It’s been 28 years since the Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people and injured hundreds more. At 9:02 a.m. on April 19th, 1995, a bomb built by Timothy McVeigh, an American domestic terrorist, exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murray Federal Building. It remains one of the deadliest acts of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. The motivations for the attack, its deleterious effects, and the longstanding impact on right-wing movements, including the January 6th insurrection, is the subject of “Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism.” The book, written by journalist and lawyer Jeffrey Toobin, is based on nearly a million previously unreleased materials. Toobin joins WITHpod to discuss what often drives extremists, ominous parallels between McVeigh and more recent insurrectionists, the role of social media in the incitement of anti-government violence, and why the book is a “warning for the future.”
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Jeffrey Toobin: One of the things I always try to be careful about when I talk about McVeigh’s background is a lot of people have many similar aspects to McVeigh in his background who don’t become terrorists or criminals of any kind.
I think there is something about McVeigh, and I have no hesitation about simply calling it evil. I mean, there was something, you know, deeply evil about this guy. But at the same time, there were many things about him that were very typical of both people in his position in life and then people who turned out to be right-wing extremists of today.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
Well, as I speak to you, June 21, 2023, Donald Trump has now been indicted for a second time. You probably know this if you’ve been anywhere other than Rip Van Winkling, and he has been indicted in federal court this time on 37 counts, having to do with violations of the Espionage Act and conspiracy to commit obstruction.
And one of the things that’s interesting is in reaction to this, and it hasn’t started with these indictments, but it’s been something, a consistent theme, actually going back years now in the Trump MAGA era, is a growing animus on the part of the right-wing towards the FBI.
Like, at a certain level, like, there’s some who were talking about defunding the FBI, that you have to defund the FBI, get rid of the FBI. The FBI is now called the deep state. The deep state is this coinage that’s actually taken from scholarship, I think, about the Turkish Republic and particularly the way that the post-Ataturk Turkish Republic had a kind of center in the armed forces there that would fairly routinely overthrow democratic governments to sort of make sure that the country did not steer away from Ataturk’s vision. That deep state concept has been imported.
And so, you’ve got this, like, really common sort of attacks, political attacks on the FBI. Now, what’s funny about this, of course, is there’s a kind of ideological vertigo that this will induce. Like, the idea is that the FBI is a bastion of, like, woke libs. And so, they’re out to get your favorite president because he’s, you know, he’s an America firster, and he’s Donald Trump, and the FBI is actually this really dangerous force.
Now, of course, the history of the FBI as relates to the left is also has been incredibly, incredibly hostile. I mean, the FBI has been a hotbed of anti-left activity, it has violated the constitutional rights of all kinds of left activists through the years, going back to its origins, going through the Cold War and the aftermath of the Cold War, COINTELPRO famously, particularly centering on Black Panthers and Black liberation activists, anti-war protesters.
So, like, the idea that the FBI is the enemy of the right-wing sounds crazy, I think, to folks that know the history of the FBI vis-a-vis the left, particularly when you also consider the FBI has literally in its history never had a Democrat running it. Think about that. Never. You had J. Edgar Hoover, and then after J. Edgar Hoover it’s all been Republicans, which is just an amazing fact about the FBI.
All of that said, there is some recent precedent for this right-wing animus towards the FBI because the FBI fundamentally is one face of the federal government, and often the federal government, and for what it stands for, itself, has been object of scorn from right-wingers and from particularly the more radicalized parts of the right, the more militant and violent parts of the right.
And as I’ve listened to people rail against the FBI, I’ve been reminded to (ph) watching the news and consuming it in the early to mid-1990s, when there was a similar fervor. There was a wave of anti-FBI sentiment animus among the right-wing. It was viewed as a kind of tool of tyranny in the hands of lib Bill Clinton, that it was an enemy of free people. Someone from the NRA referred to federal agents as jackbooted thugs at one point. In fact, it prompted George H.W. Bush to resign his membership from the NRA because the language was so offensive and aggressive.
But there was this moment of violent right-wing extremism in the 1990s that for different ways, but I think with a kind of continuity focused on the federal government and its power as itself an enemy of freedom. And the most famous culmination of that movement was the mass murder, bombing of the Oklahoma City government building of the decade in the 1990s. And I think for a lot of interesting and weird reasons, it has kind of slipped from our consciousness as usable history.
There was this moment in the 1990s when this was the subject of so much coverage, conversation, and discourse: what to do about this radical right-wing that had merged in the U.S. and culminated in this horrific atrocity? What were the roots of it? Why did it happen? What would come of it? How to deal with it?
