"The bomber's words sound mainstream. Like he won!" President Bill

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1. Link here ...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/19/timothy-mcveigh-oklahoma-bombing-far-right-1995

“Some people got away with bloody murder, Fortier being one of them,” Williams, the former FBI agent, said.

The government dropped several promising lines of investigation – into a radical religious compound in eastern Oklahoma, into a neo-Nazi bank robbery gang, some of whose members later accused others of involvement in the bombing, and into Louis Beam, at the time the chief propagandist of the anti-government right, who was reported to have said in 1994 that “some kid” was going to blow up a building in Denver, Dallas, or Oklahoma City in revenge for Waco.

The justice department’s fear was that following one or more of these leads and pointing to a wider conspiracy would weaken the case against McVeigh, when the directive from above was to obtain the death penalty at all costs. “At some point,” Napolitano acknowledged, “a strategic decision was made to focus and get a clean straightforward case against McVeigh, and not pursue every rabbit down its hole.”

And so the wider story – of a heartland America desperate and cynical about its government, of a small but growing minority willing to embrace the notion that one day it might have to take up arms against tyranny in Washington – went largely untold. In 2025, we know at last how important that story was, and where it was destined to lead.

Andrew Gumbel is the author of Oklahoma City: What The Investigation Missed – And Why It Still Matters (William Morrow, 2012)