(RepublicanNews.org) – A Utah attorney has been told that he may have to wait at least 20 years for the FBI to fully respond to his Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Jesse Trentadue first submitted his FOIA request nine years ago as part of his mission to uncover the truth about his brother’s death and its possible connection with the Oklahoma City bombing.
On April 19th, 1995, a truck filled with explosives destroyed Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and killed 168 people. Within days, authorities had declared that the two men responsible for the attack were Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Law enforcement already had McVeigh in custody on unrelated charges, and Nichols soon handed himself in. Some people, including Trentadue, have questioned whether or not federal authorities truly believed that the attack was carried out by only these two men, as they publicly stated.
Jesse Trentadue’s involvement in the case came after his brother Kenney was arrested in June 1995 on charges unrelated to the Oklahoma bombing. Despite being picked up near his home in San Diego, he was sent to an Oklahoma prison for his hearing. In August, a prison warden telephoned Kenney’s wife and told her that he had committed suicide. However, the state’s chief medical examiner would not rule his death a suicide. Photographs of the body showed multiple injuries, including bruises across his head, body, and knuckles. Jesse Trentadue said that he later received an anonymous phone call telling him that his brother was killed by the FBI in an interrogation gone wrong.
Jesse Trentadue has spent nearly three decades suing the U.S. government to force the release of documents relevant to the case. His FOIA submission from nine years ago asked for documents relating to the Aryan Republican Army – a neo-Nazi bank robbery gang with links to Timothy McVeigh. His request also pertains to a now-deceased FBI informant and CIA asset named Roger Moore.
In the face of the FBI’s “snail-pace” release of documents, Trentadue launched a lawsuit against the FBI in February 2024. The FBI responded that it would hand over the necessary information, but only at a rate of 500 pages per month over a further 11.5 years. This would bring the overall timeframe for the FOIA request response to 20 years. At this rate, Trentadue would be nearly 90 years old by the time all documents had been handed over. Trentadue has strongly criticized the delay and on June 25th filed a motion to hold a scheduling conference in an effort to force the FBI to move more quickly.
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