Read the full transcript of prize-winning investigative journalist Margaret Roberts’ interview on The Tucker Carlson Show episode titled “Margaret Roberts Exposes the True Story of the Oklahoma City Bombing and the Ongoing Cover-Up”, August 4, 2025.
INTRODUCTION
TUCKER CARLSON: So you’re, I would say, one of the living experts on the Oklahoma City bombing, which to some of us seems like just the other day, but it was 30 years ago this year. So for those not steeped in the details of the story, could just, if you wouldn’t mind giving us the overview. What was the Oklahoma City bombing?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Sure. The Oklahoma City bombing was and is America’s deadliest domestic terror attack. It happened on a Wednesday morning in 1995, an April morning, out of nowhere, nine in the morning at the Federal Building, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, nine stories tall.
A devastating explosion hit the building and killed 168 people who were working or visiting the building that morning. The front of the building looked like ice cream that had been scooped out. It was just a scene of unbelievable destruction and death and blood and confusion and the entire nation was left just aghast that this could have happened in America’s heartland.
TUCKER CARLSON: It was shocking and there was immediate confusion. I remember that morning well in April, and people immediately went on CNN to say that Muslims had done it. That was the first understanding – this was some kind of Islamic terror attack.
And then we were told that, no, it was really one guy with an accomplice who wasn’t there. The guy was called Timothy McVeigh. He had a rider truck full of ammonium nitrate fertilizer mixed with diesel fuel, I think.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: And that’s when most of us learned that that mixture could produce an explosion like this. Now that’s, I think, well known, but that’s when most of us learned it. And he was a white supremacist. He was mad at the government. He was mad about Waco and Ruby Ridge.
And he’s a former – he was a veteran, but he was part of a network of white supremacists. And then we spent the next year or two hearing about this. Bill Clinton often referred to this. And then he was executed. And that was kind of the end of the story. So that’s the layman’s understanding of Oklahoma City.
The FBI’s Lightning-Fast Investigation
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes, and it was quite an amazing couple of days. Enlightening fast speed. The FBI found Timothy McVeigh tracing the axle from the rider truck to a motel 275 miles north in Kansas, where McVeigh had checked in to the motel using his own name.
And pretty soon, just within a matter of a couple of days, the FBI found its way to Perry, Oklahoma, about 75 miles north of Oklahoma City, where McVeigh had been arrested on traffic charges, driving his Mercury car, the getaway car, without a license plate. And the officer, the arresting officer found that he was carrying a concealed weapon.
McVeigh was very polite the entire time. There was no thought that McVeigh was connected to the bombing. The highway patrolman took him into the Perry jail and he sat there. He was on his way to a bond hearing and to be released when the FBI, through this incredible speed of their investigation, found him in Perry, Oklahoma, on Friday afternoon.
For that now famous perp walk out the door without a vest in his orange jumpsuit and his thousand mile stare, and the gathered crowd around chanting “baby killer.” That’s what we remember of our first sight of Timothy McVeigh, the suspected bomber.
TUCKER CARLSON: Boy, the FBI is good. I mean, they got him within days on the basis of a truck axle. How did they say they did that?
MARGARET ROBERTS: They tracked the VIN number on the truck axle to Ryder in Florida. And Ryder had a record of that truck being rented out of Junction City, Kansas. And so they went to the rental agency and sure enough, put two and two together.
The identification was made from first, the writer for the rental truck agency where McVeigh had rented the truck. They remembered him, and they made a composite sketch of the two men. Not one, but two men who had been present for the rental of the truck. And with the sketches, the FBI spanned out in Junction City and found that motel where McVeigh had registered under his own name.
The Mystery of John Doe Number Two
TUCKER CARLSON: What do you mean, two men? Who was the other man?
MARGARET ROBERTS: The other man who eventually would emerge as the mystery man of the Oklahoma City bombing, was never identified. But the staff at Elliot’s body shop, where they rented the Ryder truck two days before the bombing on a Monday, they all said there was a second man there, and he was described as being very muscular, having a tattoo, having dark hair, and just standing to the side while John Doe 1, who called himself Robert Kling, rented the truck.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so Robert Kling was Timothy McVeigh.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Robert Kling was John Doe 1, believed to have been Timothy McVeigh, who in the end, was convicted, sentenced to death, and executed in pretty short order.
TUCKER CARLSON: When was he executed?
MARGARET ROBERTS: He was executed in 2001. That is short order for a capital crime. So six years later.
TUCKER CARLSON: So he’s been dead for 24 years. The terror attack was 30 years ago. When you say the man with him was never identified, do you mean to this day?
MARGARET ROBERTS: To this day never identified. And really, the abiding mystery of the case.
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m confused. How could you have the biggest terror attack, domestic terror attack in US history destroy the downtown of a major American city and you don’t over 30 years, you don’t find the second guy.
MARGARET ROBERTS: That’s a great question.
The Evidence of Multiple Witnesses
TUCKER CARLSON: Are we sure there was a second guy?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes, although it has been disputed, we’re sure because first of all, 24 ordinary people in Oklahoma City who eventually were interviewed by the FBI about the bombing run.
As you can remember, the investigation was a very big deal for a very long time. Journalism covered it and journalists reported, top journalists reported that the FBI had surveillance videotape because of course that’s what they do in a big crime like this. They went out and collected all the videotape and they had John Doe 2 with Timothy McVeigh on videotape delivering the bomb. They had videotape of the bomb exploding.
The preliminary hearing for the case was held a week or so after the crime and the videotapes were discussed there. The FBI agent on the witness stand admitted that the FBI had videotape of the delivery at least of the truck on its way to deliver the bomb. So we know that John Doe, too, was real.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, now I’m really confused because I don’t mean, why is John Doe 2 not at the top of the FBI most wanted list as a perpetrator of the country’s worst domestic terror attack in its history?
The FBI’s Sudden Change of Story
MARGARET ROBERTS: Pretty soon, and in puzzling fashion, considering that this was the biggest manhunt in history, it was a global manhunt. There was a $2 million reward offered for the identification and capture of John Doe, too. But pretty soon, within a couple of months, the FBI began to back away from John Doe to.
They produced a new theory that John Doe, too, was a case of mistaken identity. That the staffer that was the basis of the sketch at the body shop was mistaken. That he was really talking about a completely innocent soldier who…
TUCKER CARLSON: So I’m sorry to interrupt, but just to hold this up. So this is the flyer produced by the FBI after the terrorist attack. Right. So I believe that turned out to be Tim McVeigh. Right there.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Believed to be Timothy McVeigh. Our investigation would raise some questions about that, but yes, a lookalike for Timothy McVeigh or a lookalike for Timothy McVeigh.
TUCKER CARLSON: But at least we can kind of account for this guy, whether it’s the correct accounting or not.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Absolutely.
TUCKER CARLSON: This is the sketch of John Doe number two, but this is the FBI. This is produced by the feds. This is FBI.
MARGARET ROBERTS: FBI.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay. So this person has never been identified. No one’s looking for him. And the FBI is now saying he never existed?
MARGARET ROBERTS: That’s correct.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, given that you had dozens of people identify this person as a person, as being alive and being with Tim McVeigh. Dozens of people. And given that the FBI itself said, yeah, he existed, on what basis are they now saying he never existed?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Well, a couple of months later, they introduced a new story. This was that the man believed to be John Doe, too was this innocent soldier who had come into the body shop the day before and had somehow been mistakenly time traveled into the memory of the mechanic who gave the info about the sketch. But that it was all just a mistake, that Timothy McVeigh was by himself. It was never a very credible explanation.
TUCKER CARLSON: They identified this soldier?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes, they identified him. They talked to him. They found that he had the baseball cap that some of the witnesses had described John Doe wearing, and he was in with a friend. So the two of them were together. And it was somewhat credible or credible enough. And they were very certain and confident about it, and the story began to change.
TUCKER CARLSON: So they said, if I’m following this, that actually some other guy and a buddy walked into the same body shop around the same time. And the guy at the body shop just misremembered and thought that that guy was with Tim McVeigh.
MARGARET ROBERTS: That’s right.
