Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue says the alleged undercover operation involved "informants-infiltrators" from the Department of Justice and the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based civil-rights organization. He alleges these informants were focused on neo-Nazi and militia activities at a paramilitary training facility at Elohim City, Okla.
Trentadue believes records about Elohim City could prove his 44-year-old brother, a convicted bank robber who was being held on an alleged parole violation, was killed because he was mistaken for a bombing conspirator.
Authorities say the August 1995 death of Kenneth Trentadue in a cell at an Oklahoma City federal prison was a suicide. However, the inmate's family believes that guards strangled him with a set of plastic handcuffs in an interrogation that got out of hand.
To support that theory, Jesse Trentadue has filed several lawsuits seeking records under the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). His latest legal action was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City and asks for immediate release of all requested documents concerning an investigation of Elohim City.
Trentadue had previously made the claim about the undercover operation in his FOIA litigation. He alleges the FBI wants to conceal its mishandling of the investigation into activities at the white supremacist camp and its failure to stop the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people.
Lawyers for the government have denied Trentadue's allegations and have said federal agencies had no advance knowledge of the bombing. And an official at the Southern Poverty Law Center has said the assertion that the organization had an informant at Elohim City, either before or after the attack, is "categorically untrue."
The specific records that Trentadue is seeking includes documents concerning Andreas Carl Strassmeir's possible involvement in the bombing or his possible work as an operative for the German government, the FBI or the Southern Poverty Law Center. According to Trentadue, government documents show that Strassmeir might have been an associate of Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the bombing and was executed in 2001.
pmanson@sltrib.com