And I think that that conversation really left us but has come roaring back in the wake of what we have seen now, not just the violence at the Charlottesville march, not just the individual lone murderers at places like the Tree of Life synagogue, but, of course, the violence on January 6th on behalf of an extremist and violence-friendly right-wing movement in the U.S., this time paired with a particular president and presidential candidate.
And it’s for that reason that it’s an amazing time to revisit the story of Timothy McVeigh. And there is an incredible new book out about him called “Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism,” which was published in May of this year, 2023. It’s written by Jeffrey Toobin, who’s a journalist, author, and lawyer who’s written a whole bunch of books throughout the years.
And, Jeff, welcome to the program.
Jeffrey Toobin: Thanks, Chris.
Chris Hayes: How did you find your way to this topic?
Jeffrey Toobin: Well, to answer that question, I think I need to quote my father who used to say, to make a long story unbearable, there’s sort of a short version and a long version of how I find my way to the story. The slightly longer version is that I covered the McVeigh and Nichols trials back in 1997.
The bombing itself was April 19, 1995, but it took two years for them to get to trial. There was a change of venue. They were tried separately, both in Denver, and I covered those trials.
So, I, you know, was there and I, you know, was steeped in the facts of the case, but I didn’t write a book about it at that point. What brought it all back initially was October of 2020, when, as I think many people will recall, the FBI arrested a number of people in Michigan who were plotting to kidnap the Governor of Michigan, Governor Whitmer.
And I got very interested in that case because the people who were arrested, they’ve all now been convicted, were affiliated with the Michigan Militia. I knew from back in the ’90s that Terry Nichols, the second defendant, frankly, the less culpable defendant, although clearly guilty in the Oklahoma City bombing, was from the thumb of Michigan and along with his brother were also affiliated with the Michigan Militia.
And I saw that the values, the politics, the priorities of the people who were arrested in Michigan seemed awfully similar to those of the Nichols brothers. It was only a handful of weeks later that January 6th happened. And that, too, seemed very much reminiscent of the Oklahoma City bombing. And I decided, at that point, to take a full-fledged look at the Oklahoma City bombing.
I was very lucky to find a whole bunch of sources that had never been looked at before. So, simultaneously, I wanted to do, you know, the full story of what really happened in Oklahoma City and how it happened, as well as draw the connections between McVeigh, Nichols, and the people I regard as their political heirs who are active still today.
Chris Hayes: One of the things that’s very striking about the book to me is just the continuity through the years of a certain kind of extremist right-wing rhetoric, worldview vision. I mean, if you go back and, you know, if you look at the posters they put up in Dallas, right, on the eve of JFK’s visit, when he would be assassinated, it was “Wanted for Treason.” That was the picture of him. And he was turning the country over to the foreigner (ph), to communism, the fear of the black helicopters, John Birch Society, all of that rhetoric.
Like, in some ways, it’s almost shocking how little it changes through the decades, as evidenced both, you know, in your book to today.
Jeffrey Toobin: Well, you know, not to draw attention away from my own wonderful book, but there is another book that’s out now that won the Pulitzer Prize for History this year by Jefferson Cowie, about a county in Alabama. It happens to be the county where George Wallace was born. But he goes all the way back to the Civil War.
And he shows how, and this is very much in line with how you were talking earlier in the podcast, about how hostility to the federal government, in particular, has been a touchstone of right-wing extremism since the Civil War. I mean, after all, the Civil War —
Chris Hayes: Right. That’s the —
Jeffrey Toobin: — was (ph) —
Chris Hayes: Yes (ph).
Jeffrey Toobin: — what it was about. And George Wallace, you know, standing at the schoolhouse door in Alabama, was defying the United States Department of Justice. This theme of local, especially state-level, hostility to the federal government is something that’s really deep in American right-wing thought and action.
It’s funny, you know, when I was working on the book, one of the suggestions for the subtitle was Timothy McVeigh and the birth of right-wing extremism. And I remember saying to my friends at Simon & Schuster, this was not the birth.
Chris Hayes: No, right. Yeah.
Jeffrey Toobin: You know, you could start this story at many different points in American history, you know, and it’s (ph) certainly going back to the Civil War and certainly going back to slavery. So, you’re right that the themes that you see in McVeigh and in January 6th do have very deep roots here.
Chris Hayes: Before we get into the story of McVeigh, you mentioned this sort of in a passing fashion, but I think it’s worth lingering over for a moment is the records that you build this book out of are shockingly comprehensive. Tell us about the documentation you were able to use.
Jeffrey Toobin: You know, both as a writer and as a television broadcaster, you know, I’ve been covering trials for 30 years. And, you know, what you usually have are the transcript of a trial and the briefs that have been filed in court.
