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After insisting for a year that it was unable to find records connected to the death of an Oklahoma prison inmate, the FBI is acknowledging it has found hundreds of pages of documents that could apply to the case.
However, the agency is asking a federal judge in Utah to pare back his order requiring it to produce records and grant an extension of a June 15 deadline. Officials say they need more time to review more than six million pages of information that potentially could fall under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in 2004 by the inmate's brother, Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue.
In a request filed Thursday, a lawyer representing the FBI said requiring production of at least one of the requested documents could reveal the identity of a confidential source, which is information that is exempt from disclosure under the FOIA.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Carlie Christensen is asking Judge Dale Kimball to allow the agency to edit that document - and possibly others that turn up with sensitive information - or withhold them. The judge has that request under consideration.
In a May 5 ruling, Kimball said that the agency had failed to make a good-faith effort to find requested records, pointing out that Trentadue had obtained from other sources two redacted FBI documents that fell under his request.
One was a memo sent to members of a task force investigating the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people.
Trentadue is pursuing the records because he says the bombing investigation holds clues to his brother's death.
Kenneth Trentadue, 44, who had served time for bank robbery, was being held on an alleged parole violation in a federal prison in Oklahoma City when guards found him dead on Aug. 21, 1995, hanging from a noose made of torn bedsheets. Authorities say he committed suicide and several investigations also ruled that the prisoner died by his own hand, but his family insists he was killed.
Trentadue contends the FBI mistakenly suspected his brother was part of a gang that robbed banks to fund attacks on the government, and that authorities killed him when things got out of hand during an interrogation.
In his FOIA requests, the lawyer has sought records on a white supremacist compound in Oklahoma where Timothy McVeigh, who was executed in 2001 for the Murrah bombing, allegedly tried to recruit accomplices. Trentadue says an informant for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights organization, had infiltrated the compound and relayed information about McVeigh's plan to the FBI about two weeks before the bombing.
The SPLC has denied that it ever had an informant at the compound.
Trentadue sued the FBI last year, alleging it had failed to comply with the FOIA, which led to Kimball's June 15 deadline.
In a declaration supporting the FBI requests, an FBI official says the agency performed a reasonable search. FBI policy prohibits searching under individual names unless the person has signed a privacy waiver or is deceased, said David M. Hardy, a section chief in the agency's records division.
"If the FBI has misinterpreted the request as the Court infers and it should now search its files for each individual and investigation named in the request and not in connection or conjunction with the SPLC, then the scope of the search is increased exponentially," Hardy said, adding that the bombing probe was the largest in the agency's history and produced about 6.6 million pages of reports, notes and miscellaneous papers.
A search for several specific reports or memos requested by Trentadue took two employees two days to conduct and turned up about 340 documents, Hardy said. He said those papers still must be reviewed to see if they contain relevant information or if confidential material needs to be redacted.