Alright, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio, and it's Patriots Day, April 19th, 2011.
We're going to go ahead and start the show with our first guest.
It's Jesse Trenadue.
He's a lawyer from Utah.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Jesse?
Fine, Scott.
Thank you for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, and I'm going to go ahead and give him the short version here real quick to start us off, and you correct me if I'm wrong or anything like that.
Make sure we're straight to start off here.
Jesse's brother, Kenneth, in 1995, was the spitting image of somebody else, and he was arrested.
He had a probation violation, I think.
He was arrested crossing the Mexican border and had the wrong dragon tattoo, the wrong red hair, the wrong pickup truck, and was just wrong place, wrong time.
He was nabbed by the feds, and they were convinced that he was someone else, someone named Richard Guthrie.
And apparently because he wouldn't admit that he was this Guthrie character, Kenneth Trenadue was tortured to death in a federal prison cell in the summer of 1995.
And ever since then, Jesse has been waging a battle for truth and justice in the matter of the murder of his brother.
And in pursuing this, he has found himself up to his eyeballs in the story of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Is that right?
And then could you explain how it was that you somehow connected the story of your brother's death with the Oklahoma City bombing, Jesse?
That's basically the story, Scott.
Kenny had a no-beer-drinking condition on his probation, and of course we fought that.
The probation officer didn't agree that he should drink beer, and we lost it.
And so he told his probation officer, my brother worked construction in Southern California, that he was going to drink beer and they could come and get him if they wanted to.
Well, they never did, obviously, because you don't send people back to prison for drinking beer.
What happened is he came across the border, as you say, and he was picked up, sent to Oklahoma City.
He arrived there on Friday, the 18th of April, 1995.
I spoke with him on Saturday, the 19th, I mean, it was August of 1995.
On August 19, 1995, I talked to him.
We would get ready for his probation hearing, and he supposedly committed suicide the night of August 20, 1995.
It took us a week to get his body home.
Meanwhile, the federal government had tried at least twice to have him cremated.
And when we did receive his body home, he was made up heavily so you couldn't see his wounds.
We removed the makeup and his head had been smashed in three places to his skull.
He was beaten front to back, head to toe, and his throat was cut.
And the government said that he had committed suicide by hanging.
And at the time, we just never had a motive.
And the harder we pressed the government, especially the FBI, for the truth, the more things went amiss.
The crime scene photographs disappeared.
All the logbooks that would have shown who had access to my brother disappeared.
If they didn't disappear, the pages from the logbooks disappeared.
The surveillance cameras malfunctioned.
He was found in bloodstained clothing, and when his body was turned over to the medical examiner two hours later, the clothing had disappeared.
Where he died was considered a crime scene, yet the FBI and the federal government had it cleaned and painted.
They wouldn't allow the medical examiner in to examine the death scene.
All these things were happening, and we could never figure out why.
And then in, I think it was December of 1995 or January 1996, I received an anonymous call, and this was back before you had caller ID on telephones and things like we have today, who said that your brother, I want you to know your brother was killed by the FBI.
It was an interrogation that went bad.
It was a case of mistaken identity.
He fit the profile of a member of a group of people who were anti-government and robbing banks to get money to attack the federal government.
And, of course, I just blew that off as a nut case calling.
And then in June of 1996, I read an article in the Los Angeles Times about a fellow named Richard Lee Guthrie, who had been a member of a group called the Midwest Bank Robbers, who had supposedly hanged himself while in federal custody the day before he said he was going to give an interview to the Los Angeles Times that would blow the lid off the Oklahoma City bombing.
And they didn't have a picture of Guthrie, and I just read the story and didn't pay much attention to it.
And then shortly before he was executed, I got a message from Tim McVeigh, who told me that when I saw your brother's photograph and heard what happened to him, I want you to know that he was probably killed by the FBI because they thought he was Richard Lee Guthrie.
And then I started to inquire about Guthrie, but what really pulled it together for me was J.D. Cash, who's now dead, but he was a reporter, a dogged reporter from a little paper in eastern Oklahoma, who had followed the bombing from the day it happened until he died.
He had family killed and injured in the building in the bomb blast and friends who had been killed and injured in the blast.
And I received a call one day, I think it was about 2003, 2004, from J.D. Cash, and he said, I want to talk to you about your brother.
