FBI Can’t Find Oklahoma City Bombing Video Tapes
July 8th, 2011Via: AP:
The FBI has not found videotapes from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that are being sought by a Utah lawyer and do not believe another records search is reasonable or will uncover the information, the agency has told a federal judge.
FBI officials are “unaware of the existence or likely location of additional tapes” that would fulfill the Freedom of Information Act request filed by Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue, agency attorneys said in court papers filed last week.
Trentadue sued the FBI and the CIA in 2008 to get the videos and contended the FBI’s efforts to locate the information have been inadequate. He is looking for surveillance tapes taken the morning of the bombing from exterior cameras on the Murrah building and dashboard camera video from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol’s arrest of Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh was convicted of and executed for the bombing.
Trentadue asserts that the videos exist and will expose that others were involved in the domestic terrorist attack that killed 168 people.
But attorneys for the agency said the electronic databases have not turned up the records, nor have manual searches of FBI crime labs, evidence centers or a warehouse in Oklahoma City. A further search of a records cache totaling an estimated 450,000 documents — from just the first 14 days of the investigation — in the warehouse would be “unreasonably burdensome” and could take a single staff person more than 18 months to conduct, court papers said.
The conclusions were included in a court-ordered explanation of the FBI’s response to the records request. U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups had ordered the agency to provide a detailed explanation of its records search last month.
The judge will consider the response in deciding whether the FBI complied with federal information laws in Trentadue’s case. It was not clear when the judge might rule.