Well, what I discovered as I started looking into this story is that Stephen Jones, who was the lead lawyer for McVeigh, donated to the Briscoe Center at the University of Texas, every scrap of paper that he had used and collected in defending Timothy McVeigh.
That included all the notes of his interviews with McVeigh and other lawyers on his team’s interview with McVeigh, all the legal strategy memos that they wrote, all the discovery that had been turned over by the federal government in preparation for this trial, meaning all the FBI 302s, all the FBI interviews. So, it was this unbelievably comprehensive dossier, 635 boxes in Austin, Texas.
Now, you don’t have to be a lawyer to recognize there is something ethically problematic about turning over all this confidential material, much of it protected by client confidentiality, attorney-client privilege.
I deal with this in part in an author’s note at the end of the book. But in short, it’s not my problem. You know, I (ph) —
Chris Hayes: Right. Yeah. You’re not the lawyer.
Jeffrey Toobin: I’m not —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right.
Jeffrey Toobin: — the lawyer. So, I had this incredible resource that really allowed me to do a 360-degree picture of both who McVeigh was and how this conspiracy came to happen and then to fruition.
Chris Hayes: And partly that’s, I mean, as you write in the book, I mean, you know, the government basically assigned this lawyer and gave him a budget, you know, paid for the defense. And it was to the tune of something like $20 million, about —
Jeffrey Toobin: $20 million.
Chris Hayes: — $20 million.
Jeffrey Toobin: There were, at various points, 15, 16 lawyers, private investigators, world travel. I mean, it was a spare-no-expense defense.
Chris Hayes: And so, part of that is, and again, this is where the sort of ethical questions arise, but, like, they had psychologists, for instance, who were doing a sort of, you know, workup of the guy. So, he’s being interviewed by his own lawyer or psychologist, right, presumably for his defense.
Jeffrey Toobin: Correct.
Chris Hayes: And the things that he told those psychologists, they’re now on record in this library that you could go and read. Like, here’s what he was telling his defense psychologist.
Jeffrey Toobin: Absolutely. And also, just, you know, how he was telling his lawyers how he did it, how he built the bomb, how he —
(CROSSTALK)
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeffrey Toobin: — why he decided to build the bomb, how he worked with Terry Nichols, whether anyone else was involved.
I mean, all of that is in the files. It’s really something that I could never even imagine that I would get access to. And I was, frankly, thrilled as a journalist to be able to see it.
Chris Hayes: So, let’s talk a bit about McVeigh as a person and his trajectory. And then, we can talk about sort of him as a person, his radicalization, and then the act, if that makes sense. You know, I have to say, the book is great, by the way, and incredibly well told.
One thing that’s sort of interesting is that, like, he’s not a surprising figure, like, the details —
Jeffrey Toobin: No.
Chris Hayes: — about him. It’s like, in many ways the things that sort of build, it’s like, this is the resentments he has, the place he comes from, the post-industrial malaise and frustration, the misogyny and anger of women, the white men can’t catch a break, Black people are taking all the jobs, all this stuff is, like, just the exact kind of stuff you would expect.
Jeffrey Toobin: You would expect, although one of the things I always try to be careful about when I talk about McVeigh’s background is a lot of people have many —
Chris Hayes: Exactly, yes.
Jeffrey Toobin: — similar aspects to McVeigh in his —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeffrey Toobin: — background who don’t become terrorists or criminals —
Chris Hayes: Mass murderers, yes.
Jeffrey Toobin: — of any kind. I think there is something about McVeigh, and I have no hesitation about simply calling it evil. I mean, there was something, you know, deeply evil about this guy.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jeffrey Toobin: But at the same time, there were many things about him that were very typical of both people in his position in life and then people who turned out to be right-wing extremists of today. And just, you know, to go over a few of them quickly, you know —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jeffrey Toobin: — he came from outside Buffalo and his father worked at a G.M. plant for 30 years. His grandfather worked at the same G.M. plant for 30 years.
By the time McVeigh came along, that plant had shrunk dramatically. It still hasn’t closed entirely, but that option for a good union job, which his father and grandfather had, was really not available to him. So, you have this feature of economic precariousness.
Chris Hayes: Yep (ph).
Jeffrey Toobin: You have his parents having a rancorous divorce when he was a teenager. And he was not a terrible student. He was sort of an average student, but he was unfocused. And what did he decide to do? As a teenager, he got very interested in guns. And guns was really the main consuming interest of his life.
He joins the NRA, he starts reading gun rights publications, and as an 18-year-old, failed out of (ph) junior college. He enlists in the military, where many of his right-wing preconceptions get hardened.
So, all of those things are part of what made him what he was, but they also describe a lot of other people who did not become anything —
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Jeffrey Toobin: — like what he became.