TUCKER CARLSON: But he wasn’t.
MARGARET ROBERTS: That’s right.
TUCKER CARLSON: And so the FBI is now saying that Tim McVeigh did this alone?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes.
The Unexplained Eyewitness Testimony
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay. How do they explain away the eyewitness testimony of people who were there at the scene and saw them both in the truck together?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Tucker, that is one of the abiding questions never answered about this case. And as a matter of fact, years later, after some of the controversies that would develop, one of the top case commanders, Danny Colson, conceded that this single fact of 24 eyewitnesses who saw John Doe 2 in the bomb truck with Timothy McVeigh is not something that can just be explained away with this new story.
The Missing Videotape Evidence
TUCKER CARLSON: I have an idea. Let’s go to the videotape. There was videotape that was admitted, you said on the stand by a federal officer that they had the videotape. So that would just show. Where’s the video? Have you seen the videotape?
MARGARET ROBERTS: No one, Tucker, has seen that videotape in 30 years.
TUCKER CARLSON: Outside the FBI in 30 years, they’ve never produced that.
MARGARET ROBERTS: They’ve never produced it. And imagine this was an incredibly high profile mass murder trial. Those images were not shown at the trial. The videotape was not shown at the trial.
TUCKER CARLSON: It was not shown at the trial?
MARGARET ROBERTS: No.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Well, that’s never been credibly answered by the FBI.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so I just want to start as big picture as we can before we get into the details. But I’m already coming just as a ignorant person who sort of remembers all of this. We’re coming to points that are just like, don’t make any sense at all on the most basic level.
MARGARET ROBERTS: And there are many of these.
The Official Government Case
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m aware, I’m now aware. But I want to go into this slowly because I think this is not one of… This is not the Kennedy assassination. This is not something on which there have been 50 books written. I mean, you have written a great book on this, maybe one or two others. But most people, I don’t think, as of right now, summer of 2025, have revisited this in their heads and said actually the Warren Commission was fake. Like that’s not… That has absolutely… Right.
Okay, so you have now the claim by the FBI that McVeigh did this himself. He may have had… He had help from this friend of his called Terry Nichols, who is to this day still in prison serving life. But he was not in Oklahoma City that day, is my understanding correct?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Correct.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
MARGARET ROBERTS: He was in Kansas.
TUCKER CARLSON: He was in Kansas. So they’re saying that Tim McVeigh did the actual bombing totally by himself.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Rented the bomb truck in Junction City by himself, drove to Oklahoma City by himself, delivered and detonated the bomb by himself.
TUCKER CARLSON: And that’s the state’s case.
MARGARET ROBERTS: That’s the government’s case. And escaped by himself.
TUCKER CARLSON: What do they say his motive was?
MARGARET ROBERTS: He was enraged at the government for its overreach at Waco which was the government assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas two years before. To the day. To the day. April 19, 1993 was the FBI final assault after an 80 some day standoff. Two years before Oklahoma City bombing.
TUCKER CARLSON: That was where Janet Reno killed all those kids.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes, there were children. There were heavy casualties for children as well as adults.
TUCKER CARLSON: And they said Tim McVeigh was so mad about that that he decided to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City. Any indication as to why Oklahoma City?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Well, Oklahoma City was central to an anti government movement in the Midwest. So it was a high profile target.
The Search for John Doe Number Two
TUCKER CARLSON: So the FBI backs off of its claim and then completely erases its claim that there was a second perpetrator involved working with Tim McVeigh. How hard did they look for John Doe number two?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Well, it was a global manhunt, $2 million reward offered all over America. People were being stopped in the street, detained in a few instances, arrested. So they were looking hard for a month.
Who Was Timothy McVeigh?
TUCKER CARLSON: Who was Tim McVeigh, exactly? Timothy McVeigh.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Timothy McVeigh was a 26 year old bronze Star, ex soldier from the Desert Storm operation in Iraq. And he had come back home in 1992, this was three years before the bombing, and kind of kicked around his home where he grew up in upstate New York.
Had a couple of jobs, security jobs, security work, but never really gripped into a future after the army. There’s a story about, he was a great soldier, an intense, passionate soldier. And he was offered a tryout for special Forces at the end of his tour. And he had developed blisters on his feet, so the story went, and couldn’t make the physical part of the tryout, so he washed out of special Forces. And that had been his dream. That’s where he always saw himself.
So when he came back home, security guard work wasn’t satisfying. He was living with his dad and he was just aimless at the time.
TUCKER CARLSON: So how did he get from being an unemployed security guard, Bronze star winning veteran, living with his dad in upstate New York to blowing up a federal building in Oklahoma City?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yeah, that was a really curious passage. He became very political and he headed south to Florida and hooked up with one of the kind of mysterious connections that we know about in the next couple of years of his life, and a retired gun dealer named Roger Moore.
And he basically went on the gun show circuit. He would carry with him copies of the Turner Diaries, which is this anti semitic apocalyptic novel that he was very much… And not just anti Semitic, but anti government. It was just basically the story of an insurrection. And he would take this with him to gun shows and try to sell it or convince people to read it. He was trying to convince all his friends to read the Turner diaries.
And he just floated around without knowing what really was going on in Timothy McVeigh’s life for the two years that led up to the bombing. It’s really a puzzle. And he lived this road warrior life, staying in motels, unexplained. I’ve heard somebody account for, like, it would have cost someone in those dollars in those days, like, $50,000 to live this way. But we only know of him having earned, like, $5,000. So where did he get the rest of the money? Unaccounted for.
But he just drove thousands of miles, stayed in motels, hit gun show circuits, and eventually two years later, plus some months, bombed the federal building.
Federal Infiltration of Anti-Government Groups
TUCKER CARLSON: So we know at the time, so the government had committed a number of… A couple, at least, of high profile massacres of conservative Christian white people. One at Ruby Ridge and one at Waco. And so they were, as I recall, they were very concerned about backlash from conservative Christian white Americans becoming radicalized white supremacist, you know, Nazis, whatever that means. But like radical anti government white people. That was the threat.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: In their view, in the Clinton years, the first Clinton term. And so they were trying to neutralize that threat by infiltrating those groups with federal informants.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Correct.
TUCKER CARLSON: But at scale, like they were really working on this. Can we say that for certain?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: So Tim McVeigh going to all these different, you know, basically hanging around with all these people, joining the circuit of this political philosophy based in gun shows and no visible means to support. We can assume he was a federal informant. Sounds like, or may have been a federal informant.
MARGARET ROBERTS: There’s never been any record. I think that would be perhaps a bit of a reach to assume he was a federal informant. It was, at least to my understanding, and there is going to be some evidence about that. But I think making that connection, the gun shows were a hangout.
You know, if you were lost and male and ex military and seeking direction, as McVeigh’s attorney would argue in his defense at trial, there were a lot of people who shared his beliefs about what had happened at Waco, who were seeking others, seeking a clubhouse, if you will. And the gun show circuit was that place. So I think it could have been just that he was searching.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I’m sure. But what that world would have been crawling with informants.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes. Absolutely crawling with informants and crawling with law enforcement.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I mean, that’s what happened to Randy Weaver. Of course.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: His world was crawling with law enforcement because again, the FBI had identified that world. That brand of politics is the main threat. Randy Weaver sold a shotgun that was like too short or something and they wanted to…
MARGARET ROBERTS: Well, he was being pressed to be an informant and refused.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. And so they murdered his wife and son. So… But back to Tim McVeigh. So we don’t really know what he was doing during that time. It sounds like with any great specificity.
MARGARET ROBERTS: That’s right.
Terry Nichols and the Money Trail
TUCKER CARLSON: Who was Terry Nichols?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Terry Nichols was an army buddy of McVeigh’s and he was older. He went into the service older. He was perhaps 10 years older than McVeigh or five. But they had served together. They liked each other. And in fact, with a third soldier named Michael Fortier, who will be part of this story, the three of them served together.
And after McVeigh… Nichols left the service first and then McVeigh and they hooked up again together to be in the army surplus business. So that was how they came back together after the Army.
