a roofer at the time because it was like early in the morning, like 5, 30, 6 o'clock in the morning or whatever,

and all the workmen are all in the Texaco, and I'm holding up the newspaper going, hey, look, everybody, it turns out there is no John Doe, too. You don't have to even worry about ever again, man. That guy was not an FBI informant. He wasn't anybody that you need to worry about.

And everybody's just laughing. Like, this is the most ridiculous thing in the world. What do you mean? There's no John Doe 2. You know what I mean? The whole crowd full of guys like, Chuck on the other. But that was just the way they played it.

I have a clip somewhere of Mike Wallace going, well, FBI says there is no John Doe 2. So they focus their attention on McVeigh. And so will we, for the rest of our staff, story here because that's what the Hoover building has determined for all of us is that we're just not going to care about this anymore. I'm glad that you started out with that because the absurdity there is just, you know, undeniable.

Yes. And for those that may not know that story, we go into it in detail in episode one. But when John Do One rented the bomb truck that was used in the bombing, there was a second person that was seen by the three eyewitnesses with him while he was renting the truck. And it's not really clear 100% that it was even McVeigh, that that was John Doe 1. I personally kind of split on it.

I think it could have been, it might not have been, but as there was another two other guys that rented a truck the next day, this would be the day before the bombing. and there were two guys and one of them was smoking at the time. They said John Do 2 was smoking. And so there might have been some kind of, you know, contamination of memory, but that the story doesn't add up because of John Doe 2

was just mistaken identity by these three eyewitness. Well, what about the other 24 plus eyewitnesses that saw this guy with the same description on the day of the bombing in the rider truck? And so the government's story, there just doesn't doesn't pass muster and we know that they were looking for an additional suspect for years after the bombing and um so yeah it doesn't it doesn't work it just doesn't make sense so i wanted to make sure that we we addressed that and then the first episode man it's so cool i own liberty stickers

again liberty stickers dot com everyone else's stickers suck but these ones are really good like for example this one i made back years ago so what if they never tell the truth about the oklahoma city bombing. I mean, who cares, right? It's supposed to be ironic and sarcastic. You get it. And then here's one. Join the CIA, creating tomorrow's enemies today. That kind of thing, you know, so you can put them on the back of your truck and tell everybody else how stupid their politics are. LibertyStickers.com. Hey, guys, if you sign up for my substack at Scott Horton Show.com, then you get all the shows a day early and without ads. Pretty good, right? Scott Horton Show.com. Hey, look, guys, Scott Horton Show and Scott Horton Academy Shwag.

Just look at the YouTube channel there and under every video. There's links to all the stuff. And then remind me because I flubbed this last night, I'm provoked with Jarrell, the number of witnesses who saw McVade that morning. I know that no one saw him saw him alone. Everyone who saw him saw him with somebody else, but I forgot what that number was. Can you remind me?

In episode three, I am only going to show the eyewitness sightings on April 19th. And I've got, I think it's actually more than 24, but 24 is like the floor for. That's what I said. That's what I thought it was. But then I thought, but isn't that the exact same number as the number of cameras that we know that? Yeah, exactly. There's weird, there's weird, like, synchronicities with numbers.

I just hadn't noticed that coincidence before. So when I said it last night, I was, wait, I was like, wait, that isn't right. I'm using the number of the cameras and then I'm transposing that on the other. Well, I actually, I had to do a deep dive because, you know, I've heard. those number of cameras, but then I realized that the sourcing for that number comes from a lawsuit that David Hoffman, who was a journalist, and he wrote a book on the bombing, he had sued the Department of Justice to release the videotapes, and finally it came out from that lawsuit that there were 23 videotapes and a duplicate that was in BC.

So that's where the 24 comes in, but those are videotapes. it's not necessarily cameras. But yeah, there's weird synchronicities like when they printed out the contract for the, for the bomb truck, it was at 4.19 p.m. and the bombing took place on April 19, 419. So weird stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah, that's meaningless.

By the way, I forgot if I mentioned this to you on the phone, but this is really, I think, worthwhile, man. And in the local news footage from the day of, you can find this where the original reports are it was a car bomb outside. and I believe it's ATF says that they estimate that it was a car bomb with as much as 1,200 pounds of explosives in it. And then a few hours later, I'm not exactly sure of the time frame,

but that same day, they say, and now we're getting word that the bomb was even bigger. We're told that the bomb may have been as big as 2,400 pounds of explosives. exactly double, right? And then I'm not sure now. I used to know this. I don't want to make a claim because I'm afraid I'll get it wrong.

