Why Is The Epoch Times Spiking Pieces and Burying Stories About Oklahoma City and Israeli Spying?
Read the piece the Epoch Times doesn't want you to see here
It’s the 28th anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing. A lot of the players in the saga, including Attorney General Merrick Garland, are very much still around.
In the last couple of years there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people who want to take another look at this event, both on the left and the right. The book Aberration in the Heartland of the Real has had a second life recently. Some of the researchers on this stuff have had shadowbans or outright bans applied to their accounts on Twitter.
A few of the previous pieces here have touched on this murky world of 90s domestic extremism. I get the sense the true story of it has not yet been written. A few of the people moving around in this world are probably still alive, but have not yet been heard from. For instance James Mitchell Rosenberg, the ADL infiltrator who I have tried to track down but is very difficult to find.
Another one is Frederick Schulze, who, I am told, was at Elohim City around the time preceding the events of the Oklahoma City bombing. I was given his business card some years ago, which showed he was a graduate student at St. Andrew’s in counterterrorism, working on a PhD. I asked a former colleague of his, now at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, what might have happened to him, and he has no idea. There are a few terrorism-related publishing credits to his name, but nothing recent. He doesn’t seem to have a teaching appointment. It looks like he just disappeared.
I also want to note that America’s great gay patriot Gore Vidal was a skeptic about the official narrative of the bombing. You can read his Vanity Fair article covering his letter-writing relationship with Timothy McVeigh, which came out a few days before 9/11, and thus, of course, got buried. To be clear, I think he’s wrong about certain aspects of it, but he asks a lot of the right questions.
Gore Vidal, because of who he is and who he’s related to, is allowed to raise these questions—he was an old-stock American. When foreign-backed media does it, I get a little more skeptical. This is sort of the problem with much of our media being foreign-backed, it messes with our ability to make sense of things.
In the previous post I mentioned how certain storylines recapitulate themselves over the years. Back in the day, the Moonies backed DC’s main conservative paper, The Washington Times. Today, another anticommunist Asian cult is backing conservative media in a big way, this time it’s called The Epoch Times, the leadership of which contains a lot of Canadians. Whether they’re aware of the sensitivities here or not, they have been burying tough reporting about Oklahoma City as well as Israeli spying. I contacted one of their senior editors to ask about this, but he won’t respond.
The Epoch Times published a piece by Ken Silva last June about a NASA contractor, and then promptly removed it. It is unavailable on the Internet Archive. I am reproducing the text here below. The FBI memos in question are hosted on Mother Jones’s website.
If you want to read about the background of PATCON, which is connected to the infiltrator identified in the piece, read J.M. Berger’s report on it here. The feds basically created a militia group, the Texas Light Infantry.
The reporting below also touches on the Aryan Nations, which was at the time considered the nation’s top domestic terror threat, with many attempts to infiltrate it. Damien Patton, covered in these pages, may have been part of one of those infiltration attempts, before his work founding Banjo. The one that eventually succeeded was Dave Hall, who wrote a book with his FBI handler on the case. Hall was busted for moving some weed, and the FBI sent him into the Aryan Nations, which sounds like a Seth Rogen movie waiting to happen.
All this background is a way of saying none of the following piece implies Dave Hollaway, the infiltrator identified here, has done anything criminal, and as his lawyer says, much of this may well have been him talking a big game about his far-right cred, making statements that ended up in the hands of the FBI. I’m not sure about the detail that he was married to a “princess of the Aryan Nations,” since she isn’t named anywhere. (Richard Butler, the leader of the Aryan Nations, had two daughters, Cindy and Bonnie. Cindy was married to someone else at the time. I can’t find much on Bonnie.)
Whatever he may have done in his past, he appears to have left that behind, and is entitled to live a peaceful life working on NASA contracts. Nevertheless, this is the sort of story that makes you go hmmm.
As the Biden administration continues to raise alarms about the purported threat of white supremacism, The Epoch Times has learned that a former extremist militia member with ties to the Oklahoma City bombing works as a contractor for the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
NASA confirmed in a June 13 email to this reporter that David M.A. Hollaway, former member of the Texas Light Infantry (TLI)—a now-defunct militia that was the target of a 1990s-era undercover FBI operation called Patriot Conspiracy (PATCON)—is a contractor for the federal agency, working as an employee for Jacobs Engineering Group.
NASA declined to comment further, and Jacobs Engineering Group didn’t respond to messages seeking comment. Hollaway declined to comment or be interviewed for this story.
Decades before he started as a NASA contractor in 2019, Hollaway was a retired U.S. Army Special Forces member who was active in the extremist militia movement.
Two key FBI investigatory records outline Hollaway’s connections to the 1990s extremist militia movement, as well as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing: a 1996 memo detailing the bureau’s interview with him, and a 1997 memo based on statements from an informant who spoke with Hollaway about the incident. Extremism researcher J.M. Berger also wrote about Hollaway’s former TLI membership and links to PATCON in his 2012 research paper titled “PATCON: The FBI’s Secret War Against the ‘Patriot’ Movement, and How Infiltration Tactics Relate to Radicalizing Influences.”
Those records show that Hollaway was a member of TLI during the late 1980s until 1991—the year the FBI launched its PATCON operation against the militia for allegedly threatening the lives of bureau agents. The FBI never charged anyone in relation to those allegations.