TUCKER CARLSON: So the government alleges that the two of them, maybe with Fortier, hatched this plot to bomb the Murray building. How’d they pay for it?
MARGARET ROBERTS: There’s a lot that’s missing about the money and nobody ever… The investigation never succeeded in following the money in this enormous terrorist attack, which just remains an unsolved mystery. But because they were both virtually penniless and Terry Nichols had run up credit card debt and tried to declare himself exempt from… Tried to give up his citizenship at one point and tried to say none of his credit card debt was valid.
But they were scrambling to put together a business because they both were familiar with how the army surplus business works. So they were… That was their plan. That was their hope.
TUCKER CARLSON: They had no other… So far as we know, they had no other source of income.
MARGARET ROBERTS: That’s correct.
The Philippines Connection
TUCKER CARLSON: Now we’re getting into the… Again, stuff that doesn’t make any sense because I think… Not to get ahead in the story, but I think Terry Nichols made a number of trips to the Philippines, didn’t he?
MARGARET ROBERTS: He did. He traveled.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s not as long a flight as you can take in the world. How’d he pay for that?
MARGARET ROBERTS: No one knows.
TUCKER CARLSON: What was he doing there?
MARGARET ROBERTS: No one knows for sure.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay.
MARGARET ROBERTS: He married a Filipino. But he didn’t take her on all of these trips. The people who investigated later found out that he reportedly took a bomb building book on one of these trips. That a Filipino terrorist turned government informant said that Terry Nichols attended a meeting on one of the islands there with Ramzi Yousef, who was plotting a terrorist attack during Nichols last trip to the Philippines, which was in late 1994. That would have been months before the Oklahoma City bombing. So no good answers for how these guys…
TUCKER CARLSON: Ramzi Yousef is a World Trade center bomber.
MARGARET ROBERTS: ’93, correct.
TUCKER CARLSON: The first World Trade center bombing.
MARGARET ROBERTS: That’s correct.
TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think it’s possible that Ramzi Yousef met Terry Nichols?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Well, that’s what this terrorist said. Claimed had happened.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that would just be given the earth’s population outside the bounds of probability, correct?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Correct.
TUCKER CARLSON: Random probability.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Correct.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
MARGARET ROBERTS: And it was also known that at this boarding house where Terry Nichols made many phone calls in Cebu City, it was a hangout for Islamic terrorists. So there is this very curious, intriguing, but unanswered possibility that Terry Nichols had some connection to that lobe of activity.
TUCKER CARLSON: That would cut against the prevailing story, which was that Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh were Christian nationalists, white supremacists. You know, why would a white supremacist Christian nationalist be hanging around with Muslim terrorists in Cebu City, Philippines?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Good question.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, it’s a very obvious question, but it’s a question. Again, we’re getting to the. This is a question that has no answer.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: Terry Nichols is in prison. I believe you’ve interviewed him.
MARGARET ROBERTS: I have.
TUCKER CARLSON: Has he answered these questions?
MARGARET ROBERTS: No.
TUCKER CARLSON: No.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Terry Nichols. When Representative Dana Rohrabacher in Congress took up this matter and really pressed. Terry Nichols eventually bailed out of a second interview with the congressman because he said there is no connection between the Philippines, my travel there, and the bombing. So that was. That’s Terry Nichols word on this.
TUCKER CARLSON: But Terry Nichols never explained how he afforded to travel as an unemployed person trying to start an army surplus business to the Philippines multiple times, or paid for the rider, truck and ammonium nitrate.
MARGARET ROBERTS: That is right.
The Unexplained Financing
TUCKER CARLSON: This just seems now. Now we’re getting to like, bonkers level. Unanswered questions. It’s like, what did the fed say about all this in the indictment during the trial? Did they ever explain the money?
MARGARET ROBERTS: No. This trial was basically simplified. It was political ideology. It was Timothy McVeigh the mastermind. It was McVeigh built the bomb, delivered the bomb, and that was the end of the story.
TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t know why I’m laughing. It’s. You know, it’s. Let me just pause and say, parenthetically, if you’re just a news. A hapless news consumer, as I was at the time, I was in the news business, but not covering this. Just sort of reading the news every day. It’s crazy what they can exclude from the story without you noticing.
If the story is big enough, loud enough, salacious enough, you don’t ask the obvious questions, which, like, how did these two unemployed losers afford this bomb, this truck, this plot, like, where’d the money come from?
MARGARET ROBERTS: So true.
TUCKER CARLSON: It is so true. I’ve never thought about it till right now. Okay, so another dumb question, but what was the point of the bombing exactly? In the. In the feds telling, like, what did they hope to accomplish by doing this? Do they have a manifesto? Were they starting a group? Were they?
MARGARET ROBERTS: No manifesto. Again, the feds always pointed to McVeigh and his rage at the federal government, his rage at Waco, his rage at the overreach of Waco. And remember, this was the Oklahoma City federal building where a lot of agencies had their offices. Not the FBI, but the ATF and DEA and other federal agencies. So that was, you know, the crime theory here is that this was Timothy McVeigh’s revenge on the federal government for its overreach at Waco.
TUCKER CARLSON: Did Timothy McVeigh or Terry Nichols ever explain their motives?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Terry Nichols basically has always steadfastly said he was the helper here, you know, and got in way over his head and had done things. I mean, Timothy McVeigh made sure that early on that Terry Nichols helped him rob a quarry in Kansas of blasting caps. So he was, you know, he was in up to his neck and he would say before he even knew it. And then he was helpless to say no to McVeigh.
As to McVeigh, his story is the same as the government’s, that it’s revenge over Waco and the government’s overreach and the government’s attempt to take, you know, guns away from people who are entitled to hold them.
TUCKER CARLSON: So they steal the blasting caps from a quarry. They assemble an enormous amount of ammonium nitrate fertilizer from ag companies. They spend many months apparently planning this. The government never offers or even suggests an accounting of how much they spent doing this. Is that correct?
MARGARET ROBERTS: That’s correct.
TUCKER CARLSON: They never tell us that. And they basically. Basically, they’re saying that Timothy McVeigh did it with the help of Terry Nichols. But by the time the trial comes around, there’s no hint of an accomplice of a John Doe number two. Right?
MARGARET ROBERTS: That’s right.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right. So by this point, are you starting to ask yourself, well, maybe I imagined John Doe number two.
The Hoppy Heidelberg Revelation
MARGARET ROBERTS: Well, there’s another there. In that first year, Tucker, There were some other really strong indications that John Doe two was real. One of them, an extraordinary story, is, as you know, grand jury proceedings are completely closed, sealed, and off the record.
Inside the McVeigh grand jury, there was a grand juror named Hoppy Heidelberg who was so upset about the way the federal prosecutors were running, managing, steering, and, in his opinion, rigging that grand jury that he went rogue. He began complaining to his congressmen about the fact that the government was hiding evidence of John Doe, too. He became an unnamed source for the daily Oklahoman newspaper, leaking what was going on inside the grand jury.
And eventually, after the indictment came down In August of 1995, a couple of months later, he went fully public, wrote. Well, he gave an interview. He broke rules which could get him kicked off this grand jury. But he also wrote the judge, the federal judge who was overseeing this grand jury, a letter in which he said, “The federal government is hiding the identity of John Doe to the victims of this crime, deserve to know who committed this crime, who was really behind this crime, and it isn’t happening,” and actually petitioned the judge to empanel a new jury.
The judge wrote back in three or four sentences, kicking Hoppy Heidelberg off the jury and warning him that if he broke the grand jury rules, he could go to jail. So there were more details.
TUCKER CARLSON: Who was the judge?
MARGARET ROBERTS: The judge. His name was David Russell. And he was not the judge of the McVeigh trial.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right. He was a different judge presiding over the grand Jury.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: To produce the indictments.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: But Hoppy Heidelberg, who was the grand juror, said he believed the government knew A, that John Doe number two existed and B, knew his identity.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Not that he knew his identity, but knew he existed. And Hoppy Heidelberg told the. In the interview with the journalist that he gave, which he was absolutely a violation of the grand jury rules, but he was going rogue. He said for him, the red flag of this whole scenario was the story the government put out about the soldier.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.
