Utah lawyer says Obama’s A.G. pick behind cover-up
Accusation–Attorney general-nominee led effort to kill investigation into prisoner’s death.
By Pamela Manson
The Salt Lake Tribune
December 25, 2008

A Salt Lake City lawyer who claims his brother was tortured and murdered in a federal prison is alleging that Attorney General nominee Eric Holder played a role in covering up the crime.

In a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee members, lawyer Jesse Trentadue acknowledges the paper trail on Holder’s actions “is scant,” but claims he was the “point man” in an effort to persuade Congress to not investigate his brother’s death. He is asking that Holder be questioned at his confirmation hearing next year about his alleged attempt to block efforts “to obtain a certain measure of justice for my brother’s murder.”

The Department of Justice, where Holder served as deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton, referred a request for comment to the Presidential Transition Team (PTT). A statement issued by an Obama transition aide denied Trentadue’s allegations.

“Multiple independent investigations have found that Kenneth Trentadue’s death was a suicide,” the statement said. “There is simply no evidence to support the claims in this letter.”

The body of Kenneth Trentadue, who had served time for bank robbery and was being held on an alleged parole violation, was found hanging in his cell at the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City on Aug. 21, 1995.

Several investigations by state and federal agencies ruled the death a suicide, but his survivors believe Kenneth Trentadue was strangled with plastic handcuffs by guards who mistook him for an accomplice in the Oklahoma City bombing. Jesse Trentadue has filed several lawsuits alleging the Justice Department and the FBI are withholding records concerning his brother’s death, which he requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

In his Dec. 19 letter, Trentadue says Justice Department e-mails show Holder planned to meet with Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch on Oct. 9, 1997, to defuse Judiciary Committee oversight and media inquiry into what happened the night Kenneth died. Hatch, then-chairman of the Judiciary Committee, announced the day after the meeting that he intended to schedule a hearing in the matter but never did, Trentadue writes.

In addition, Trentadue alleges that an FBI delegation, at the “apparent” urging of Holder, approached Oklahoma Sen. Don Nickles to ask for assurances that there would be no Senate oversight.

Nickles said Monday that he was sympathetic to the Trentadues and at first was leaning toward their position, but he became convinced the death was a suicide and that there was no cover-up after inspecting Trentadue’s prison cell, talking to the medical examiner and meeting with FBI agents in late 1997 and early 1998.

“I do remember reviewing the case and wanting to get to the bottom of it,” said Nickles, now chairman of The Nickles Group, a Washington, D.C., consulting company. “This is the only case in my 24 years in the Senate which I was ever involved.”

Hatch said Tuesday that at the time the case came to his attention, “federal officials were operating a formal investigation into the details of this issue and a Senate Judiciary Hearing would have been premature and counter-productive.”

pmanson@sltrib.com
Source URL: http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_11307197?source=rss

Family offers reward for information

A Salt Lake City attorney is offering a $250,000 reward for information that leads to the conviction of the person who allegedly killed his brother in a federal prison in Oklahoma City.

Jesse Trentadue and his family have announced the offer on the Internet at http://www.kmtreward.com, in newspaper ads in Oklahoma and Washington, D.C., and in a notice in Prison Legal Times, which circulates throughout the federal correctional system.

The death was ruled a suicide but family members believe Kenneth Michael Trentadue was murdered in 1995 after being mistaken for a conspirator in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Source URL: http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_11307197?source=rss

From KMTReward.com, as mentioned in the above article–

Information

Shortly after the Oklahoma City Bombing, Kenneth Michael Trentadue is tortured and strangled in an isolation cell at the Oklahoma City Federal Transfer Center. The Department of Justice informs the family that he had hanged himself with a bedsheet. His family believes that he was murdered by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and that his death is linked to the Bombing. Kenneth Michael Trentadue may have been the 169th victim of that attack.

