The FBI is Stonewalling Jesse Trentadue as He Tries to Find Out Who Killed His Brother

Will his lawsuit this year succeed where past ones have failed?

via Flickr, Edward Stojakovic

There are a number of threads on the Oklahoma City bombing that are still live, and of great relevance given Merrick Garland’s role at the top of the Department of Justice. He was the prosecutor in the McVeigh case.

There’s Tonia Yeakey, who is on Twitter talking about her ex-husband’s mysterious death and has been interviewed by some friends of mine. There’s the disappearing Fred Schulze, one of the more obscure angles. There’s the famous John Doe #2, who Gore Vidal focused on when he wrote about Timothy McVeigh for Vanity Fair. There’s Ken Silva’s stories getting pulled from the Epoch Times, which I wrote about here. And then there’s Jesse Trentadue’s fight for disclosure.

Trentadue has filed several lawsuits in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, the most recent one was this February, in relation to a FOIA request that has been waiting unfulfilled for almost a decade. His personal interest in the case is that his brother was found dead in his cell in what the authorities claim was a suicide.

Curiously it’s more or less only Silva who has been on Trentadue’s newest one. In the past, The Guardian and Mother Jones had taken an interest. Trentadue’s fights in the courts also may touch on Justice Gorsuch, who was a judge on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Several folks at Scott Horton’s Libertarian Institute have been on this stuff, and Richard Booth has suggested I write about Trentadue’s ongoing lawsuit, concerning the disclosure of more than 60,000 pages of records the FBI has said were responsive in 2016 but have not released, related to Roger Edwin Moore and the Aryan Republican Army. One other ARA member, bank robber Donna Langan, has since become a “pioneering” transgender inmate.

Ken Silva wrote a story when the lawsuit was filed, and then another one this July, when the feds tried to claim they had already released records responsive to the suit, when in fact they had only released a very small portion of them.

Booth has been involved in analyzing the files released to the request, and there is a declaration filed Friday alongside an evidentiary objection from Trentadue which suggests the Bureau is playing all sorts of games.

The feds said their release of 340 pages on July 31—received by Trentadue August 6 and posted to the FBI’s archive on August 7—was a show of good faith, but according to Booth none of them were actually responsive to Trentadue FOIA request. “Considering that none of the documents thus provided are responsive to either the PUNCHOUT FOIA or BOMBROB FOIA, it is patently false for the FBI to represent to the Court that what is left is in any way a ‘remainder,’” Booth’s declaration reads.

The FBI’s proposed schedule of release would involve 500 pages monthly, meaning the request, after ten years, would take 11 years more to actually fulfill.