MARGARET ROBERTS: From who. Who supposedly innocently.
TUCKER CARLSON: Happened to be at the Rider Truck rental place.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Exactly. Yeah. With a buddy, he said. Hoppy Heidelberg said this was the red flag. To me, that soldier didn’t look anything like the John Doe 2 sketch. And this was a cover up.
The Kenneth Trentadue Case
TUCKER CARLSON: So one of the reasons that we know that everything you’re saying is right, that it was a cover up, that the government knew that there was a second accomplice, terrorist. John Doe number two is real, is because of an incredible story that I had never heard before until someone I know told me it. Which is why I want to do this interview with you about a man called Kenneth Trentadue. If I’m pronouncing his name correctly, Yes.
A construction worker from San Diego. And this is, this is all real. This story may be more than any other I’ve heard in a long time. Makes me think, you know, I’m. We have serious problems with our government. This is evil. So will you tell who was Kenneth Trentadue?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Kenneth Trentadue was a construction worker who had in the past been. He basically had a drug problem. Came back from the army in the Vietnam War era, addicted to heroin. He turned to robbery to feed his habit and eventually got arrested for bank robbery. Went to prison, did his time, came out. He had a falling out with his probation officer over whether it was okay for him to drink a beer after a day of hard work.
TUCKER CARLSON: And he was a construction worker?
MARGARET ROBERTS: He was a construction worker. The probation officer said. The parole officer said, no, it was a red line. And Kenneth Trentadue walked away, stopped making his appointed visits with the parole officer. Nobody was looking very hard for him for six or seven years. When.
TUCKER CARLSON: What was he doing during that time?
MARGARET ROBERTS: He was working construction, putting his life back together. He married his long term girlfriend and in 1995 they were expecting their first child. She was Hispanic. He was coming back across the border.
TUCKER CARLSON: Was he involved in that? We know of crime of any kind or was he just a construction worker?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Just a construction. He had totally put his life back together. He was totally on the up and up. And he crossed the border from Mexico where he had been visiting his wife’s family and he was arrested for the old parole violation.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, so they just put his name into the computer and bam, there was a warrant for the guy and they arrest him.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: This is San Diego. The San Ysidro border crossing in San Diego.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: Across from Tijuana. Yeah.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yep.
TUCKER CARLSON: So then what’s. Okay, so he goes to jail on a parole violation.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Now a very again inexplicable chain of events occurs.
TUCKER CARLSON: I’m sorry, when is this?
MARGARET ROBERTS: This is June of 1995. So two months after the Oklahoma City bombing. This is the two months in which this manhunt for John Doe too has been most active. It is now in mid June at almost exactly the same moment that the government is beginning to back away from the John Doe II story and support this innocent soldier mistaken identity story.
It’s almost exactly that moment that Kenneth Trentadue is arrested. He is a dead ringer lookalike for the John Doe TO poster. He’s driving the brown truck that John Doe TO may have driven. He’s got the John Doe. He’s got the tattoo on his left arm. The John Doe too.
TUCKER CARLSON: He looks like that guy.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay, Is there any indication that he was that guy?
MARGARET ROBERTS: There come to be some strong indications as the investigation unfolds, but at that moment, no. And he wasn’t that guy.
TUCKER CARLSON: But at some point the authorities are holding this guy on a completely unrelated charge. And somebody says notices internally. Wait a second. This guy looks a lot like the John Doe number two wanted poster.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Well, that’s what we assume happened. But what is known to have happened and what is the remarkable chain of events that happened is that Kenneth Trentadue, now in jail awaiting minor penalty for the probation violation, is suddenly moved from San Diego. This is two months later. He chills in custody for two months and then he has suddenly moved to Oklahoma City, 1300 miles away.
TUCKER CARLSON: So he’s busted, just randomly coming across the border from Tijuana, visiting his in laws. And then two months later he’s on a plane, on some like federal marshal plane to Oklahoma City.
MARGARET ROBERTS: That’s exactly what happened. And the family couldn’t figure out why they were concerned and suspicious. His crimes were all in California. His probation officer was in California, who presumably would have been a witness at that hearing. But Kenneth Trentadue is now in Oklahoma City. And just to complete the timing, this is approximately one week after the indictment came down in the McVeigh case.
TUCKER CARLSON: So he’s so clearly the feds think he could be John Doe number two. I mean, I think we can assume that that’s a fair assumption. It doesn’t make any sense. Otherwise he looks just like the wanted poster. They move him to Oklahoma City. They think that this could be John Doe number two.
MARGARET ROBERTS: That’s a reasonable assumption.
TUCKER CARLSON: I can’t think of another. What happens to Kenneth Trentadue?
The Death of Kenneth Trinidue
MARGARET ROBERTS: After he is moved at 3 o’clock in the morning? Well, first he’s moved to a special housing unit for reasons unknown, but he is in solitary confinement in a suicide proof cell. Two days after he arrives in Oklahoma City, Kenneth Trinidue at three in the morning is found tortured, bloodied and supposedly hanging in his cell, his suicide proof cell.
TUCKER CARLSON: He’s dead. He’s dead two days after getting to Oklahoma City. Okay, so it sounds like he was murdered.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes, it does.
TUCKER CARLSON: What was the condition of his body?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Brutalized, brutalized, bloody, stun gun like injuries on his feet, bruises, lacerations, all the signs of a terrible beating.
TUCKER CARLSON: So he was beaten to death by the feds? It sounds like it does.
MARGARET ROBERTS: However, if I could just complete the picture here of how the family found out about this death. It came as a phone call to Mrs. Trinidue, his mother, and it was the associate warden to tell her that her son, Vance Paul Brockway had killed himself.
Well, this wasn’t even a name she knew. She said, “I don’t have a son named Vance Paul Brockway. I do have a son named Kenneth Trinidue who is in your facility.” Once sorted out, the warden reinforced that this was her son. He was dead. He killed himself and made a very bizarre offer of free cremation.
And Kenneth Trinity’s mother said, “Well, I will have to speak to his wife about that.” And the warden said, “Oh well, he doesn’t have a wife.” And Mrs. Trinidue said, “Yes, he definitely has a wife and he has a brother too who’s a lawyer.” So eventually this is how Jesse Trinidue comes in to the picture.
Jesse Trinidue’s Investigation
TUCKER CARLSON: Kenneth’s brother, the lawyer, who unfortunately for the feds is a high performing, high intelligence, very motivated lawyer who wants to find out what happened to his brother.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Absolutely. And this is the X factor in this whole story because 99% of the prisoners who run afoul either of each other or the institution do not have families with high powered lawyers who are intent on finding out what happened.
And to your question, Tucker, about what was the state of the body when Jesse called the prison to find out himself what had happened? One of the first things he said was, “Do not cremate the body, send it home, send Kenneth home for burial.”
When the casket arrived several days later and the family had the funeral home take the coroner’s makeup off Kenneth, that’s when they found these injuries. They were concealed under heavy makeup. And that’s when the family had to see this for the first time. His throat was slashed, the stun gun like burns on his feet, the bruising, the lacerations. They discovered it in the funeral home.
And Jesse, being a lawyer, hard as that had to have been, took photographs and videotape of the body for evidence.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s very obvious it wasn’t a suicide.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Very obvious.
TUCKER CARLSON: So it sounds like what happened was it was a case of mistaken identity and this guy just got swept into this hysteria, into an FBI investigation and the feds beat him to death, maybe accidentally, who knows, during questioning, and then try to cover it up. You think that’s what happened?
MARGARET ROBERTS: I think that’s a reasonable assumption.
The FOIA Battle for Video Evidence
TUCKER CARLSON: Do you think there’s any chance he was John Doe number two? No, no, no. It sounds like. So this sets the. Really the reason that most people know about this story is because of his brother Jesse Trinity, who just launches into like a multi year crusade to bring justice.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Absolutely right.
TUCKER CARLSON: And he’s the reason there was a FOIA filed to get the videotape of the actual bombings. We could find out who was in the truck with Tim McVeigh, is that correct?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Exactly.