And I said, well, he introduced himself and then he said, describe your brother.
I said, well, he was about 5'8", 5'9", dark-complected, muscular.
J.D. said, well, where was he when he was arrested?
And I said, he was coming across the border from Mexico.
His wife was Mexican-American.
She was an American citizen, but he'd been down to visit her family across the border from San Diego.
And he said, well, what was he driving?
I said, he was driving a 1986 Chevrolet pickup truck, which belonged to his friend.
And he said to me, J.D., did he have any tattoos?
And I said, yeah, Kenny had a tattoo.
And J.D. said, where?
I said, he had a dragon tattoo.
And J.D. said, where?
And I said, on his left forearm.
And then J.D. says, are you sitting down?
I said, yeah, I'm sitting down.
And he said, let me tell you this.
He said, the largest manhunt in American history was for John Doe II, and it was taking place at the time your brother was arrested.
He said, this is the description the FBI put out of John Doe II, white male, dark-complected, 5'8"-5'9", muscular, heavy build, believed to be in Canada or Mexico, driving a mid-1980s Chevrolet pickup truck, dragon tattoo, left forearm.
And he said the other person who matched that description was Richard Lee Guthrie.
And so what happened is I started out, now I had a motive as to why my brother was murdered and tortured for information he didn't have.
And then I started to pursue that, and every trail I went down, every lead I followed, took me back to the Oklahoma City bombing.
All right, now we're approaching the break here.
We just have one minute, so I want to sum up.
Our guest is Jesse Trenadue.
He's a lawyer from Utah, and his brother Kenneth was tortured to death by federal government employees in his prison cell in August of 1995 in what was apparently a case of mistaken identity.
They thought he was Richard Lee Guthrie, who, it turns out, knew Timothy McVeigh and the Aryan Republican Army bank robbery ring of the early 1990s, early to mid-1990s.
And ever since then, Jesse's fought this legal battle to get to the truth about what happened to his brother and accountability and responsibility for those who murdered his brother.
And along the way, he has come up with so many documents and so many secrets and exposed such a cover-up.
And one more note as we go out to this break, at scotthortonshow.com you can find many interviews of J.D. Cash, the great reporter he referred to.
We'll be right back after this.
It's Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and on the line is Jesse Trenadue.
He's a lawyer in Salt Lake City, Utah.
And the feds murdered his brother, Kenneth.
And they did so because they thought he was Richard Lee Guthrie, friend of McVeigh and apparent participant in the Oklahoma City bombing.
I urge you to check out the website kennethtrentadue.com for more information.
And there's a lot of great journalism about this, not least of which from the great J.D. Cash at the McCurtain County Gazette.
The late J.D. Cash, old friend of both of ours.
Jesse, all right, so now here's the thing.
We've got a little more than ten minutes here.
We can't tell them everything, but I was hoping you could hit the highlights of some of what's been found out.
Of course, there's a lot of information coming out about the Oklahoma City bombing cover-up before you ever got clued into this thing by J.D. Cash and by a letter from Timothy McVeigh that you described earlier.
But now you've come out and, I mean, every once in a while I get PDF files of these FBI documents that you've succeeded in having the courts in Utah wrangle out of them and so forth, secret service timelines and depositions of ATF informant handlers and all kinds of things, witness statements and 302s of every description.
So I was wondering if maybe you could just, you know, touch on some of the most important things to get people's interest piqued and let them know where they can go learn about this kind of thing.
What is the basic narrative as you've been able to figure it out so far?
What really happened at the Oklahoma City bombing?
Well, once, I didn't get a letter from McVeigh.
It was through a third party associated with him.
He sent it out to me.
And I started to press then the FBI for their links to the bombing, and I focused on a white supremacist paramilitary compound in eastern Oklahoma called Elohim City.
And it turns out, and it's not me making this up, and I think you'll tell your audience, what I'm about to tell your audience comes from FBI documents.
Hey, and I have them.
I have a whole folder called Trinity Files, and it's full.
The FBI, after Waco and Ruby Ridge, was under tremendous pressure from Congress and the media and American people for their screw-ups.
Somewhere in that period of time, I think they put together this idea of a sting operation, focusing on the militia, the neo-Nazi movement, to infiltrate them with agents and provocateurs to get them riled up so that they would plan some kind of attack on the federal government.
And I don't know whether they intended to stop it and be heroes or to let it go through.