Chris Hayes: Totally. Totally. And I mean, literally millions of people, I think, have somewhat similar political affiliations and —
Jeffrey Toobin: Right.
Chris Hayes: — views as his.
But I mean, when you think about this sort of paradigmatic example of the downwardly mobile, white, working-class man in a post-industrial landscape that has taken away the kind of stability and dignity of the union job in the plant that was, you know, two generations, 60 years; his father, even over the course of his life, watches his own sort of economic prospects start to degrade; combined with, like, rage and animus at his mom for, quote, like, leaving him behind and walking out, a very, very fraught relationship with women; you know, lots of sort of racial bigotry that flowers into genuine white supremacy.
Like, all of those things are present there that are the kinds of things, I think, we think about and talk about when we’re analyzing, you know, why did Trump win the Industrial Midwest and, you know, what does this thing look like? They’re all present in this guy.
Jeffrey Toobin: And what you just described about McVeigh, word-for-word, you could say the same about Terry Nichols with one exception.
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Jeffrey Toobin: Terry Nichols came from the rural thumb of Michigan, where the decline of the family farm was —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeffrey Toobin: — the great economic theme of his life. So, again, you know, people are individuals, they’re not paradigms. But you have, in McVeigh, the decline of the industrial part of America. In Nichols, you have the decline of the agricultural part —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeffrey Toobin: — of America. And their similarly stewing resentments brought them together to the crimes they committed.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: With McVeigh, let’s talk a little bit about the kind of cult of the gun, because McVeigh’s one true love in his life is weaponry or guns. And it’s the enduring source, in some ways, of meaning and joy, actually. Like, it’s the one thing that he’s —
Jeffrey Toobin: Oh, yeah.
Chris Hayes: — literally the thing he’s best at. He’s an incredibly good marksman. He goes into the armed forces where he wins all sorts of awards. He’s uniformly seen as incredibly talented at shooting. He’s obsessed with shooting. It’s his recreation. It’s his calling.
Like, how does that love of guns connect to the ideological trajectory he goes on?
Jeffrey Toobin: I think this is so important, Chris, because, you know, to the extent McVeigh is remembered, I think one thing he’s remembered for is setting off the bomb on the second anniversary of the Waco raid and his anger at the FBI about the raid on the Branch Davidian compound that led to the death of, you know, 76 people.
And that’s partially true. That certainly was part of the motivation. But what’s equally true was that he was outraged about September 13, 1994, when Bill Clinton signed the Assault Weapons Ban. That was the event that led McVeigh and Nichols to say, okay, we’re really going to do this. And guns were just as central to his sense of outrage as the Waco story was.
And there, the source of the motivation, you have to look at “The Turner Diaries,” which is the dystopian novel he started reading as a teenager. And the story of “The Turner Diaries,” in brief, is about a imagined contemporary America where a sinister conspiracy of Blacks and Jews have taken over the federal government, passed a law called the Cohen Act, very subtle, which called for the confiscation of all private firearms.
Earl Turner, the narrator and hero, as a gesture of protest against the Cohen Act in this confiscation of firearms, rents a truck, fills it with an improvised bomb and sets it off next to the FBI building in Washington.
McVeigh modeled his actions on Earl Turner’s act to set off a rebellion against the federal government, which is what happens in the novel. That’s all about guns.
And one of the things you see is that “The Turner Diaries” remains a major source of inspiration on the right-wing. I deal with this in the epilogue. Oath Keepers, Three Percenters talk about “The Turner Diaries,” and the fixation of fear that the federal government is going to take our guns away is so core, it is so much a core of McVeigh, and it is also the most clear link between him and his successors.
Chris Hayes: So, “The Turner Diaries,” if people are not familiar, I would not recommend reading the text, but it’s also, like, just to add on to it, it’s repellently, almost pornographically violent book in which, you know, there’s this culminating violence called the Day of the Rope, where all the, you know, basically marauding massacre of the race war, Blacks and Jews and, you know, leftists and the people from the system, the government, I mean, it’s really, like, disgusting stuff.
But to me, and you definitely highlight this in the actual book itself, you know, there’s just sort of ascending levels of the ideological justification for the Second Amendment, not in the sort of the actual Second Amendment, but the sort of Second Amendment gun fetishization, you know.
One is you love hunting, and you love recreation. And then one level up from that is you need it to defend yourself. And then the level up from that, which is the Timothy McVeigh vision, the militia right vision, The Turner Diary vision, right, is that, actually, the gun is necessary to rob the government of the legitimate use of violence and actually to make war against the same government. It’s explicitly a tool of violent insurrection, mayhem, and murder against the government.