TUCKER CARLSON: And how long has that been ongoing?
MARGARET ROBERTS: That has been ongoing. The FOIA was filed in 2008. It went all the way to trial. In 2014, the trial was fully finished until its star witness, who an FBI whistleblower. We haven’t talked about him yet, but bailed out of the trial, leading to a long and still ongoing conflict over Jesse’s allegation of witness tampering against the FBI.
TUCKER CARLSON: So bottom line, in 30 years, despite lawsuits of trial, the FBI, the federal government has never produced this videotape.
MARGARET ROBERTS: That’s correct.
TUCKER CARLSON: And they’re now claiming they, they just don’t have it somehow, Right? Yeah, they just don’t have it.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Right, Right.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. The central piece of evidence and the biggest terror attack. They just, they just don’t have it. Just like they don’t. They don’t actually have the original moon landing footage. They just taped over it because they needed the Betamax tapes. They’re just out of space.
Yeah. You wonder how, like why not try harder with the lies? Do you ever wonder about that? If you’re going to lie like at least make them inventive so you don’t patronize the person you’re lying to.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Absolutely.
The Aryan Republican Army Connection
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. Wow. Who do you think John Doe number two was?
MARGARET ROBERTS: I believe John Doe number two was one of the neo Nazi bank robbers that Timothy McVeigh was associated with that the FBI was chasing him for from the very beginning, though somewhat off the books. They weren’t telling the public they were looking for this neo Nazi bank robbery gang, but they were looking at them. They, these investigations were connected.
The, they didn’t know who had been robbing the, the, the bank robbers. To an earlier point of yours, Tucker, about following the money, these. The Aryan Republican army, also known as the Midwest bank robbers to the FBI, robbed $250,000 from 22 banks in 1994-95. That would be roughly twice that much in today’s dollars.
None of the money was ever found by the FBI. Once they arrested these bank robbers and they got them, you know, depose them or that they still didn’t learn where the money went. But the. One of the leaders of the bank robbery gang did say that he had contributed heavily to white power causes. So this was a heavy duty operation and they were intending to, to overthrow, to. To. To have an insurrection that was their intent. So they were, they were arrested basically in early 1996. But no one, no one ever connected the dots back to.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I’m a little confused or even more confused because white supremacists, whatever those are, were the number one priority of the FBI, have been for decades, decades and decades. They hate them on many levels. And so you’re saying that John Doe number two was one of these guys, one of these neo Nazi types, but they just sort of stop looking for him and they don’t care enough to keep the investigation going into who this person was?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yeah, it just, it doesn’t, it doesn’t stack. I agree. But there has been a concerted effort to basically wind down the various tentacles of this investigation rather than keeping them going. I would, I would say that’s fair.
TUCKER CARLSON: So from spending my life in D.C. I know that when investigations pull back before achieving their goal, it’s a hundred percent of the time because the investigation is revealing wrongdoing on the part of the government. Yes, I mean that, I mean that’s why, that’s why, that’s why they haven’t released the tapes from January 6th and never will, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So what do you think the government’s wrongdoing in this case might have been well, here.
McVeigh’s Prison Revelations
MARGARET ROBERTS: And. And just to backtrack a moment, you asked me who do I think it was? I’m there are the names are known of this group of, you know, five or six members of the Aryan Republican Army. They’re well known.
One of the most remarkable moments of this, the Jesse Trinity investigation comes in. Well, it begins in 2001. And if this, if this is solved, if it will be partly owing to Timothy McVeigh who sent Jesse Trinidad, who McVeigh himself was engrossed in the Kenneth Trinidue murder because of course this was a cause celeb in federal prison, right? This is every prisoner’s worst nightmare.
And the prison slang for it came to be “getting Trinidad.” That’s when the SWAT team comes into your cell in the middle of the night and brutalizes you and kills you. So that is what is understood in prison as getting Trinidad. Timothy McVeigh from his prison wrote letters to a journalist about the Trinity case.
And so he was obviously interested in it. A few years later, he actually met up with a prisoner who has played a key role in Jesse’s case, who landed on death row with Timothy McVeigh and interviewed him for a book that he published from death row.
But the part of the story that’s relevant here is that Timothy McVeigh in 2001 asked this death row prisoner who he knew, knew Jesse, “Please tell Jesse Trinidue this is what happened to Kenneth Trinidue. The FBI mistook him for Richard Guthrie.” Richard Guthrie was the co leader of the Aryan Republican army gang. So that would be one answer.
TUCKER CARLSON: Did they look alike? Guthrie Infinity.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes. Dead ringer. Look.
The Death of Richard Guthrie
TUCKER CARLSON: So what happened in Guthrie?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Guthrie amazingly wound up dead in his federal prison cell. He was prisoner number two. It was days after, days before he was going to give testimony in another of the bank robbers trials. It was shortly after he unloaded everything he knew about the insurrection they were planning to the federal prosecutors.
So he had. And he told his family that he was looking forward to the future. He was going to give an interview reportedly to the LA Times. He said he had written a book and he was writing a tell all. And all of a sudden from his jail cell in Kentucky, he wound up hanging. So he’s the second hanging. Very suspicious hanging death of the second federal prisoner in this story. And there is a third, by the way.
TUCKER CARLSON: Can we pause on Guthrie for a second? It sounds like you don’t believe that he killed himself. Why would he have been killed? I mean, the clear motive would be his former compatriots who were mad about his upcoming testimony.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Well, he was a federal high value federal prisoner. He was under the watch of the United States Marshal Service before he and his compatriots went to trial. So it’s hard to imagine. And he too was in solitary confinement, so it’s hard to imagine. Reportedly the FBI knew was threatening Richard Guthrie with charging him in the bombing. So they were reportedly very close. Either either knew or were close to knowing his role in the bombing.
TUCKER CARLSON: Do you, I mean based on your reporting, do you think he was John Doe number two?
MARGARET ROBERTS: I think based on my reporting, I think it’s either him or another member of the gang who also is a lookalike for. I mean look, we know how these composite sketches goes. They are approximations.
TUCKER CARLSON: Both Guthrie, this looks like Hollywood thug, you know what I mean? It’s like.
MARGARET ROBERTS: But you can see a bodybuilder type in this, you know. So when you ask me do I think it was Richard Guthrie, I believe the witnesses on the ground that morning saw the men who were with Timothy McVeigh. I believe based on my reporting that those men were members of the Aryan Republican Army. So I believe Richard Guthrie was there. But there was another member of that gang who was reported to be a lookalike for John Doe too. As much of a look alike as Richard Guthrie. So it could have been him.
Government Cover-Up
TUCKER CARLSON: But again I just refer back to the government’s behavior. They have been intentionally opaque on this subject. They’ve lied about it. I understand they killed a guy in a case of mistaken identity. I get why they wouldn’t want him cop to that. I understand that. But why the lack of transparency otherwise I just don’t understand why it wouldn’t like what are they, what are they hiding? Pretending there was not a John Doe number two.
MARGARET ROBERTS: It’s a good question and my reporting, if I could take us on one, one quick detail because it is so incredible here that there is a third prisoner in this situation who winds up in the same death scenario as Richard Guthrie and Kenneth Trinidue. And that is a man named Alden Gillis Baker.
Baker came Forward to Jesse 2. Two or three years after Kenneth’s death, Jesse mounted a huge wrongful death lawsuit against the federal government which went to trial in the year 2000. And he was, his family was awarded a million dollars by. It’s a civil trial by a judge who couldn’t, didn’t, wouldn’t call this a murder. He caught he again lack of evidence, but he awarded the money based on the raw, the, the abuses against the family after the death of the way that the whole death thing was handled.
But Kenneth. But Alden Gillis Baker, while Jesse was preparing for that lawsuit, came forward. He was now in a different prison. He was on the cell block with Kenneth Trinidadu.
TUCKER CARLSON: And who is he? Was he an guy, too?
