03/16/16 – Roger Charles – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Up next, it's Roger Charles.
He is the co-author with Andrew Gumbel of Oklahoma City, What the Investigation Missed and Why It Still Matters.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Roger?
Scott, good to chat with you, buddy.
Yeah, yeah, good to have you back on the show.
So I didn't recognize the name, but when Barack Obama announced this morning, or it was announced, I guess, his choice to replace Antonin Scalia as Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, this guy Merrick Garland, I thought, oh, yeah, whatever, you know, some other, some federal judge.
But then they said, yeah, he oversaw the Oklahoma City bombing case.
And this is supposedly to his credit.
And I thought, they're bragging about that?
Bragging about that.
That's something to brag about, because he successfully orchestrated the cover-up for the first part of the period of investigation.
All right, now, that is a huge accusation.
Now, whether there was a huge cover-up there, I mean, give me a break.
But now explain and really elaborate, because when I checked the index in the book, there was hardly anything on him.
And I know that you guys couldn't cover everything in the book, obviously.
Some choices had to be made there.
But so, you know, tell us everything that you think you could possibly tell us that we could need to know about his role in the cover-up of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Well, he was chief of the Justice Department Criminal Division at the time of the bombing on the 4th, 4-19-95, April 19, 1995.
On the 27th of April, 1995, eight days later, he personally appears at McVeigh's preliminary hearing in Oklahoma City.
And in that hearing, an FBI agent, John Hursley, discusses in detail a surveillance camera that is mounted on the exterior of the apartment building right west of the federal building.
And this camera, and the agent Hursley went into some detail about how it could pan the length of 5th Street, which ran to the north side of the Murrow Federal Building, and had a clear shot.
They were actually using it, he says in his sworn testimony, to see if they couldn't pick up McVeigh's Mercury Marquis in the parking lot north of the Murrow Building, directly across the street, before the bombing.
And so if they're seeing that, then we know from other surveillance tapes that did get released, that they certainly would have captured the Ryder truck as it proceeded east on that street, from the Regency Tower Building was the name of it.
Anyhow, so that's in sworn testimony in this hearing, which Mr. Garland served as the Senior Justice Department Representative, personally presenting the case.
Now, let's stop a second.
Mr. Garland is a Harvard grad, I understand, and a Harvard Law School grad.
So he is one smart guy, right?
And he knows he's been trained by the best in how to prepare for a preliminary hearing, so one cannot doubt that he and his staff went over in minute detail the testimony of all the government witnesses that were going to be at this preliminary hearing.
The purpose of which, Scott, is to determine whether Tim McVeigh can be released on bond, or whether he's going to be held in prison, ending the trial.
Okay, so this is very important, and as a sign of its importance, Garland goes out to Oklahoma City and presents the case.
So he knew what this FBI agent was going to be presenting, he knew about the surveillance camera outside of the Regency Tower Apartment Building, he knew the field of vision, that camera, because he is a smart attorney, and he's going to want to know all these things before he puts that witness on the stand.
Now, let's go almost 21 years exactly forward in time to today.
The Justice Department today is telling Jesse Trinidude in a federal court case in Salt Lake City, which was brought because Jesse submitted a Freedom of Information Act request asking for copies of the surveillance tapes.
The Justice Department is saying today, no such tape exists.
Well, in 1995, you had an FBI agent in sworn testimony going into detail about this camera, and what it caught, the field of vision, and what they were using it for.
Now, he does say at the hearing, which I find ludicrous, that he makes the claim that he personally did not look at all the tape to see the bomb go off.
Now, if you had a chance and you had this up on your, at the time, VHS recorder watching it, you would stop before you could see the bomb go off?
Okay, well, that's what he said.
But he got by with it.
That was what Garland said, or that was the FBI agent witness?
Now, let me just stop a second here and remind the audience that, you know, every other state trooper in Oklahoma is headed basically to Oklahoma City.
Not everyone, but all in the immediate area, and some from pretty far off.
For example, an agent down in Attabelle, Oklahoma, he's headed to Oklahoma City.
All right?
So, this Charlie Hanger says he's headed south, and then for some reason, he turns and goes north.
