Nearly 20 years after the Oklahoma City bombing, a new federal trial is taking place to determine if surveillance video taken from around the Murrah building from that day will be revealed.

For years, Utah attorney, Jesse Trentadue, has been fighting for information about his brother's suspicious death.

He hopes this lawsuit will get to the bottom of what really happened that tragic day.

If there is never-before-seen surveillance video of the Oklahoma City bombing, Jesse Trentadue is working to get it.

In his latest lawsuit, Trentadue is requesting copies of the videotapes from more than 20 surveillance cameras surrounding the Murrah Federal Building, before the truck bomb went off that killed 168 people.

In an email, Trentadue sent News9 several documents, that he said he plans to use in federal court. It revealed an attorney representing an FBI agent, offered to sell a copy of the bombing surveillance footage for over $1 million dollars to an NBC Dateline producer.

Trentadue didn't want to speak before the trial, but News9 talked to local attorney David Slane to get his take.

"Here we are almost 20 years later after the Murrah bombing and we still haven't turned these over, and I think this is what leads to the conspiracy theories, I think that if the government has the tapes, and a judge says turn them over, I think that it might answer things once and for all," Slane said.

After Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were named suspects in the bombing, Trentadue's brother Kenneth met the description of a third possible accomplice.

He was found hanged inside an OKC federal detention center in 1995. Trentadue's family believes he was murdered because he was mistakenly identified as a co-conspirator.

"It may bring in some new light, but it's most likely going to raise more and more questions if we get the tapes,” Slane said. “I think people need some closure to all this and not let it become the next John Kennedy assassination of trying to find a second shooter, Oklahomans deserve to know the answers.”

The FBI has previously stated there are no records of unreleased security recordings.

The trial is set to begin on July 28 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Outrageous coverup of 1995 OKC bombing continues


Jon Rappoport
Prison Planet.com
July 28, 2014

Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue claims his brother, Kenneth, was killed during interrogation, in federal custody 19 years ago, because Kenneth resembled the “other suspect” in the OKC Bombing case, John Doe #2.

The FBI claims Kenneth, with “41 wounds and bruises (according to AP),” committed suicide.

Attorney Trentadue states there was another man with Tim McVeigh at the scene of the Bombing on April 19, 1995—and it wasn’t his brother.

The FBI claims McVeigh was alone.

To settle this issue, in 2009, as AP reported, the FBI finally gave Trentadue some security tapes from buildings near the Murrah Federal Building. Magically, the tapes were all blank just before and after the Murrah Building was blown up at 9:02AM on 4/15/95.

Now, Trentadue has filed a FOIA suit against the FBI. He wants more tapes. A trial begins Monday.

The FBI claims it can’t find more tapes.

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Everybody connected to the OKC bombing case knows there is another reason the FBI is tap dancing and lying:

Actual video footage of the Murrah Building falling would show the fabled truck bomb didn’t cause the damage to the Building and didn’t kill 168 people inside.

Video footage would show a straight-down demolition-type collapse. Meaning: charges placed on the columns did the true damage.

In 1995, while investigating the Bombing, I interviewed 4 explosives experts, and they concurred that the force of an ANFO truck bomb would have dissipated rapidly in the open air and failed to create so much destruction.

More importantly and specifically, the profile of the damage (which columns remained, and which fell) excluded the possibility that a bomb in a truck was the weapon.

Some columns closer to the famed Ryder truck stayed up; other columns farther away went down.

Shortly after the Bombing in 1995, I spoke to a reporter at the Daily Oklahoman. She said she’d interviewed a man who’d seen the Murrah Building collapse. He told her it went straight down, demolition-style.

I managed to reach this witness. He said he didn’t really see the Building go down.

I got back to the reporter. She was furious. She told me she had his statement in her notes. “I’m not making this up,” she said.

I also interviewed Hoppy Heidelberg, a grand juror in the OKC Bombing case. He told me he’d tried to persuade the prosecutor to call bomb experts as witnesses, but he was flatly turned down.

In 1995, anti-federal-government sentiment was rapidly spreading across America. Then, in the wake of the Bombing, President Bill Clinton gave a landmark speech. He basically told Americans they should come home to the government, the destruction of a federal building and the killing of 168 people was a heinous act that proved the real attitude of these “anti-government” groups. But security would be restored.

The speech was heralded as a “return to order and confidence.” Major media coverage of popular opposition to federal power receded.

From 1995 on, Americans who asserted federal power had expanded far beyond Constitutional boundaries have been labeled as potential terrorists.