And that used to be like a Timothy McVeigh soldier of fortune ideology that has really, like, migrated into the halls of Congress to the point now where you hear elected Republican leaders essentially articulating that as the reason for the Second Amendment.
Jeffrey Toobin: Lindsey Graham has said that explicitly, that he has a gun to protect himself against the government. Ted Cruz has said that.
And, you know, not to date myself, but I am old enough to remember when the Second Amendment was not even interpreted by the Supreme Court. It was only 2008, in the Heller decision, when the Supreme Court said there was any individual right in the Second Amendment at all. For most of the history of this country, overwhelmingly, the Second Amendment was interpreted as something solely about the power of militias, having nothing to do with individual right to keep and bear arms.
But not only, as you were just pointing out, has it become gospel on the right that you have the right to have a weapon in your home to protect yourself against criminals who may come in and try to steal things or attack you, now it’s become a vehicle for protecting yourself against the government. It’s never quite spelled out how that would work, but it just shows how this has all ratcheted up in recent years.
Chris Hayes: Yes, it’s one of these things, too, when you try to, like, you know, McVeigh and his, you know, fellow travelers, I think, were more explicit about this. It’s explicit in “The Turner Diaries.” It’s explicit if you go to the most extremist right-wing websites. But you know, there’s sort of a dot, dot, dot ellipsis when articulated now.
Like, protect you from the government, what do you mean? It means I will use the gun I have to put bullets in the brains of American soldiers, or American FBI members or, like, that is the actual —
Jeffrey Toobin: Law enforcement, yeah.
Chris Hayes: — thing that you are saying. Law enforcement, like you’re saying, I am going to shoot and kill, you know, whoever they send. And that’s that sounds like the deranged ravings of McVeigh if you actually spell it out. But instead, what you end up getting is this kind of wink, wink, nudge, nudge. But it all derives from the soldier of fortune McVeigh worldview of what the guns are for.
Jeffrey Toobin: And another part of that, and this was completely news to me as I was working on “Homegrown,” was the fetishization of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution —
Chris Hayes: Exactly. Yeah.
Jeffrey Toobin: — itself as a vehicle for right-wing extremism. McVeigh had a very clear idea that what he was doing was precisely analogous to what the —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeffrey Toobin: — Founding Fathers had done in fighting the British. The day he was arrested, he was quoting the Declaration of Independence, not the famous part, you know, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” but the later part of the Declaration of Independence, which talked about why the colonists were rebelling against the evil British king. That was how he saw what he was doing.
What I didn’t realize until I started, you know, working on the book was if you go to January 6th and you listen to what Alex Jones was saying, and if you look at what Lauren Boebert, the congresswoman, was tweeting on the morning of January 6th, she said, “Today is 1776.” This idea that the rebellion against the federal government, what went on at January 6th, was analogous and the clear and honorable heir (ph) —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jeffrey Toobin: — to the work of the Founding Fathers, was precisely what McVeigh was saying that he was doing in 1995.
Suffice it to say, I think that’s a horrible perversion of what went on in the American Revolution. But that claimed affiliation with the American Revolution is one of the ties between McVeigh and the people who are operating today.
Chris Hayes: So, McVeigh, you know, he, sort of, I think, through a kind of entry of gun culture, right, and gun shows. He’s going to gun shows at some point. He’s meeting people. He’s connecting these publications, “Soldiers of Fortune.” He’s going to the back of them. He doesn’t have the internet, but he’s starting to get on (ph) shortwave radio, right? He’s moving in this milieu of extremists.
He meets Terry Nichols at Fort Benning in Georgia when he enlists in the Army, and that, you know, their sort of relationship is cemented there and they become sort of fellow travelers. Where’s the break from disgruntled, you know, Gulf War veteran with extremist right-wing politics to active, you know, terrorist plotter?
Jeffrey Toobin: What happens is he’s in the Gulf War, the first Gulf War, and he distinguishes himself. It’s a very short war, as people may remember, but in the, you know —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jeffrey Toobin: Just a few days, he wins a brown star. He gets promoted. And immediately after the Gulf War, he goes to try out for the Green Beret Special Forces. And it’s a 21-day tryout, and he flunks out after the second day. And that is really the beginning of the end of his ties to normal American life.
He goes back to Fort Riley in Kansas, but he has no more motivation. He really wanted to be in Special Forces. He didn’t want to be just an ordinary noncommissioned officer. And he drops out of the Army very soon thereafter. Goes back to Buffalo, you know, doesn’t have a job.
He’s thwarted in romance. He doesn’t have a good job. He thinks that Black people are getting all the good jobs, which is, you know, where that resentment festers. And he’s rebuffed by a woman he, sort of, falls in love with.