Well, as he's going north, he sees this car with no license plate, and that's Tim McVeigh and his Mercury Marquis, and he pulls McVeigh over for not having a tag.
Now, this is at the time, you've got this huge cloud of smoke over Oklahoma City, probably visible at that point by Charlie Hanger north of Oklahoma City, but he stops this guy because he doesn't have a tag on his car.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
The rest, McVeigh finds all sorts of incriminating evidence and so on.
Now, Roger, let me stop you there for a second, because I guess that's the first time I've ever heard it implied that it was a mysterious circumstance that he was pulled over in the first place, that Hanger had just so happened to pull him over kind of a thing.
Do you have any other bit of evidence that would make that seem mysterious rather than a stroke of luck?
No, absolutely.
One of the things that Hanger did is he was using his personal cell phone to talk to the dispatcher.
Well, why would you do that?
Well, because if you use your Cooper sedan radio, that conversation's recorded and the conversation is transcribed.
But when you call on your cell phone, it is not.
All right.
Well, OK.
So as far as that goes, how does that relate back to Garland then?
OK.
Well, Garland is aware of all this stuff.
He's got to be aware in minute detail of what's going to be presented.
And Charlie Hanger is going to be there presenting the case to the court at the preliminary hearing on April the 27th about McVeigh and why he should not be released.
And part of Hanger's presentation is how he describes his pulling McVeigh over and McVeigh having a gun and all this.
But what is not presented at that preliminary hearing, but has come out later, is the dash camera on Trooper Hanger's car, which captures a lot.
But it doesn't get turned on for some reason until McVeigh is already in the backseat with the handcuffs on.
Now, what's the purpose of having a dash cam on a trooper's car like that?
It's to capture the most dangerous moment for the trooper when he pulls somebody over, which is when he gets out of the car and approaches the individual he's pulled over.
All right.
Hold it right there, Roger.
We've got to take this break.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back out with Roger Charles after this.
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All right, guys.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
So Judge Merrick Garland has been nominated by President Obama to be the new Associate Justice on the Supreme Court to replace Antonin Scalia.
And we're talking with Roger Charles, co-author of the book Oklahoma City, What the Investigation Missed and Why It Still Matters, about Garland's role as a Justice Department official, chief of their criminal division, in covering up the Oklahoma City bombing.
And if it's all right with you, Roger, if you'll bear with me for a second, I want to read this quote out of your book.
And we can get back to Charlie Hanger and the pullover or whatever other detailed discussion in a moment, if you wish.
But this is, I think, the most important part of the book, actually.
Well, possibly.
Page 328.
Larry Mackey, and everyone forgive the government newspeak and triple and double, quadruple negatives and whatever in the way he phrases this, but I think everyone can understand what he says.
Mackey, one of the U.S. Attorney Prosecutors here, says, If you had said to us, anybody in the room 100 percent confident that McVeigh was alone, raise your hand, we would have all kept our hands in our laps, he said.
Which is, of course, kind of a weird backwards way of saying, if you agree that we all help cover up and allow the real perpetrator, the rest of the perpetrators of the attack, get away with it, raise your hand.
They would have all had to raise their hands.
They had agreed to let everybody else get away with it.
And as you explain in their words, as you report, their explanation basically boils down to, they were afraid that if they try to prosecute everybody, then McVeigh would not get the death penalty.
Because his lawyers would be able to say, well, Strassmeyer made him do it, and he's just an innocent boy, and so let him go.
And then he would only get life, and so that was the decision they made, was to let everybody else go, just in order to stick the death penalty on this one guy.
Is that right, or could you elaborate upon that?
Did they really believe that?
That was their excuse, or what?
No, that's partially.
Here's the key thing, is that as John Cash, who died almost nine years ago, but as John Cash and Glenn Wilburn, who's been dead for about 20 now, he's passed on too.
But as these two guys told me in 1996, when I first got into the investigation, this was all about the government trying to protect informants that it had inside the bombing group, because these informants were telling their handlers, who should have been passing the word up the line, all about the plans.
And then the question is, well, if the government knew in advance, why did they not stop it?
And I think I've gone into that with you before.