9/11 took that accusation to a whole new level:

“The central government is always right. Those who say it’s fundamentally wrong are dangerous and/or mentally ill.”

This post originally appeared at www.nomorefakenews.com

Lawyer says FBI threatened witness in OKC bombing records trial

Agency denies claim, says search failed to turn up blast videotape.

By pamela manson

The Salt Lake Tribune
Published: July 31, 2014

image
Jesse Trentadue, a Salt Lake City attorney, is shown in his office with a picture of his brother, Kenneth. Kenneth Trentadue was found hanging from a noose made of torn bed sheets in a federal prison cell on Aug. 21, 1995. The death was ruled a suicide, but Jesse Trentadue believes his brother was killed after being mistaken for an Oklahoma City bombing conspirator. Tim Kelly

A Salt Lake City lawyer suing the federal government for records in the Oklahoma City bombing case alleged Thursday that an FBI agent threatened one of his witnesses to keep him from testifying at trial.

Attorney Jesse Trentadue said the Salt Lake City-based FBI agent had contacted John Matthews, who he described as a former undercover operative for the government, and suggested that it would be “best for everyone if [Matthews] didn’t show up to testify.”

The agent also suggested that Matthews take a vacation and said that if he did testify, “he should have a case of the ‘I-don’t-remembers,’ ” Trentadue told U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups.

Lawyers for the FBI denied the claim and said Matthews had called the agency asking how he could get out of testifying. The agent told Matthews that he should obey a valid subpoena, Department of Justice attorney Kathryn Wyer said.

But Trentadue countered that Matthews was testifying voluntarily and had been contacted repeatedly by the FBI. He said Matthews was going to testify about PATCON, an operation that targeted the militia movement in the 1990s.

Trentadue on Tuesday first informed Waddoups that he had learned Matthews was backing out of testifying after talking to government officials, and the judge had told the DOJ attorneys to look into the matter. After hearing further details about the claim on Thursday, Waddoups scheduled a hearing next month on the matter.

The allegation was raised on the last day of a four-day trial on Trentadue’s lawsuit, which claims the FBI failed to do an adequate search for bombing videotapes and documents that he requested under the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Waddoups has taken the case under consideration and will issue a ruling later.

Among the records that Trentadue is seeking is footage he believes shows two men exiting a Ryder truck parked in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and the detonation of explosives in the vehicle.

In addition, he wants surveillance tapes taken on the morning of the explosion from cameras in downtown locations and the original dashboard camera videotape of Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Charlie Hanger arresting bomber Timothy McVeigh. The arrest tape he received was edited and does not show McVeigh, Trentadue says.

Trentadue is asking for an order allowing him to search for tapes and documents at FBI locations, including field offices in Oklahoma City and Los Angeles, and requiring the bureau to produce the records he requested.

The FBI says it spent weeks searching its massive bombing investigation archive and that it has no tape of the explosion or the other requested materials.

Trentadue believes the records will provide information about his brother’s death in a federal prison in Oklahoma City a few months after the April 19, 1995, bombing that killed 168 people. The death of Kenneth Trentadue was ruled a suicide but his family believes he was mistaken for a bombing conspirator and killed in an interrogation that got out of hand. Federal officials deny the allegation.

To support his claim that the requested records exist, Trentadue has submitted government documents and news reports that refer to tapes or photographs. They include an FBI report that a source said an attorney purporting to represent an FBI agent had tried to sell a tape that shows a Ryder truck pulling up at the Murrah Building and two men, one of whom resembles McVeigh, getting out of the vehicle.

Also among the documentation submitted by Trentadue is another FBI report that says a camera inside the Regency Tower Apartments a block from the Murrah Building had picked up images of a Ryder truck at about 5:57 a.m. the day of the bombing and again at 8:57 a.m., a few minutes before the blast. Trentadue has a copy of the later video but it does not show the truck’s driver, he said.

On Thursday, Stephen Brannan, a retired FBI agent, testified he had investigated the tape sale report and determined it was a hoax. He said “that video did not exist.”

In other testimony Thursday:

• Three other former FBI agents said they had reviewed tapes gathered from locations around the Murrah Building and none showed the detonation.

• Richard E. Williams, a former Murrah Building manager, said surveillance cameras there had been phased out several years before the bombing. The cameras had been left up as a deterrent, he said.

• Hanger, now Noble County, Okla., sheriff, said he did not turn on his dashboard camera until after he arrested McVeigh because he didn’t feel it was necessary for a simple traffic stop.

pmanson@sltrib.com Twitter: PamelaMansonSLC