Newly Released Documents Prove FBI Investigated McVeigh-Aryan Republican Army Link Within One Week of Bombing

Documents Show Investigation Continued For at Least 7 months

Dec 22, 2024

For more than two decades OKC bombing researchers and some especially focused investigative journalists have delved into a connection between a group of mid-west Neo-Nazi bank robbers dubbed ‘The Aryan Republican Army,” and Timothy McVeigh.

The connections between McVeigh and the group have remained largely based on circumstantial, yet very compelling, evidence. For example, we have McVeigh’s sister telling the FBI on May 2, 1995 that her brother produced to her proceeds from a bank robbery that he was somehow connected to. (affidavit here - see pages 5 and 6) and that she laundered some of the bills for him.

Criminology professor Mark S. Hamm wrote a book about the theory, 2002’s In Bad Company: America’s Terrorist Underground. Journalists J.D. Cash, Roger Charles, John Solomon, James Ridgeway, and others have also pursued the story over the years, sometimes turning up new and often-interesting details.

Well, we now have some new and interesting details from an unlikely source: courtesy of the FBI. A recent release of largely insignificant documents happened to include a handful of records which will be of-interest to followers of the case.

What these documents consist of are FBI lab reports which show that the FBI zeroed-in on a McVeigh connection to these bank robberies within a mere 7 days of the bombing.

Far from there being “no connection” as some FBI officials have suggested in the past, these records show an almost immediate interest in a connection.

One newly produced FBI lab report, dated May 4, 1995, details how the FBI crime lab in Washington D.C. was sent from various field offices a voluminous collection of fingerprints from the various bank robberies—with the intent of comparing McVeigh and Nichols’ prints to that bank robbery evidence.

The report goes on to say that McVeigh and Nichols’ prints do not match those from the various bank robbery files they had been sent.

May 4th, 1995 Crime Lab Report. Note the 4/26 telephone call reference, and each of the ‘specimens received’ references a bank robbery (the 91A designator=bank robbery) from six different field offices.

Additionally, the May 4th, 1995 lab report denotes that the actions undertaken were in reference to an April 26th, 1995 phone call. What was mentioned on that phone call can only be speculated upon, but if one of the chief results of the call was FBI field offices sending their BOMBROB prints to the D.C. crime lab for comparison, we can take an educated guess as to what the call was about, and conclude that it certainly it must have covered a possible bank robbery connection — and thusly directed the field offices to get their prints to the lab in D.C. right away.

The April 26 date is key, as it establishes this FBI investigatory interest very early, and quite significantly, this came days before Jennifer McVeigh told the FBI that her brother gave her bank robbery proceeds to launder. That was on May 2nd.

So the question that comes to mind immediately is: what lead or information did the FBI have prior to Jennifer’s 5/2 “confession” that caused them to render this comparison and consider a link between the BOMBROB and OKBOMB investigations?

In addition, within the same batch of FBI documents, there was a November 16th, 1995 lab report that was—once more—comparing McVeigh and Nichols’s prints to the bank robbery investigation’s collection of prints.

So, one could say that far from investigating a connection and then quickly ruling it out, the FBI rather continued to pursue this line of inquiry for at least 7 months.

And we know from other documents, it did go beyond the 7 month period established by the fingerprint analysis records—as we have for example a teletype from January 5th, 1996 in which the BOMBROB investigators are running the names Richard Lee Guthrie and Peter Langan (and all known aliases) through the OKBOMB motel room database.

The new documents serve to put a pin on the timeline, marking the earliest possible connection made between the bank robberies and McVeigh as April 26th. Just seven days after the bombing and a few days after McVeigh’s arrest.

It is being reported here for the first time that the FBI pursued this link almost immediately. However, one could have deduced this, as early media accounts from the Los Angeles Times talk about the investigation, on April 28th, just two days after the April 26th phone call mentioned in the May 4th lab report. On that day, the Times ran two stories on the OKC bombing: one of them said, on the front page, that the FBI believed the bombing was the work of 4-5 people. That article mentioned there was a possible connection to bank robberies. Another separate story in the same issue detailed the bank robbery investigation.