And it’s really at that point, Bill Clinton is elected president in November of ’92. That’s what sort of sets him off on the road. And from December of 1992 to the bombing, which is April of ’95, he leads this itinerant existence where he travels around to gun shows. He makes a living. He’s selling “The Turner Diaries.” He lives in his car. He lives in cheap motels.
And he gets angrier and angrier. That’s when he becomes a dedicated Rush Limbaugh listener. That’s when he starts listening to shortwave radio, Bill Cooper, this right-wing extremist on shortwave. That’s when he starts having target practice with Terry Nichols in Kansas, where they have silhouettes that they put Hillary Clinton’s face on.
That’s the period where he gets more and more alienated from American life and the Assault Weapons Ban, which is September of ’94, is really the last straw before he goes full time into planning for the bombing.
Chris Hayes: How does he plan for the bombing?
Jeffrey Toobin: Well, the very explicit model is Earl Turner’s bomb of the FBI building. And if you read “The Turner Diaries,” as I had the misfortune to do several times because it was important for this book, you see that it really does spell out, you know, how he builds the bomb. And the period of September of ’94 to April of ’95 is really about McVeigh and Nichols buying fertilizer; stealing some explosives from a quarry in Kansas; Nichols robbing a gun dealer in Arkansas that they take his arms, and they sell them to get money to fund the bombing; how they go buy jet fuel, racing fuel from a racetrack in Dallas.
You know, it’s a very complex undertaking. And, you know, there is an evil genius about McVeigh that he is able to keep all of this in his head to build this bomb. And that six months from September to April of ’95 is devoted almost entirely to planning the bombing.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And one thing that comes through in his interviews and writing that appear in the book is that this guy is, you know, he’s not a dummy. He’s a pretty sharp guy.
Jeffrey Toobin: Yeah. And, you know, I want to be very careful about how I describe him in that respect.
Chris Hayes: Well, I mean, that’s true of Osama bin Laden too. I mean, you can do —
Jeffrey Toobin: Exactly. Right, I mean, yeah.
Chris Hayes: You could do horrible things and, you know, be smart or sharp or whatever. That’s a totally morally neutral description. But in order to carry out the plot, in just generally —
(CROSSTALK)
Jeffrey Toobin: Yeah, I want to make sure that, you know —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jeffrey Toobin: But that’s true. And it’s very different from Nichols. I mean, Nichols was a follower, a dope —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeffrey Toobin: — a zero, someone who never would have had the moxie and the intelligence to pull this off if he had been left to his own devices. He was very much the second fiddle in this endeavor, though, I want to be clear, he was very much —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Jeffrey Toobin: — a part of it.
Chris Hayes: And they do this thing where they, like, draw this credit card debt and then they buy gold, this sort of right-wing maneuver to, like, get off the banking system, you know, get away from the Rothschilds or whatever. And so, how does the money work during this period?
Jeffrey Toobin: Well, they live on an incredibly small amount of money. You know, McVeigh —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeffrey Toobin: — was, as I said, living mostly in his car, driving around to various gun shows, occasionally staying in motels. He got some money from his family. He got some money when he left the Army. But the main source of money was this crazy robbery that Nichols committed in Arkansas. This character that McVeigh had met on the gun show circuit and who had hosted McVeigh at his home in Arkansas, who had made a lot of money at various points and had collected guns, had collected gold, they figure out a way for Nichols to rob him and they steal —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeffrey Toobin: — the guns, they steal the gold, they steal some jewels. And that money is what goes for renting the Ryder truck, ultimately, and buying the jet fuel. But the actual amount of money that was necessary was really rather minimal because McVeigh lived in such a frugal existence.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: I feel like whenever you’re discussing an act this depraved and violent and destructive, you know, it’s important, obviously the book’s about McVeigh, but just to talk about the bomb and what it did and what it meant for the lives of the hundreds of people and the entire community in the country that were, you know, either ended by it or affected by it.
Jeffrey Toobin: Yeah, Chris, you know, this is something I struggled with in the book because, you know, the book really is about who McVeigh and Nichols were and why —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jeffrey Toobin: — they did what they did and how they tie to the rest of right-wing extremism in the country. But I didn’t want to neglect in any way —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jeffrey Toobin: — the magnitude of the horror of this story. And just to give you the statistics, you know, 168 people were killed, including 19 children. I think a lot of people remember that —
Chris Hayes: Yep (ph).
Jeffrey Toobin: — there was a daycare center on the second floor of the Alfred P. Murrah Building and 15 of the 19 children who died were in the daycare center. There’s a famous picture of a firefighter holding Baylee Almon, one of the children who died in the —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jeffrey Toobin: — daycare center. I tell the story of that.