I used to know this, but I forget. But at some point very soon, the number doubled exactly again to 4,800 pounds. And they claimed they had, you know, derived that from a receipt for info with McVeigh's thumbprint on it that they found at Nichols House, which whatever.

and then the racing fuel they had estimated that in. Later, when McVeigh did his interview for the book that he did with his local newspaper guys from his hometown, he told them it was 7,000. And so sometimes you'll see that at 7,000 is now the new number. But usually they say 48 still. But it was just too obvious that they just made that up. Yeah, that part is, um,

Yeah, it's fresh on my mind because I just did a fact check on a certain aspect of it. Stephen Jones and his defense team was never allowed to examine the bomb crater. When they went there, it had been covered with plywood and the government said, we're not here to take you on a tour. So they weren't able to examine the bomb crater. The bomb crater would tell you exactly, well, approximately the size of the bomb based on, you know, how big it was across, how deep it went. and there was a FEMA report in 1996

that estimated the size of the crater has a figure, I think it was like six, six feet deep and 28 feet across, I believe. It might be 26, but it is a big crater, and they relied on this engineering survey report, that's the source of the size in this report. But there has never been any, that report has never surfaced.

So whatever they're basing that measurement on has never been produced to public or the defense team or the Oklahoma bombing investigation committee. And so there is a question about what was the composition of the bomb, how big it was. And I think they kind of reverse engineered it based on the forensic evidence they had, like you mentioned the receipt.

So they knew how much fertilizer was purchased and they knew approximately how much nitro-mething. was purchased the racing fuel. So I think they took that and they used that as the number rather than from potentially an actual forensic investigation of the crater itself. Or even they just double the number because 2,400 still sounded too low

and then they just did the calculation to fit the number that they had already made up. It's also, and I know I'm getting ahead of the story because none of this is in episode one, but just all the stuff that's coming to mind now that like just make sure that this is in there, somewhere is that Super Dave Williams from the crime lab was a damned liar

and Frederick Whitehurst destroyed him on the stand and it was admitted that they had no actual positive evidence of ANFO in the wreckage or I guess they, I'm trying to remember now they claim that they had a little bit in supply with some. Yeah, there was a lot had to admit that he made it up on to some degree. Yeah, they found, you're exactly right,

they found a small piece of ammonium nitrate crystal on a piece of plywood. And it had rained that night on April 19th. It had rained that night. It was a big storm. And the piece of plywood supposedly was face down. And so he was able to recover the crystal and examine that and determined it was ammonium nitrate.

However, when the defense, when the defense wanted to, to get the specimen themselves, the ammonium nitrate crystal was not there, apparently through some kind of mishandling, that they should have done something to preserve it. So the defense was never able to examine that piece of evidence. That's the only residue analysis of ammonium nitrate from the explosion. Mmm, moondose artisan coffees. explicitly

Scott Horton's show-flavored coffee from Moondos artisan coffees get it they hate Starbucks because Starbucks supports the war party but Moondos artisan coffees they support peace and so here you go Scott Horton show flavored coffee

it's part what Sumatran and part Ethiopian all mixed together and tastes so good in the morning and also in the mid afternoon if you start getting sleepy Scott Horton.com org slash coffee. Get you some. All right, you guys, me here for expatmoney.com slash Scott.

And what it is is this great guy, Mikkel Thorup, and he's a world traveler and a real expert in what you can do to buy property and invest in property overseas, protect your assets, and look into even living overseas if that is your interest. And if you just go to expatmoney.com slash Scott, you can get this free handy booklet, plan B, residences, and instant citizenships. That's expatmoney.com slash Scott. Although, I mean, I don't know of any real reason to doubt that it was an info bomb, but it's just, you know, like the FBI, they're building a case here, man. They're not trying to get to the truth.

They're trying to construct the case that they want to tell, the story that they want to tell around the thing. Right. You know, and it's like all's fair in love and war in the sense that it's an adversarial system, but I've always found it tremendously strange. Well, it's just put strange in brackets there that the government relied mostly on a circumstantial case to convict Timothy McVeigh. But one of the people that we interviewed for the first episode is a man named Rodney Johnson, who was a catering truck driver who saw someone he identified as McVe walking across the street

from the rider truck. And he had a... had to slam on his brakes and almost, you know, come to a complete stop because he was about to hit him. And he told the FBI that before McVeigh's famous perp walk on, on that Friday. And he said that there was a second individual that was walking on the street with McVeigh. Now, they never called, they used his testimony in the pretrial hearing to keep McVeigh in custody. Agent John Hursley used his testimony when he was on the stand. And Merrick Garland, by the way, anytime they were mentioning this John Doe 2, he would object.