Scott is that the bombers knew they had infiltrators, and turned that from a threat into an advantage, and used them to pass disinformation up the line to the handlers.
And what happened was, a decoy truck was used, and the FBI was fat, dumb, and happy, thinking they had it under control, and McVeigh comes in the back door with the bomb truck, blows up the building with the daycare center, and they say, oh dear, we have a problem in Oklahoma City.
What are we going to do?
Well, they had to contain the damage.
They had to keep it to just McVeigh and Nichols.
Because if they went beyond that, then it would involve government informants.
As John Cash and Glenn Wilburn told me, and Don Thrasher, the 2020 producer, when we started working on this in 1996, this was a government sting gone bad.
And all the evidence, and I've accumulated a lot of evidence in the last almost 20 years I've been working on this, all the evidence supports that initial conclusion that John Cash and Glenn Wilburn reached back 20 years ago.
All right, now, out of all of these guys who've been named as probably or possibly involved, you know, most of them neo-Nazis of one kind or another, Andre Strassmayer appears to be the one, or maybe they're more Roger Moore maybe, who he was basically an agent provocateur, not really a Nazi, but he was pretending to be a Nazi.
He was infiltrating the Nazis, but who exactly was he working for, and how can you prove it?
Well, as is in the book, and it's in a footnote unfortunately, but that was an editor of my co-author, a decision of my editor and the co-author to bury it in a footnote.
I had a retired senior, very senior CIA official tell me in 2006 that he had personally read a document at the agency, was not classified as such, but the document said that Andre Strassmayer was a German operative reporting to the FBI, and his information was also, of course, going back to Germany.
This was a big attempt for the Germans and the U.S. government to decapitate the American radical Nazi white supremacist movement, and this was a sting they set up to do this, and it backfired.
And to keep the incompetence or whatever it was that caused it to go bad, Merrick Garland and people like him suppressed evidence and hid the truth, and allowing other people to go free who were not government informants, but it did include some government informants.
And so here's the part about this, if you're just hearing this for the first time in 2016, is this just sounds impossible.
Man, you must be off on a red herring, because the level of cover-up you're talking about, I mean, all the major networks, every major newspaper editor in America, you can't even get the Dallas Morning News to get this right, or the Kansas City Star, or nobody to get this right.
How could it be?
It's a sad commentary on the state of journalism in our country, and independent reporting.
I can guarantee you, I once stood up close and personally saw ABC fold and kill a piece on Carol Howe, who was an ATF informant, talking about these guys' plans to blow up federal buildings in Oklahoma City or Tulsa, six months before they blew up the Murrow building in Oklahoma City.
She actually made a trip there with a couple of these neo-Nazis, Strossmeier and a guy named Dennis Mahon, to recon targets.
This is four or five months before the bombing.
And all this is reported to her ATF handlers and to the Justice Department.
And her handler, Finley, admits this on the record under oath, under cross-examination.
Yes.
So, this is just a huge screw-up by the government.
And smart guys like Merrick Garland and smart gals like Jamie Gorelick, who was the Deputy Attorney General during a lot of this, they were there to keep the lid on it, to suppress evidence, contain the damage.
And, you know, Oslik Willie was able to turn the Oklahoma City bombing, from what should have been an impeachable offense, into an advantage.
And he credits it with his winning re-election in 1996.
He really did brag about it.
He did.
He bragged about it.
Yeah.
So, I mean, people don't realize just the degree of duplicity and dishonesty.
To me, it's the same as 9-11.
They may as well have done it on purpose.
To the degree they exploited it, the shamelessness and the cynicism with which they exploited Glenn Wilburn's grandchildren's deaths for their own political gain, it's unbelievable.
It's unbelievable, and I remember it firsthand as it happened.
I still can't believe it.
Yeah, that's an excellent point, my friend, is that the government, our government, these high-level officials, these very smart Harvard grads like Merrick Garland, used the very grief of the Oklahoma City people who had friends and loved ones die, family members die, in the bombing.
They used that grief to promote the cover-up.
I mean, these are black-hearted, cold-hearted, self-promoting, career bureaucrats, and they'll do anything.