In Search of John Doe No. 2: The Story the Feds Never Told About the Oklahoma City Bombing
Seeing Murder in a Face
The Trentadue Files – New documents offer details of the FBI’s secret Oklahoma City Bombing investigation
The Trentadue Case: A Coverup That Won’t Stay Covered
In the matter of Kenneth Michael Trentadue
A Coverup Under Two Presidents: The Unsolved Mystery of the Oklahoma City Bombing
Conspiracy Files – Oklahoma City Bombing

Scott Horton Interviews Jesse Trentadue
December 6th, 2008

Jesse Trentadue discusses the the events surrounding the 1995 murder of his brother while in federal custody in Oklahoma City and the connection to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, the Elohim City paramilitary camp sting operation run by the FBI and Southern Poverty Law Center, foreknowledge of FBI agents and complicity of FBI informants in the bombing, the ongoing court battles with the U.S. government over FOIA requests and civil lawsuits and the involvement of Obama’s appointed attorney general Eric Holder in the coverup of Kenny’s murder.

Scott’s collection of Trentadue pdf files.

MP3 here. (54:24)

Jesse Trentadue is an attorney in Salt Lake City, Utah.

In Search of John Doe No. 2: The Story the Feds Never Told About the Oklahoma City Bombing
by James Ridgeway
Mother Jones

Federal officials insist that the Oklahoma City bombing case was solved a decade ago. But a Salt Lake City lawyer in search of his brother’s killers has dug up some remarkable clues—on cross-dressing bank robbers, the FBI, and the mysterious third man.

KENNEY TRENTADUE was driving a 1986 Chevy pickup when he was pulled over at the Mexican border on his way home to San Diego on June 10, 1995. He was dark-haired, 5 feet 8 inches, and well muscled, a former athlete who had picked up construction work after he quit robbing banks. His left forearm bore a dragon tattoo. Highway patrol officers ran his license and found that it had been suspended, and that he was wanted for parole violations. After two months in jail in San Diego, Trentadue was shipped, on August 18, to a prison in Oklahoma City for a hearing on the parole violations. The move placed Kenney in close proximity to the most famous federal prisoner in America. In one way or another, it also sealed his fate.

Four months earlier, another car had been stopped by a state trooper, some 80 miles north of Oklahoma City. It was 10:20 a.m. on April 19, 1995, and much of the country was still waking up to the enormity of what had happened earlier that morning, when an explosives-laden Ryder truck gutted the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. The driver of the 1977 Mercury Marquis was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon and driving without tags. He gave his name as Timothy McVeigh. Two days later McVeigh was identified as the John Doe No. 1 wanted in the bombing, and fellow antigovernment extremist Terry Nichols turned himself in to police. They were indicted on August 10, and federal authorities said they had their men. But there were many who didn’t buy the tidy closure.

A sprawling Great Plains town known for its tornadoes, Oklahoma City was already the center of a swirl of theories about the crime, all of them insisting that the two men could not have acted alone. Some refused to give up on the idea of Middle Eastern terrorists, speculating about a plot headed by Saddam Hussein; others suspected an inside job by the feds. Some simply stuck to the far more plausible conviction that there were coconspirators not yet apprehended. After all, immediately following the bombing, law enforcement had been searching furiously for a man whom numerous sources said they saw with McVeigh, and who by some accounts was seen walking away from the Ryder truck—the character whose police composite sketch became known around the world as John Doe No. 2. According to the police description, this man was about 5 feet 9, muscular, and dark-haired. By some accounts, he drove an older model pickup truck and had a dragon tattooed on his left forearm.

Read the rest of the article here.

Editor’s note from 911truth.org-
Thanks to Mother Jones for this excellent article, and for making the related documents available online at their site. Thanks also to James Ridgway (and research assistants) for this excellent investigating reporting. Oklahoma City … 9/11 … Jessica Lynch … Abu Ghraib … Patrick Tillman … anything else being covered up? A little more of this kind of muckraking would be welcome!

This morning, Amy Goodman conducted a brief interview with Jesse Trentadue and James Ridgway on Democracy Now!Transcript here.

Update 8/3: “Antiwar Radio: Scott Horton Interviews James Ridgeway”. Listen to mp3 here.