The Star Witness Who “Committed Suicide”
MARGARET ROBERTS: No, he was a suspected serial killer, psychotic criminal. He had been in the federal prison system for seven or eight years. So he’s a dangerous guy. He came forward to Jesse and said that he had witnessed the murder. He described the SWAT team coming into Kenneth’s cell. He said his death lasted about 30 minutes. He heard struggling, shouting, moaning, and then nothing. And they left the cell.
The SWAT team returned some hours later, and he could hear them tearing up bed sheets, which he took to be that they were basically staging a hanging. Baker came forward to Jesse a couple of years later while he was preparing for the wrongful death trial. And he was in a new facility. He said, “They loaded me up on drugs and shipped me to a new facility. I want to tell what happened.”
Jesse, as part of the wrongful death trial, took a deposition of Alden Gillis Baker with what I’ve told you here from his account. And he would have been a star witness at this trial. He started receiving threats. He was in a California prison. He started receiving threats from fellow inmates. He begged the prosecutor to protect him, and the prosecutor refused.
Jesse petitioned the court for a protective order for Alden Baker, which was never answered. In August of 2000, two months before the trial opened, Alden Gillis Baker was found hanged in his cell. So that’s how Jesse lost the star witness to Kenneth Trinity’s murder.
The CIA’s Dark Psychiatrist Connection
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s unbelievable. Can I just go back to Tim McVeigh for a moment and clear something up that I have read? Don’t know if it’s true. So there was a psychiatrist, a contract employee of the CIA for many decades, Jolly West, who was one of the people who conducted experiments with LSD and other drugs on unsuspecting civilians. One of the darkest people in 20th century American history. Also the person who declared Jack Ruby mentally ill. Visited him in lockup in Dallas. Clearly sent to do that. So he’s a super dark guy. I have read that he visited Tim McVeigh in jail. Is that true?
MARGARET ROBERTS: You know, Tucker, I’ve seen that reference, too, but no more than you do. I don’t know that is true or not.
TUCKER CARLSON: Okay. Because if we ever find out that’s true, then it’s just worth overthrowing the US Government at that point, because it’s just like they’re not even trying to hide it from us. Okay, so you don’t know if that’s true?
MARGARET ROBERTS: I don’t know. To your point, I did take us on that detour, but I think you’ll agree it was an amazing detour.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes. But a lot of suicides in this case, yes.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Three prisoner unexplained deaths, let’s say.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, the kind of people who commit violent crimes don’t typically kill themselves. I’m just saying, like, I think there’s data on this. You know, the kind of people who kill themselves are like sad accountants whose wives leave them. That’s more the profile. It’s not bodybuilders who are also rapists. They kill other people, not themselves. So it’s even more unusual, I think, among that population. Just saying.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Absolutely. And we might add, as a curiosity to the Trinity hanging: suicide hangings are generally bloodless affairs, or nearly so. But the orderly who was assigned to clean up the cell described it as a bloodbath. He had to clean up the blood with a mop.
McVeigh’s Claims of Being a Federal Operative
TUCKER CARLSON: What do we know about Tim McVeigh’s contact with the federal government? Like, he obviously served in the US Army, but I seem to recall a letter that he wrote his sister in which he refers to contact with the intel services.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes. And you had asked what was going on here with McVeigh and the federal government. McVeigh told the story at least three places, one being the letter to the sister. It’s a shocking claim, so I’ll pause a moment here, but Timothy McVeigh, while on death row, being interviewed by that death row prisoner who I mentioned, claimed that he operated in the Oklahoma City bombing not as a terrorist, but as an undercover federal operative.
That he was basically recruited during his military service in Iraq. He told the story slightly different ways, but to the death row inmate who wrote the memoir and published this story, McVeigh said that he was recruited into an unspecified defense department operation, domestic surveillance operation.
I interviewed three prisoners once I became involved in this investigation for Jesse’s FOIA case. I interviewed David Hammer, Terry Nichols and Peter Langan, who is the co-leader of the Aryan Republican Army. But back to what McVeigh told: He told the death row inmate that he was undercover for an unspecified defense department operation. He told Terry Nichols that Timothy McVeigh let slip that he was undercover for the FBI.
He told his sister that he had been recruited during that tryout for the special operations. Essentially that scenario would be he didn’t wash out of special operations. He basically joined this new unit. But he told her that he was going to be doing domestic operations. And as a matter of fact, in 1998, the New York Times published that letter. Not with much context, but yes, McVeigh made these claims after his trial.
TUCKER CARLSON: Never mentioned them at trial.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Never mentioned them at trial. No.
Why Would McVeigh Stay Silent?
TUCKER CARLSON: This is speculation, but what would Timothy McVeigh’s motive be for carrying out this terror attack at the behest of the feds? Their motive would be a little bit clearer, which would be like, prove that there really is a domestic terror threat from white right wingers. Something they’ve been working on for a long time. But what would his motive be in staying quiet about that? Like, why wouldn’t he say, “Yeah, I was part of this” at trial, and like, “I’m not going down for this. I was asked to do it.”
MARGARET ROBERTS: Well, one explanation might be that he became radicalized during, just like a lot of people during Ruby Ridge, Waco, that he was at the point of this operation, deeply conflicted over what it was he was doing.
TUCKER CARLSON: No, that’s fair. It radicalizes me hearing about it. Got to be honest. It does.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Well, there’s one more source. This story does have three or four just superb researchers who have dedicated decades to trying to figure out what happened here. And one of them wrote a book she researched through the University of Texas library that has McVeigh’s attorney, Stephen Jones, donated his papers to.
And she has uncovered documents from his original attorneys. He was given a public defender right away. And they immediately started trying to get out of that case because they were so conflicted. I mean, their friends had been injured. The courthouse was damaged. They were freaked out.
But he did have a brief period with them until they could hand him off to Stephen Jones, in which he told them that he had been working. This would have been his first representation to his first lawyer before trial. Before the preliminary hearing. I mean, within hours and days of the bombing. And he told his first lawyers that he had been a government operative.
And he said that he was shocked at the damage done by the bomb, as if he had been there to create a demonstration with his truck in the road, not destroy the whole building. What I do know is that he told them he was shocked at the level of damage that was done.
TUCKER CARLSON: Wow. Do you think it’s plausible that he was telling the truth?
The PATCON Operation
MARGARET ROBERTS: Well, let’s go back to another question of yours, which is what was going on here? Why is the government covering this up? And I can just tell you that it appears based on other revelations that have come to Jesse Trinity, because he’s been the engine of this investigation, that there’s evidence that the government had Timothy McVeigh under surveillance before this attack, and this evidence comes from an FBI whistleblower.
There are a lot of Marines in this story, by the way, and there’s a lot of Marines “do or die” in this story, Jesse being one, and John Matthews, who is this FBI whistleblower, being another. And that brotherhood kind of clearly motivated Matthews to come forward to Jesse in 2011 in Salt Lake City and tell the story.
It’s an untold story because it’s been suppressed, first by the Justice Department, bearing down on Newsweek magazine, which was going to publish this story of Matthews’ work for the FBI in an undercover program called PATCON, short for Patriot Conspiracy, in the 1990s, before and after covering the Oklahoma City bombing, which was a sweeping infiltration program.
Matthews was a Vietnam vet, went to Nicaragua with the Iran Contra operation to train the Contras and now found himself in PATCON. And it was, as he told Jesse on the phone, “much bigger and uglier than you can imagine. I want to tell you about this.” He was alienated by this program because he said it was inciting the violence that it was supposed to be preventing. And he was with PATCON for like eight years.
So long answer to your question, what could have been going on here? Matthews’ belief from his knowledge of PATCON: Matthews told Jesse first that he believed Oklahoma City was a PATCON operation. He denied working the operation. He was based in Arizona, but Arizona is another lobe of the McVeigh run-up to the bombing. McVeigh stayed and lived in Kingman, Arizona, and Michael Fortier lived in Kingman, Arizona.
But back to what John Matthews knew.
TUCKER CARLSON: The whistleblower.