Who was, he was one of the prosecutors. And so you have a positive idea of the guy on the day leaving the bomb truck, but you don't call him to the stand? Why don't you? You just don't want to make it messy with John Doe 2? I mean, if I'm the prosecution, I don't need anything. I just need that guy on a stand. Nick Ve is convicted.

End of story. Yep. Exactly right. I mean, this is what we said at the time, too, was look at this. They call the little girl who lost her mom and they go, how sad are you, little girl? And she's like really sad. And then they look at the jury and they cluck their tongue and they go, you're going to let this guy get away with making this girl feel this bad. And, you know, I have the clip too from, this is from 60 minutes where I'm 99% sure of that. But I have it and the file is correctly named for the source. I'm 99% sure this 60 minutes

where the juror tells Mike Wallace, a lady juror, says, well, I was just waiting for someone to show up and say that they were McVeigh's alibi and that he was with me, so it couldn't have been him. Right, right. And that didn't happen.

Meaning just like almost perfectly, like if it was a comic book and you wrote those words for her, right, that through their moral guilt tripping, they were able to turn the burden of proof from the prosecution to the defendant, defense that, come on, the government wouldn't accuse this guy if he wasn't really the guy. And so now he has to prove that he wasn't the guy, which, as you say, Jesus Christ, this is the biggest case in the world.

What do you mean you can't make a case that the guy did it? You have every agent in the country at your disposal. You need to call in guys from Nevada to back up. They're going to do that, right? You have everything you need. And here, as you're saying, you got eyeball witnesses. couple a dozen eyeball witnesses saw the man in the truck, in that city on that morning. But we don't want to hear from any of them.

Not even the guy who saw him at the Murrah building because they all saw him with somebody else. Everyone listening to this knows how to finish that. That's because they know who the someone else was and the someone else worked for them. Had to be there's no other reason for them to cover that up. Yeah, the, that I don't, you know, I try to avoid theorizing a little bit as best I can. You do that. I'll go ahead and commentate the journalisticness. But yeah, I think, you know, one of the, their theory, which I think was in American bombing,

I believe the lead prosecutor, Beth Wilkins, I think she said that, hey, you know, we had to make a case against McVeigh and Nichols. and I think they had on the office of their, on the door of their office, something like, don't confuse the case with clutter. So I think the least conspiratorial explanation for it. It is the case with clutter.

I never heard that. I love the alliteration and everything. That's beautiful. Are you kidding me? Oh, my God. Yeah, the clutter, like there was another guy that was there on the bomb truck. Do you see words making case? You know, it's a beautiful thing there.

Ah, wow. So listen, I'm going to add to that because it's the same thing. It just goes in the same paragraph there or the same little section of your deal is we know this from Gumble and Charles book. I believe it's page 234, but it's where they, Larry Mackey, the U.S. attorney, says the same thing. The deal was that they didn't want to jeopardize the death penalty case against McVeigh. and they would have if they started going after everyone involved, because then that would raise the question, whether he was just the Patsy driving the truck

and whether someone else was really the guy who deserved the needle for it. And so the gas chamber, so I guess it was the needle. So they'll just let them go to pin it on him. And the way he says it, there's a separate part where he says, in this funny kind of double negative, where he says, you know, if you had all of us prosecutors around the desk and you asked us if, raise your hand if you think we didn't get everyone involved

or raise your hand if you think we did get everyone involved then everyone's hand would stay in their lap they wouldn't raise their hands tried to get them to say that we finished the job on the thing and then so but like you can see that right we're like if you were the assistant or you were the U.S. attorney and I was the federal prosecutor like the pointy boss, then I would say to you, bring me 10 life sentences without parole.

Right. I guess if we're not going to be able to execute the one, then we'll just hold all of them until they die old age and we'll just have to settle for that. What the hell do you mean that the calculation is you're going to let these guys go? And I believe that that's a thin excuse. I think that's all they got because they don't want to say, well, listen, these guys were informants and flip state's witnesses and they should have been under our control and they weren't and so oops and so it's a bunch of FBI ass covering right yeah I mean what's I mean and on the

flip side of that the FBI investigation and I've only read less than a percent of all of the 302 reports this was the biggest manhunt and American history looking for John Doe too and I am just frankly amazed and surprise and you know there were certainly like street agents that we're literally trying to find him because they're pounding on all kinds of different doors from what I've, you know, from what I've read, even things that are, you know, second or third orders away from the event

and they're not able to find a guy. So yeah, it makes total sense that he is protected in some way, whether he's a domestic or international, you know, protected figure is unknown. But and the reason I say international is just because it is based on his description, and which, of course, he could be American or someone from overseas. But, you know, he was described as variously American Indian or Native American or Hispanic, dark,

completed white guy. So was this person homegrown or was he from elsewhere? You know, that's not clear. We don't know who the guy is. Yeah. Scott Horton's show is brought to you by Matt Sersely. tax attorney. Let's say you run a small business or you're a high salary professional and you're looking to protect your revenue from the revenues who would rather take it and spend it on

