By Ken Silva – Libertarian Institute
It’s been about nine years since Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue filed a Freedom of Information Act request for records about a CIA asset and FBI informant who helped fund the Oklahoma City bombing, as well as for records about a neo-Nazi bank-robbery gang also involved in the attack.
Tired of waiting, Trentaudue sued the FBI over the matter in February, demanding the bureau to produce the 69,375 pages of documents that it’s holding. But now, the FBI wants to take another nearly 12 years to fork over those documents to him, which means that it would take at least 20 years for the bureau to comply with his initial FOIA request.
Such a slow production rate is unacceptable, Trentadue said in a Tuesday court filing.
“The FBI proposes to process these records/documents for release to Plaintiff in monthly increments of 500 pages over a period of 11.5 years!” he said.
“If the Court accepts the FBI’s proposed snail-pace processing of these materials, Plaintiff will be close to 90-years of age when he finally receives all of them,” he said.
“He has already waited almost a decade for these documents/records, with the FBI having made no effort during the interim to produce them, and should not have to wait another 11.5 years to receive them.”
Trentadue has been suing the U.S. government for OKC bomb-related records for nearly 30 years, ever since his brother was murdered in a federal penitentiary. The complex story of how the death of Trentadue’s brother relates to the OKC bombing can be read in this Mother Jones article.
Trentadue’s latest lawsuit seeks records on FBI informant and CIA asset Roger Moore (not the James Bond actor), and the bank-robbery gang, the Aryan Republican Army, which he says was an FBI front group.
According to Trentadue’s lawsuit, Moore was an FBI informant as part of the bureau’s 1980s- and early 90s-era Operation Punchout, which was designed to identify and apprehend surplus dealers that bought and sold government property stolen from Department of Defense facilities in Utah.
Furthermore, Moore build patrol boats for use by the US Navy in the Vietnam War, as well as speedboats for the CIA, according to Aberration in the Heartland of the Real—historian Wendy Painting’s PhD thesis-turned-book about OKC bomber Tim McVeigh.
As for the Aryan Republican Army, Trentadue believes that was an FBI front group that also helped fund the bombing.
Trentadue’s Tuesday filing elaborated further on the ARA’s connection to McVeigh.
“During 1993, 1994 and 1995, a gang known as the Aryan Republican Army or “ARA” robbed banks and armored cars in the mid-west. Timothy McVeigh participated in some of those robberies and is reported to have used money obtained from these crimes to help fund the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995,” he said.
“According to Peter Langan, several members of the ARA assisted McVeigh in carrying out the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building.”
No hearings have been set yet in Trentadue’s lawsuit.