MARGARET ROBERTS: The whistleblower. And the potential here for the FBI having had McVeigh under surveillance is that Matthews told Jesse that he saw Timothy McVeigh with another member of this Aryan Republican Army group. Not a member of the gang, but one of them. He saw McVeigh together with that guy at a military training in San Saba, Texas in 1994. He was working PATCON surveillance at the time. So we know that PATCON surveilled McVeigh months before the bombing.
The Transponder on the Bomb Truck
TUCKER CARLSON: So why didn’t they stop it?
MARGARET ROBERTS: They didn’t stop it. They tried to stop it.
TUCKER CARLSON: The feds.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yeah.
TUCKER CARLSON: How did they try and stop it?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Well, all the evidence, the best evidence, I have to just say, best evidence is that they had McVeigh under surveillance, that there was a transponder on the bomb truck. Something happened.
TUCKER CARLSON: There was a transponder on the bomb truck.
MARGARET ROBERTS: There’s evidence of that? Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: Like a federal transponder. Like they were following him?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: Tracking him?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes. That’s best evidence. I’m sure the government will say, “No, we didn’t.” But a member of this… I haven’t said the words Elohim City, but this is the location where the Aryan Republican Army hung out, hid out in eastern Oklahoma. One of those guys who may very well be another informant. His name is Andreas Strassmeyer. He’s a German national. He was in the country illegally on an expired visa.
He’s got a lot of heavy German political pedigree and intelligence training and was out front fomenting this “Let’s blow up federal buildings” out of this enclave called Elohim City in eastern Oklahoma. After the bombing, he went back to Germany. And since then he has had the odd practice of basically issuing insider knowledge about how the bombing really went down. He was one who said, “Yes, the truck had a transponder.” He seems to know the truck had a transponder.
TUCKER CARLSON: He’s never been charged.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Never been charged.
TUCKER CARLSON: Andreas Strassmeyer is in Elohim City, which is where all these Aryan would-be terrorists supposedly are planning the bombing of various federal buildings, including the OKC one. And the bombing comes off, biggest manhunt in history. And he just goes back to Germany and he’s fine and no one ever goes after him legally.
MARGARET ROBERTS: That’s right.
TUCKER CARLSON: How does that work?
The FBI’s Massive Investigation and Missing Leads
MARGARET ROBERTS: Imagine how many leads – I think it was 25,000 or something – that the FBI was pursuing during the biggest manhunt in history. And you know, which led them to elementary school teachers of Timothy McVeigh right now. You know, somehow Andreas Strassmeyer was never interviewed and there are markings and it can be reasonably assumed that Andreas Strassmeyer may have been an undercover informant.
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I mean, I’m, you know, don’t want to speculate or anything, but it seems entirely possible coming from his political pedigree in Germany, the intelligence training. His patron in Washington D.C. an Air Force colonel who was believed to have worked for the CIA. He has all of those traits.
The Carol Howe Revelation
MARGARET ROBERTS: And which I must introduce one more character here. It turns out during a couple of years after the bombing and as a matter of fact, on the eve of Timothy McVeigh’s trial, let’s remember one of the lessons of this story is just the uncuriosity of the national news media. They were taking their spoon fed story from the DOJ in Washington D.C. while this Oklahoma news reporter was beating the bushes and he found.
His name is J.D. Cash. He’s one of the heroes of this story and became very close to Jesse. He found an undercover informant whose name was Carol Howe, who was embedded inside the bomb plot for eight months in the run up to the Oklahoma City bomb plot. She was embedded at Elohim City in eastern Oklahoma, the hideout of the Aryan Republican army, where Andreas Strassmeyer was the militia leader, the paramilitary trainer.
And she told the FBI afterward. Well, she told her handlers during the runup before the bombing. This is why the survivors of the victims who know about this are so outraged. She told of his. In late September, October, Strassmeyer said, “It’s time to stop talking and start blowing up federal buildings.” And he took. And she went along on at least one and maybe as many as three, these apparently scouting missions to Oklahoma City.
Oklahoma City was on the short list of targets. One, you know, as well as two buildings in Tulsa. But yes, she told them that he was planning this, you know, that there was going to be a bombing and it might be the federal building in Oklahoma City. So. And they knew this, the FBI. Now, she was an informant for the ATF, not the FBI. But the FBI debriefed her right after the bombing.
TUCKER CARLSON: And she was never charged.
MARGARET ROBERTS: She was charged not. She was charged in reprisal, basically, for going public about this afterwards. What would she have been? What were you thinking she would be charged with?
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I mean, she was an accessory to the bombing.
MARGARET ROBERTS: It sounds like she was an informant.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, but she was also. Of course she was. But I mean, like, strictly speaking, she was part of the plotting, correct?
MARGARET ROBERTS: She. No, she was. She was an observer. She was an observer.
The Political Impact of Oklahoma City
TUCKER CARLSON: I have a theory of this case and I want to throw it out to you against your superior knowledge. But before I do that, can we just pull back and assess the political effects of all of this for a second?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: So Oklahoma City happens in April of 1995. Clinton is totally focused on his reelection at that point. Things are about to get super crazy. Things are about to get really crazy in his life with the Monica Lewinsky stuff. And there’s just a lot going on in America at this point. And Clinton’s worried about it, he’s unpopular. Oklahoma City happens. What happens to Bill Clinton’s political career?
MARGARET ROBERTS: This saved his political career. He was, you know, I mean, everybody remembers him as the great comforter in chief going to Oklahoma City in a, you know, almost ministerial way.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right.
MARGARET ROBERTS: You know, comforting the victims. And then it was possible to, you know, pass in Washington, they could pass new legislation, the FBI’s budget was increased to, you know, prevent, to, you know, prevent terroristic attacks. I mean, it was, you know, it was the beginning of. It wasn’t. We saw this after 9/11. But yes, it, it was a great boon for the Clinton presidency.
TUCKER CARLSON: And, and as you said, it was a great boon for federal law enforcement who got more money and more power. Yes, but the irony is just, just like The FBI and CIA got more money and more power after 9/11, which they allowed to happen, obviously. I mean, they what, they allowed it to happen or not on purpose, but it happened on their watch. They were paid to prevent it from happening. It happened anyway. But they got richer and more powerful as a result. Their screw up helped them.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Absolutely.
TUCKER CARLSON: And that’s true here as well.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Absolutely.
Tucker’s Theory of the Case
TUCKER CARLSON: Amazing. So here’s my theory. My theory is that the federal various agencies, ATF, FBI, maybe, maybe others were fully aware that this plot was in progress. They may or may not have wanted it to happen. Probably not at the scale it actually did happen. Who knows? They weren’t fully in charge of it, but they knew that it was going on and they thought they could kind of fine tune it. They couldn’t. It went off, it killed a lot of people. And then they just kind of made the best of it from there.
Hid their own involvement in it, wound up murdering a guy, hid that. Their number one goal was to protect themselves. Their number two goal was to infiltrate white supremacist groups. And none of this has come out, really, to the public, despite a number of books, first and foremost yours, and the efforts of Jesse Trentadoo. Because the American news media is totally vested in denying any of this and pretending that the real threat is these fringe groups. That’s my theory.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Tucker, you think that’s right? I do, I do. And this story is such. It’s so much about the failure of the news media and how they had 30 years to ask the hard questions about Oklahoma City. And instead they actually helped bury this story along with the victims of the bombing.
Media Cover-Up: The ABC Story That Never Aired
Just a couple of instances of this, and I mean, because it’s been a long investigation, but literally, in 1997, on the eve of the Timothy McVeigh trial, at this time, when the Oklahoma journalists discovered the informant, ABC deployed a news team to get that story, to get the Carol Howe story, and they did. With the help of J.D. Cash, the Oklahoma journalist, they got it in the can. And the day of air, the Department of Justice bore down on the ABC network and they killed the story.
TUCKER CARLSON: Was it a Jackie Judd story, do you know?
MARGARET ROBERTS: No, it was Tom Jarrell.