All of this was reported by the Times before the FBI crime lab in D.C. had even received the prints to conduct their comparisons.

Find one of those stories here:

David Willman and Ronald J. Ostrow, “Investigators Believe Bombing was Work of 4-5 People,” LA Times, April 28, 1995.

Quoting from this story, Willman and Ostrow report that "FBI agents are investigating whether those responsible for the Oklahoma City explosion may have financed their activities with the proceeds from a bank-robbing spree across the Midwest."

The new documents were found within a batch of thousands of pages of material released to FOIA requestor and Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue, produced to him only after he was forced to file a lawsuit because the FBI had failed to fulfill it’s FOIA obligations on the request which he filed nearly eight years ago. At that time, the FBI had said it had located more than 30,000 responsive documents.

Thus far, very few if any of the documents the FBI has produced to Trentadue are in any way responsive to his request—they are largely documents unrelated to the request (which specifically was for records where Tim McVeigh was mentioned in connection with the Aryan Republican Army).

Most of the records produced in 2024, for example, are about the ARA and only the ARA, and do not in any way mention McVeigh, making them squarely outside of Trentadue’s FOIA request and thus not responsive documents.

In addition, many of them are previously processed and released documents and therefore cannot be part of the 30,000+ unprocessed potentially responsive documents Trentadue was initially advised the FBI had located.

However, slipped into the largely useless batch, in a moment of possibly coincidental competence, the FBI did manage to include a couple of relevent documents, and what they detail adds considerable weight to the theory that McVeigh was well acquainted with the Aryan Republican Army, and that the FBI was confident enough of this likely fact that it continued investigating it for many months.

Significantly, these records show that when Kenneth Trentadue was pulled out of his truck at the U.S./Mexico border in June of 1995 and shipped off to the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma—on a parole violation—with his John Doe #2 tattoo and bank robbery background—he was clearly pulled into the John Doe 2 dragnet at a time when the FBI was still investigating the McVeigh-bank robber link. Trentadue’s suspicious death in that Federal Transfer Center bears all the hallmarks of a brutal interrogation, beating, and ultimately murder which the family says investigation has led them to believe was a result of mistaken identity.

The new documents we’ve received further support this allegation by illustrating that the investigation concerning accomplices in the bombing was well underway in August 1995 and continued until at least November, according to the reports we now have.

Meanwhile, let us look back to investigative reporter J.D. Cash and crimonology professor Mark S. Hamm, who both studied extensively possible links between the bank robbery gang and McVeigh. Both believed that McVeigh was an accomplice in one or more robberies.

One of the gang’s bank jobs was carried out September 21, 1994 in Overland Park, Kansas. According to Cash, “witnesses provided a sketch of him [one of the robbers], you look at it, and there’s no question it’s McVeigh.”

Mark Hamm agreed, telling Cash, “I believe that sketch of the other subject is Timothy McVeigh and not [Peter] Langan. It’s almost a perfect likeness of McVeigh.”

Overland Park police sketch of ARA bank robber (L) and Timothy McVeigh (R)

Mark Hamm agreed, telling Cash, “I believe that sketch of the other subject is Timothy McVeigh and not [Peter] Langan. It’s almost a perfect likeness of McVeigh.”

Timothy McVeigh’s sister produced a signed affidavit for the FBI on May 2nd, 1995 in which she details how her brother produced to her a wad of $100 bills of an “undetermined quantity” and that he told her that the money was “his share” of proceeds from a “bank robbery” that he “helped plan.”

Below is an excerpt from that affidavit, courtesy Kathy Sanders, where Jennifer admits to this and also talks about laundering the bank robbery proceeds through her bank:

It is quite notable that the FBI’s April 26th, 1995 phone call as recorded on the FBI crime lab report came days before Jennifer’s affidavit, showing that the FBI was onto the connection between McVeigh and the neo-Nazi accomplices days before they received solid confirmation that Tim McVeigh had been a participant in at least one bank robbery.

More as the story develops.

Endnotes