Obviously, I could not tell the story of all 168 people and the hundreds of others who had terrible injuries as a result. But It’s important to emphasize and, you know, I was just in Oklahoma City talking about the book and I went to the memorial where I’d been many times, you know, in reporting the book. And I certainly encourage anyone who’s listening to go to the Oklahoma City Memorial.
It’s a very moving memorial. I think people know that there are chairs out there for all, you know, sort of stylized chairs. But there’s also a fascinating museum with a lot of the original artifacts from the case. They also have a big oral history collection, which I used in the book.
But you know, the opportunity just the other day, to meet with some of the survivors and the family members of people who died in the bombing is, it’s just an important reminder that this was not some, you know, this wasn’t like a bad election. This was mass murder —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeffrey Toobin: — on a grand and horrible scale. And you know, I’m glad you gave me the opportunity to recognize that this is, you know, obviously, a central part of the story.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And I mean it’s, you know, after 9/11, right, one of the most horrific acts of mass violence in the country’s history.
Jeffrey Toobin: But actually, one of the things that, you know, I make a point of saying is, to this day, it’s often described as the worst act of terrorism on American soil before 9/11.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jeffrey Toobin: And I don’t think that’s accurate. It’s not even the worst act of terrorism in Oklahoma history, that shortly after the turn of the century, there was a massacre in the Black neighborhood of Wall Street in —
Chris Hayes: Yep.
Jeffrey Toobin: — Tulsa. There were 300 people approximately, no one knows the exact number, killed there, an event that only really in recent years has started to get the attention it deserved. But it’s important to say that as bad as the Oklahoma City bombing was, more people died in Tulsa —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jeffrey Toobin: — than in Oklahoma City.
Chris Hayes: Yes. And there’s decades of lawless terror across the wide swaths of American South and also in the frontier and in many instances as well.
After the bombing, and this is where we get into the part that’s sort of the public record and also things I remember very clearly, because it was such, obviously, just an utterly shocking thing, there is, first, this impulse to look towards, you know, Islamic jihadi actors. This was after the World Trade Center bombing that had happened, the first one, in 1993. What’s the public reaction and then how does the case get cracked?
Jeffrey Toobin: You know, the case gets cracked through some really excellent work by the FBI and very fast work by the FBI. When the bomb goes off, obviously, most of the damage is confined to the front of the Murrah Building. But at the moment that the bomb goes off, an enormous truck axle goes flying through the air a full block away and crushes a car that’s sitting in front of an apartment building a block away.
Law enforcement officials recognize from the beginning that this truck axle probably comes from —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeffrey Toobin: — the vehicle that was holding the bomb. The truck axle has a VIN number on it, vehicle identification number on it, which is tied to a Ryder truck. The Ryder company says that truck was rented two days earlier in Junction City, Kansas, by someone named Robert Kling.
The FBI then swarms Junction City, Kansas, which is a small city outside of Fort Riley, Kansas, where McVeigh and Nichols had been stationed. And they start going to hotels and motels and asking, has anybody seen a Ryder truck?
They go to one motel in particular, the Dreamland Motel, and the owner says, yeah, there was a guy here who had a big Ryder truck, and he rented his room. And his name was Timothy McVeigh and he registered under the name Timothy McVeigh.
They then look at his phone records and they see that he called a Chinese restaurant for delivery of food. They go to the Chinese restaurant, and they see that the Chinese restaurant made a delivery to Room 25, Timothy McVeigh’s room, but he gave the name as Robert Kling.
So, in the matter of 24 hours, the —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeffrey Toobin: — FBI recognizes that the person who rented the truck was, in fact, Timothy McVeigh. At the same time, right after the bombing, McVeigh, who having stashed the getaway car, drives north on I-35 heading back to Kansas and he’s driving in a car without a license plate, a Oklahoma state trooper named Charlie Hanger stops him for having no license plate and then sees that he’s carrying a gun for which he has no license.
He takes him in because you’re not allowed to have a gun without a license, and through a series of really screw ups, he is not given a bail hearing for 48 hours. During those 48 hours, they make the connection, and they see that Timothy McVeigh has been arrested and is sitting in jail in a little town called —
Chris Hayes: So wild.
Jeffrey Toobin: — Perry, Oklahoma. And just as he’s about to be released, they say, don’t release him. We think he’s the bomber.
If I can just offer a little postscript to this, which I think is particularly revealing. Charlie Hanger, who’s a great American hero as far as I’m concerned, is the guy who arrests McVeigh and keeps him arrested because he’s carrying the gun without a license.