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It's not insurance. It's crowdsourcing instead. And who could possibly afford insurance at these prices in this day and age? It makes no sense. But what this is is it's crowdsourcing. You help pay for other people's medical bills and they help pay for yours. and it really works. You pay the first 500 of whatever you're doing up front in cash.

And anything over that, you bill it to the group and they help you pay. And then when it's somebody else's turn, you chip in a fair amount to pay for them. And it's all for a low monthly subscription fee. And it's totally a great deal. And I highly encourage you to check it out at join crowdhealth.com slash horton. All right. Well, look, I don't want to get too far ahead. of the series.

I want people to go and get a real good introduction to the story and what kind of questions we're asking and where we're going with this and all that. So, but now I'm really interested, too, if you can, tell us a little bit about working with Tucker on this as you're developing this story and you're telling him like, all right, boss, here's what the script is going to say.

Like, what's his reaction to this story? Because I know that this is a relatively new one to him. He interviewed Margaret Roberts, so he knows what the story is. but it's, I know that it's not one that he's followed all along or something. Yeah, he's, he's been, he's been blown away by the story and how weird it is. And anyone who has looked into this, it gets grips into you and you can't, you can't let it go. And I think there, there's a lot of different ways to look at it and different rabbit trails that maybe are red herrings that lead you down the wrong path.

and so yeah Tucker's offered great guidance and has been just intrigued the one thing that comes to mind is kind of neither here or there but you know as he's reading the script for these episodes he's just noticing how strange all the names are like one of the one of the eyewitnesses is Jeff Davis and so he started riffing on like oh and Stonewall Jackson also saw John Doe too so yeah he's he's been very very They've been a great. They've given me a long leash to do my work and and they're going to continue to let me. Like you mentioned, there is going to be nine, nine episodes. So I'm still hoping to have more time to do more investigation and talk to more people to tell the full story. And yes, we're going to get into all kinds of different things, Operation PatCon. And there's surveillance footage and try to tell the complete story. that you can in half an hour or a 45 minute episodes. Right. Well, I do hope that the Libertarian Institute document archive curated by Richard Booth has been of value to you. Absolutely. Yeah.

Thank you guys so much for hosting that. And I think it's important for future researchers to have that. And in this first episode, we have an interview, an archival interview, with the owner of the body shop that rented the rider truck, and that was donated by Kathy Sanders licensed to us. And this came from a documentary called Terror from Within, which was they conducted those interviews in 1999. And so we were sitting on all this amazing documentary archival footage,

and we're going to eventually try to make that available to researchers as well and the same kind of spirit that the Libertarian Institute has because, you know, give it here. I'll post it in our archive too. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. So we're working on digitizing those, you know, piece by piece.

Great. Somewhat related. We have a treasure trove of documentation, video and audio about Waco that we got from David Hardy who wrote, it was a career and wrote the very best book on it. This is not an assault. And so that's something that's something. That's going to be going up kind of in parallel to libertarian. Or libertarian institute.org slash OKC, which is where we have the mother look.

I had a lot of that stuff. But then Richard Booth came and he had 10 times more and absolute dedication to this story and organizing it all and vetting it all and getting it just right for everyone to go and do their work. So extra thanks to Richard for all that. And great thanks to you. Thanks for coming on the show, spend some time with us. I really hope that, you know, whatever, I don't know, I know you do too. It should be, this is the one, right?

This is the one where now everybody knows what happened here instead of only a few people have ever heard that before kind of thing. We're going to get there. Yeah, I hope so. And for the historical record, at the bare minimum, you know, that that's, that's, that's the task that I'm, you know, trying to, trying to honor the best as I can. Yep. Absolutely.

All right. Well, thank you, Scooter. It is the OKC bomb files. An unfri—oh, what? I can't read. An unofficial history. Yeah. I need my glasses on.

There's— I know what the hell I was doing? An unofficial history at Tucker Carlson.com. Thank you very much again for your time and for this great effort. Absolutely. Thank you, Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom. Roberts & Roberts Brokerage, Inc.,

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