That history is clear on that point.
Well, and by the way, not that we doubt you or anything, but just corroboration here.
The New York Times has an article by Charlie Savage from back in 2010 where he's happy to brag that the Oklahoma City bombing made him the man he is and all of this stuff.
Merrick Garland, the new nominee for the Supreme Court, is happy to tell the story about how you're damn right, he had his hands on on this case far more than anybody in his position.
Whatever do, because of just how important it was.
So, he can't back off responsibility when he's that willing to claim credit for this case.
I haven't told you this, because I just did this last fall.
I found a document which I had not seen before.
And in it, the FBI clearly states that they knew that McVeigh was connected to Associates.
The phrasing is, McVeigh and Associated Bank Robbers.
Not alleged Associated Bank Robbers, not, you know, we think maybe, perhaps, could be.
Makes a flat declarative statement, McVeigh and Associated, or Bank Robber Associates is how it's phrased.
McVeigh and Bank Robber Associates.
Now, that's in a document that slipped through.
It's clear in the context of how I found it that this was a document that was meant to stay in the restricted file that the FBI does not even share with the Justice Department.
You know, it's funny.
Do you have a second?
I'm keeping you over time here.
It just occurred to me this, I don't know if you and I have ever spoken about this before, but it's just one of the zillion little OKC anecdotes floating around in my brain.
It's something I saw on court TV once, where it was the prosecution of Shane and Chevy Kehoe, who were a couple of white supremacist bank robbers.
And their actual gun battle, where they were taken alive, was famous because it was on real stories of the highway patrol and this and that.
So, all of America, probably somewhere deep in their brain, have seen this footage of these two guys pulled over in their beaten up old Suburban and getting in a gunfight with the cops.
They played it over and over and over again back, you know, a decade ago or whatever.
Now, they weren't arrested then, Scott.
They weren't arrested.
Oh, no, they got away with that one?
They got away, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
They got away at that point, yeah.
So, I screwed my story up.
But anyway, so it's the prosecution of one or the other of those.
I forget which it was.
But the motel manager was called as a witness, and the motel manager testified that the morning of the Oklahoma bombing, that one or the other of the Kehoe brothers had come in very early in the morning and said, turn it to CNN, something big is going to happen, and sat there glued to the TV the whole time, and then whooped and hollered and celebrated as soon as the news came across that Oklahoma City had been bombed.
Well, let me just add to that, and that is in our book, but let me just add to that.
Oh, is it?
Okay, great.
And this is not in the book, I don't believe, that the other brother has been tried in Columbus, Ohio.
So, the trial, the sentencing has taken place.
I think it's sentencing, but anyhow, the court's just stood adjourned, and he yells out, the reporters are still there and the judge and everybody, and he says, my brother's involved in the Oklahoma City bombing, yells it out in court.
Well, this is, you know, 10 o'clock in the morning, roughly.
By noon, an assistant U.S. attorney and an FBI agent from Cincinnati, Ohio, are meeting with this Kehoe boy and his public defender.
And at one point, shortly after they start the meeting, the public defender is asked to step outside.
He does.
He comes back after a while, and there's a big smirk on everybody's face, and it's announced that the government has cut a deal with this Kehoe boy, and he's going to go into witness protection plan, and, oh, by the way, he's going to have conjugal visits with his wife, and he ain't going to say anything about his brother being involved in the Oklahoma City bombing.
Just amazing.
And then that's just how it goes, right, where that little clip gets some coverage on Oklahoma City, because there's no, you know, top-down, superseding order on all Oklahoma coverage that you're never supposed to mention any of these things.
Sometimes they surface here and there, but what there never is is, as you said, the 2020 ABC special put together by Roger Charles, you know, explaining, look, everybody.
Even when Dan Rather got Rick Ojeda and some of those other FBI agents who were willing to go public and complain that the investigation, the material that they had put together was excluded from the defense and all that, they still didn't say, I don't think Dan Rather asked them, right, Rick, so what's it all about, buddy?
Come on.
You know what I mean?
What was it?