TUCKER CARLSON: Wow.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yeah. And Tom Jarrell afterwards told the producer, who’s one of Jesse’s crew, another Marine, told him that in all his career, he had never seen anything like this, that they were totally blindsided. And Roger, being a Marine, his producing partner, knew that. He was tight with Colonel David Hackworth, who was Newsweek’s military affairs correspondent. He said, “Call Hack, see if you can get yourself on the Don Imus show.” So this story that was rolled by ABC News was broken by Roger on Don Imus’s radio show in New York City.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right. Which is a great way to bury and discredit true things. Roll him out on Don Imus. You know, no one will pay. You know, people sort of, what? And then move on to something else.
The Newsweek Story That Was Gutted
MARGARET ROBERTS: But then again, however many years later, 13, 14 years later, they had another chance to bring this to the national media when Jesse set John Matthews up with the whistleblower. The whistleblower, John Matthews up with Newsweek for a cover story. And at the time, and I’m sure you know John Solomon, of course John Solomon was the editor on that story. And they got everything in the can, including their reporting, confirmed that Andreas Strassmeyer, the German that the FBI never interviewed, that he was an undercover operative working for Pat Con.
TUCKER CARLSON: So did that run?
MARGARET ROBERTS: No, none of that information ran. Because just as back in 1997, the Department of Justice bore down on Newsweek magazine and its editor, Tina Brown, and the night before the story aired every detail, including, as I told you, the sighting by John Matthews in San Saba, Texas. All gone, all removed.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why? And Tina Brown made that decision so far as you know, as far. Somebody at the publication made that decision?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why would.
MARGARET ROBERTS: It was an executive edit.
TUCKER CARLSON: Right. If it was Tina Brown? I don’t. I used to work for Tina Brown. I, I would be sad to hear that. That’s pretty craven. I would not be surprised in the slightest, but I would be sad. I don’t know that, but it sounds like somebody made that decision. So why would a news organization cave to the DOJ on something like that? I don’t really understand.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Perhaps by threats, I mean, I didn’t.
TUCKER CARLSON: Hear any profanity comes immediately to mind. I mean, if I got a call from DOJ saying, you can’t say that.
MARGARET ROBERTS: In the first case, I did hear an explanation from Roger Charles, who worked on that story that was killed. And he said that the principals were calling. This is what, you know, the network. And what was said was, “If this story runs, it will be the end of the ATF and there will be machine guns on every corner.” And that was enough for the executives in New York to say, we can’t go there.
The Pattern of Government Involvement
TUCKER CARLSON: Right. So it’s going to get in the way of gun control. So don’t do it. There’s a larger goal here, which is disarming the population. Okay. Whatever you want. Right. No, it’s. It’s. I. Yeah. I mean, we could do hours. Because you spent your life in the media, as I have, and just the corruption of it is just beyond belief, but everyone knows that.
I guess what I would say is that by not covering stories like this, you allow new ones to occur. So this was 1995. Then you have 2001, 9/11. You have 2021, January 6th. Both you know, filled those stories. The stories we were presented on television are just not true. And the government involved in really sinister ways in both, and a lot of others. I mean, in between the Gretchen Whitmer assassination attack, where, like, everybody involved seemed to be a Fed.
MARGARET ROBERTS: That’s a huge alignment to that story. And I would mention one more, Tucker, which was new to me as I researched, is that the Boston Marathon bombing has spun out a whole spiral of possibilities that the older brother, the one who was killed, was an FBI undercover operative, and there’s a book written about that. And Dana Rohrabacher, the same congressman who.
TUCKER CARLSON: Tried to look from Orange County, California.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Yes, yes. He pressed with a House investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing and the possible German connections. I mean, looking, among other things, at Andreas Strassmeyer. He continued to look at this same picture after the Boston Marathon bombing and just faced stonewalling from some of the same people. I mean, Janet Napolitano, who was involved in the Oklahoma City bombing case, was one of the one stonewalling him. And Robert Mueller, who of course, was involved in Jesse’s case, trying to get justice for Kenneth on Capitol Hill. That’s another whole story.
But yes, to your point about what has happened since the bombing, since the Oklahoma City bombing, because we don’t know what really happened and the potential for this creeping surveillance cancer that seems to, you know, attach to so many of these terrible events where we still don’t fully understand what happened.
What Should Be Declassified Now?
TUCKER CARLSON: Can I ask one last question? So now Pam Bondi’s the Attorney General. Kash Patel runs FBI. Dan Bongino right beneath him. I mean, there are people who say they’re reform minded. I think Bongino is reform minded, for the record. But, you know, there are people of good faith, I think, in positions of authority in federal law enforcement. Now, what should they immediately declassify, disclose, stop efforts to hide about the Oklahoma City bombing 30 years ago that could resolve all these questions, like, what should we know that we don’t release the.
The Scope of Government Surveillance Programs
MARGARET ROBERTS: Videotapes of the bombing? Let America see this movie as well. And maybe just as important, maybe more important. And Jesse has a letter on Attorney General Bondi’s desk as of March which says, stop the DOJ resistance to unsealing the FBI whistleblower’s deposition.
This is where potentially he laid out the entire scope of the Patcon program, which nobody knows about on the record. The FBI will say, “Oh, Patcon was just this little operation. We had just lasted for two years, and it was just targeting three extremist Right wing groups.” No.
John Matthews, their top spy, says, “I worked Patcon for eight years and I infiltrated 22 groups.” And he says Patcon was run out of the White House. And Patcon was even involved in Waco. And Patcon was a precursor to Fast and Furious that included gun walking, illegal ammunition and gun sales.
It was an octopus of a surveillance program. And that was the 1990s. And the lid has been kept on it while all these other things happened that we are talking about and perhaps might have been prevented.
Modern Surveillance and Federal Informants
TUCKER CARLSON: It’d be interesting to know what’s going on now. I mean, as someone who’s been around right wingers his whole life, I don’t know a lot of potential bombers, not kind of that sort of right winger. But you wonder how many people.
I mean, if the government has decided that everyone to the right of Chuck Schumer is a security risk, and they have, anyone who opposes our program is a security risk. Anyone who’s not on board with totally destroying the country is our enemy. And that’s their view for sure. Then you wonder how many people they are collecting information from, how many people they are sending money to. How many people are in effect federal informants at some level, at some time in their lives.
MARGARET ROBERTS: I did some research on this for the last chapter of the book, and.
TUCKER CARLSON: I can think of a few, by the way, I’ve always wondered, people I know personally, like, what is that person?
MARGARET ROBERTS: It’s a staggering prospect. And the latest stats that I heard was that on any given day, the FBI has 15,000 informants out there working in the. Spending like over $40 million a year on this.
And think about what it is their frontline jobs, bad enough, like betraying their families, friends and work associates, but then to complete their projects, they’re committing crimes and sometimes and their managers are looking the other way. And nobody seems to be keeping tabs on this, which has definitely increased exponentially since 9/11.
The Need for Reform and Transparency
TUCKER CARLSON: Has there been any reform at all in the past six months that you’ve noticed? Because I haven’t noticed any reform at all.
MARGARET ROBERTS: No, no. And we both know that again, it’s the slow walk. The allegation from the January 6 detainees is that there was a heavy infiltration by the federal government. And this has been batted around Capitol Hill.
TUCKER CARLSON: Now why can’t we get an answer?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Chuck Grassley and someone else have a letter now on the desk.
TUCKER CARLSON: Why should they have a letter? I mean, Republicans control the Department of Justice. So I don’t understand what the motive is here. I mean, well, this could be how many. How many federal law enforcement officials and or informants were in the crowd on January 6th? Simple question.
Why can’t we get that answered? I don’t understand it. It’s not enough to pardon people. It’s like, what the hell just happened? And what are they doing now? And why can’t I know? I live here. I’m a citizen. Do you feel the frustration?
MARGARET ROBERTS: Absolutely. And maybe this is the answer to your question. What can Attorney General Bondi’s Department of Justice do right now? We’ll answer that question.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. I really appreciate you taking all this time. It’s an amazing story. If you had told me two years ago that there was something weird behind Oklahoma City, I would have been really surprised. But it turns out everything about it was weird.
MARGARET ROBERTS: Tucker, thank you.
TUCKER CARLSON: And they murdered a guy and got away with it. At least one. Thank you very much.
MARGARET ROBERTS: My pleasure.
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