Records state that Hollaway left TLI in 1991 to move to North Carolina and work for the CAUSE Foundation, which was infamous at the time for having represented then-Ku Klux Klan leader Louis Beam. CAUSE founder Kirk Lyons, who The Epoch Times interviewed for this story, denied that his firm was a white supremacist organization—citing his representation of black families who were victims in the 1993 massacre in Waco, Texas.
The records also detail Hollaway’s association with German national Andreas Strassmeir, a fellow former TLI member spotted with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh on multiple occasions in the lead-up to the April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing. Former PATCON informant-turned-whistleblower John Matthews said in 2012 that he saw the German with McVeigh in 1994 at a militia training facility near San Saba, Texas, and Strassmeir reportedly bragged about buying McVeigh’s U.S. Army uniform from him at a gun show—a claim that Lyons said is true.
In addition to Strassmeir and Hollaway both being former TLI members, Hollaway helped Strassmeir leave the United States and fly back to Germany in 1996 while the OKC bombing investigation was still ongoing, according to the FBI memo from that year—a report that Lyons also confirmed to be true.
“That was not [Hollaway’s] decision. That was as much my decision as anyone’s decision. He was just the one appointed to do it, because he could probably get him out of the country,” Lyons told The Epoch Times, saying he helped Strassmeir leave the United States to protect his legal rights.
“You have fewer rights as a government witness than you do as a defendant. So, I got him out of the country. You can blame that on me; don’t blame that on Dave Hollaway.”
While agreeing that the 1996 FBI memo was largely accurate, Lyons vehemently denied that there is any truth to the 1997 FBI memo, which casts Hollaway in a far more nefarious light.
According to the 1997 memo, Hollaway was a white supremacist who at the time was married to the daughter of the leader of the neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations—a woman referred to in the group as the “Princess of the Aryan Nations.” The memo further says that Hollaway claimed to be a former CIA pilot in the 1980s.
Perhaps most damningly, the memo says Hollaway had intimate knowledge about the Oklahoma City bombing—the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in U.S. history, killing 168 people, including 19 children.
“Hollaway admitted to having spoken with Timothy McVeigh on the telephone two days before the detonation of a truck bomb outside the Oklahoma City federal building. In reference to that particular event, Hollaway stated, ‘The [expletive] truck was too far away’ and indicated that it was not parked in the position which could inflict the most damage on the building,’” the FBI memo says.
“While describing the Oklahoma City bombing, Hollaway was able to provide technical details concerning the truck bomb and ANFO (ammonium nitrate/fuel oil) to include its blast over-pressure, fragmentation distances, and deflagration with an alarming degree of specificity.”
According to that memo, the FBI informant noticed changes in Hollaway’s body language while describing the Oklahoma City bombing, including him rolling of his eyes when describing the truck not being parked in a place to wreak maximum destruction. The informant believed this to be an indication that “Hollaway was attempting to communicate an involvement on his part in that bombing without verbally acknowledging participation,” the memo says.
Lyons attributed the 1997 FBI memo to Hollaway’s overly talkative personality.
“He was bullshitting some guy at a gun show, and the guy freaks out and reports it to the FBI,” Lyons said (the conversation took place at an underwater technologies convention in Houston; not a gun show, according to the memo).
“Dave’s kind of a self-promoter,” Lyons added, addressing the claims that he was a CIA pilot.
As for the question of whether Hollaway’s wife was the “Princess of the Aryan Nations,” Lyons responded by saying, “Which wife?”
Neither Hollaway nor Strassmeir were ever named as suspects in the Oklahoma City bombing investigation. Researchers of the subject—including Kathy Sanders, who spent decades looking for answers after her two grandchildren died in the attack; Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue, who has procured thousands of FBI records via lawsuits against the U.S. government; historian Wendy Painting, who wrote her doctoral thesis on McVeigh; the late investigator Roger Charles, and his protégé Richard Booth—have called for Attorney General Merrick Garland to reopen the case, which he helped prosecute.
Lyons, who now works for a law firm called the Southern Legal Resource Center, told The Epoch Times that he, too, has unanswered questions about the Oklahoma City bombing—including about the mysterious John Doe #2, an unidentified suspect seen with McVeigh by at least 24 witnesses on the morning of the bombing.
However, Lyons criticized attempts by “conspiracy crazos” to link Strassmeir and Hollaway to the attack.
“I don’t disagree with a lot of what they’re trying to find out, but they keep doing all this Strassmeir [expletive], and now I guess it’s crazy Hollaway [expletive], and I’m not interested,” he said, adding, “When I die, and I hopefully go to heaven, I want to be able to go to the big black building in heaven, where all the secrets on earth are, and I want to be left alone for a couple hundred years.
“Then, I’ll know everything.”
The second story in question, also by Ken Silva, the Epoch Times published, but buried. This one is on the Internet Archive, and you can read it here. The explanation for the Epoch Times’ hesitance might be as simple as conservatives being willing to let the Israelis get away with anything, but I’m not sure. It concerns Carbyne, which sells surveillance tech to local police departments, much like Banjo. The difference is it’s much more successful, and has involved people like David Petraeus and Peter Thiel. After former Israeli PM Ehud Barak was exposed for his close relationships with Jeffrey Epstein, he supposedly stepped down from Carbyne. The story Epoch ran shows Barak still owns a stake in the company. They published the story, pulled it, lawyered it, watered it down, and then put it back up, but wouldn’t run it on the homepage. Why?
I’m fairly uncomfortable with all this Israeli tech being integrated into our law enforcement and emergency response infrastructure, because they have shown themselves to be untrustworthy.