And I talked to Rick Ojeda way back when, 2002 or 2003, it's in the archives, and he said, yeah, you know, the investigation that, you know, my part of it led to Oklahoma City, and then they said, great job, Rick, and then they gave me another assignment, which was as per usual, nothing suspicious there, but that was the material that the defense never got, was the material that he had developed immediately.
And it fell on his lap from a hundred different directions.
That Illinois City is what the Nazis are looking for.
Yeah, he interviewed J.D. Cash, and that report of the interview by Rick Ojeda of J.D. Cash is very interesting.
I think it's like nine pages.
And then J.D. later submitted a page and a half additional, you know, correcting a couple of factual things, but basically a damn good report by Rick.
But here's the interesting thing is, one, it was withheld from the trial, and secondly, Rick didn't do this because the admin people do this.
Somebody put a different case number on that 302 report of investigation.
It's not the Oklahoma City bombing investigation case number.
It's a different case number.
So it wouldn't be filed with the Oklahoma City case file, case documents.
I mean, there's so many.
Then Jesse Trinidad found out that there are secret files, hidden files, restricted files that the Bureau has.
Not everybody in the Bureau can get access to them.
They go to special people.
You know, I was in the Pentagon for a couple tours when I was an active duty Marine, and there were these special access programs, and you had to be read in for each one.
There would be a code name for it, and you were cleared for, you know, lion tamer or prairie grass or whatever the code word was.
And if a message came in that had that on it before you could read it, you had to show the communications people that you were cleared to read documents related to that code word.
And the same thing in the Bureau.
They've got people that can see everything, a few at the very top.
But the average working guy and gal, they don't get to see everything.
They've got their head down trying to do their job out on the street and all this other stuff's taking place behind them.
But most of them know that in the Oklahoma City case, they know there's stuff that was presented that was either false, incomplete, misleading.
And they know Danny Olson called for an independent grand jury, and he was one of the lead investigators.
Right.
Yeah, I've got the audio of that where he said that.
Yeah, he knows the whole truth has been suppressed.
Right.
All right, now let me ask you one more thing, man.
I'm sorry for keeping you all this time.
I really appreciate you doing this.
But tell me this.
Is there a single saved J.D. Cash archive?
Because I never was able to really locate one, although I admit it's been a long time since I tried.
And I don't think it was even ever very well organized in the first place when he was still alive.
But it would be a tragedy if that stuff was all lost to history, you know?
I've got it, and I will make arrangements for it to go to the appropriate archive.
I've got a couple in mind.
And, by the way, did you know Mike McNulty?
Yeah, yeah.
I interviewed McNulty a couple times.
I had interviewed J.D. 15 times or something, but I interviewed McNulty once or twice.
Yeah, well, Mike passed away in February of last year.
Right.
And I hope I was able to help an attorney friend of his, Dave Hardy, from Phoenix.
Yeah, I know Dave too.
Well, I believe, based on my recommendation, that Dave was able to get Mike's papers moved to the University of Texas, which is where they should be.
So Mike had quite an extensive archive, as you know, and he paid a hell of a price.
But he was a guy that was so outraged by the abuse and lying that took on, our government did after the Waco thing in April of 1993, he left a successful insurance brokerage in California and devoted the rest of his life to trying to get justice for those people that were murdered by our government.
And for those who don't know, listen, that Mike McNulty, he was really the man, the main producer behind Waco, the rules of engagement, Waco, a new revelation, and the FLIR project, all of which proved beyond any shadow of a doubt the premeditated mass murder of the Branch Civilians by the Army, Delta Force, and the FBI.
Hey, listen, man, so yeah, do that, put that J.D. Cash archive up there somewhere, because history's going to need that.
No, that's where I found this document I just referred to, you know.
It's an amazing collection.
He was quite a guy.
All right, well, listen, man, thank you very much again, Roger.
We'll talk again.
Take care.
You bet.
All right, so that's Roger Charles.
He's co-author of this book.
It's not the hardest hitting, I think, because Gumbel kind of made it a less hard hitting, but I think he did it for a good reason, to try to really make it acceptable to the librarians and to everybody, to official people, that it's okay to look within this cover, Oklahoma City, what the investigation missed and why it still matters.
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