In my mind, I wrestle with that question, and I don't have an answer.
But the fact is, they had at least four or five informants in with Timothy McVeigh.
The FBI knew at least four months before April 19, 1995, when the bomb went off, that the Murrell Building was going to be destroyed, and they didn't stop it.
And they have fought me incredibly hard to keep from having these documents turned over.
And I sued in federal court under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain these records, and none of them are older than the afternoon of April 19, 1995.
So I go back to the federal judge and say, Your Honor, it's inconceivable that this sting operation would have sprung to life two hours after the bomb went off.
It had to be there in existence beforehand.
And he agreed, and he said, I had an order from the court that I could go take Terry Nichols' deposition because Nichols wanted to tell the whole story, who was involved, why it was done.
And the FBI went to a higher court, a court of appeals, and had that order set aside, basically out of fear of what Nichols would say.
The big fight now, and it will happen on May 11, is over the surveillance cameras that were on the Murrow building, the external cameras.
I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the Murrow cameras, videotapes, and the cameras from the other buildings on the route McVeigh would have taken to deliver the bomb that morning.
And these were the other cameras from the exterior of the buildings along the road that McVeigh would have driven to take that truck, the Ryder truck bomb, to the Murrow building.
I received 26 tapes.
These tapes go blank at various times between 8.58 on the morning of April 19 and 9.02 on the morning of April 19 when the bomb went off.
So as McVeigh was driving by a particular building, the tape goes blank for 10 or 15 seconds.
And then further down the road, the tape on that building will go blank for a few seconds, as McVeigh would have passed.
And the FBI claims that all these tapes were being recycled or changed, and that's why they're blank at these crucial times.
But they didn't give me the Murrow tapes.
And I have an affidavit from an Oklahoma City police officer who arrived on scene just after the bomb went off.
He's desperately and other people are desperately trying to pull people out of the rubble to save their lives.
Literally at gunpoint almost, the FBI orders them out of the building, and he watches as the agents take the cameras down from the Murrow building.
And then the rescue operation is allowed to proceed after that's done.
Well, you know, there was a report on Channel 4 which, you know, from NBC Channel 4 in Oklahoma, she went down that entire American Enterprise Institute, Judith Miller erected a rabbit hole thing there.
But there was some good work at the very beginning.
They tried to blame it on Saddam Hussein, of all people.
And one of them had, and I believe there was an L.A. Times reporter who was one of the sources for this story.
There were two sources for the story.
He said they had seen some of these videotapes, that they showed two men get out of the truck, that it was not McVabe but John Doe II who goes to the back of the truck and apparently lights the fuse or sets the timer or whatever it is.
And then the bomb goes off.
And, you know, the story came out way back then.
And they said, well, the government says they'll show us the video once we get to trial.
But, of course, all he shows was one still photo from one of the video cameras of the truck at a red light, and you can't see who's in it at all.
And I was leaked a document, a federal government document, that says the surveillance cameras show the bomb detonating three minutes and six seconds after the suspects exited the vehicle.
Right.
Plurally right.
I've seen that document.
And you're absolutely right.
You would have thought that film would have been exhibit one in the McVabe trial.
One of the most important parts of this story is that Judge Mache in Denver, this federal judge, oversaw two trials that aren't fit for Zimbabwe or Hosni Mubarak's Egypt back when there was such a thing as that.
But, anyway, they didn't produce those tapes.
And their excuse to the judge was we looked real hard, Your Honor, but we just can't find those tapes.
And the government takes the position, especially the FBI, that when anyone makes a request under the Freedom of Information Act for documents or records or materials that are embarrassing or harmful to the government, that all the FBI has to do is look for those records or documents or materials.
It does not have to find and produce them.
That's an incredible position to take that all the law requires is that you look and you go wink and nod, we can't find anything.
And that's what this hearing is about on the 11th, is whether or not they have to do more than that, whether or not they have to go back and actually do a manual search and turn those tapes over.
All right, well, I'm sorry we're out of time.
I know you've got to go to court and I've got more interviews, but I really appreciate your time.
Everybody, it's Jesse Trenadue.
Look at KennethTrenadue.com.
Search for James Ridgeway wrote a great piece of Mother Jones.
And just add PDF to your search and see what you find.
Thanks very much, Jesse.
Thank you.