Today, if McVeigh had been arrested, if he was stopped for driving without a license, he could not have been arrested because there is now open carry laws in Oklahoma that you’re allowed to have a gun without a license in Oklahoma, which just shows how, even though McVeigh is a reviled figure in Oklahoma for understandable reasons, his views about the Second Amendment have been ascendant there in the almost 30 years since he was arrested.
Chris Hayes: What I just remember very clearly was that they released a sketch of who they thought the perpetrator was, you know, artist rendering police sketch. And then fairly shortly thereafter, they announced that they had apprehended the individual. And I remember the first picture of him, you know, basically being perp walk was, you know, really like it was like, oh, that is definitely the person that was in that sketch.
Like, it was the sense that, like, they got the guy was so palpable and nailed. And, like, it just became very clear very quickly when everything was put together there was not a mystery here, basically.
Jeffrey Toobin: Absolutely. And what I learned in writing the book was that as soon as McVeigh spoke to a lawyer, first a different lawyer than Stephen Jones, he said, oh, yeah, I did it. I mean —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jeffrey Toobin: — there was never any mystery on the part of basically anyone who did this.
There have been various conspiracy theories over the years about others who potentially may have been involved. I try to address all of those in the book. And I am not persuaded that that there was anyone involved besides McVeigh and Nichols. But in terms of McVeigh’s involvement, you’re right. He looked exactly like the sketch. And that was just yet another example of how the FBI, frankly, did a terrific job in establishing his involvement in a very brief period of time.
Chris Hayes: We’re now, you know, a little less than 30 years after the bombing, McVeigh would be convicted and ultimately put to death in the federal death penalty and executed. His lawyers then gave the archive, the papers, to the University of Texas, Austin, I think, has it in their library and you were able to write this book.
Jeffrey Toobin: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: You know, there’s a lot of talk now about the rise and threat of right-wing violent extremism. There have been individual acts of mass shootings very clearly undertaken as explicitly, you know, murderous, you know, reactionary terror, I guess would be the right word.
You know, we saw it in El Paso. We saw it at the Tree of Life synagogue. We’ve seen it in a few other circumstances.
I remember thinking at some point, you know, particularly during the peak of, kind of, Michigan Militia, of violent extremism coverage in the ’90s, that it was going to be a growing problem or this wouldn’t be the last thing like this I saw in my life. I remember thinking that actually after 9/11 too, like we were going to have a lot of these. And then, you know, we haven’t, thank goodness, had another Oklahoma City bombing and we haven’t, thank the Lord, ever had another 9/11. And I wonder how you think about why that is.
Jeffrey Toobin: Well, you know, it’s funny. You can look at it as how few we’ve had, or how many. You know —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeffrey Toobin: — I have a lengthy epilogue in the book about, you know, the history of right-wing extremism since 1995.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jeffrey Toobin: And what struck me was how much there was, not how little. The mechanism is different. I mean, no one has had the energy or the motivation to build a bomb like that. But look at what happened.
You know, McVeigh was so outraged about the Assault Weapons Ban, which passed in 1994. That law expired 10 years later. And if you look at what right-wing extremists have done subsequently, it’s almost always with assault weapons. You know, it’s —
Chris Hayes: Yes, it’s (ph) the tool now.
Jeffrey Toobin: — so easy to get an assault weapon and shoot up a Walmart in El Paso or a church in South Carolina like Dylann Roof did. You don’t need to go to all the trouble of building a bomb.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jeffrey Toobin: Now it’s true, you’re not going to kill 168 people, but you can kill 10 or you can —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeffrey Toobin: — kill 12, or you can kill five. And the number of right-wing acts, including many that have been thwarted, fortunately —
Chris Hayes: Thwarted. Yes.
Jeffrey Toobin: — before they could come to fruition, like the kidnapping of Governor Whitmer, you know, I guess, I agree with you that it’s good that there hasn’t been more like McVeigh. But, boy, there’s been a lot more right-wing activity in this realm that I had thought there was when I began work on the book.
Chris Hayes: Well, and that point about the gun is so sort of central, too, because we’ve also seen, you know, we’ve seen to the extent that there have been deadly attacks by people, you know, in pursuit of, you know, ISIS’s ideology or al-Qaeda, like it, they also have used guns because it’s, to your point, right, like, that is the easiest way for mass destruction.
In American society, all the, you know, cloak and dagger and all the difficulty and all the red flags you might have, getting fertilizer and getting all this stuff, you have this, like, wildly destructive weapon, essentially easily accessible if that is what you want to do and what you would choose to do with it.
Jeffrey Toobin: Right. And you made a passing mention of this, but I think it’s important to emphasize, which is the internet and social media which was not available to McVeigh. There’s a line in the book where McVeigh says to his lawyers, you know, I knew there was an army out there. I just couldn’t find them.
And —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jeffrey Toobin: — he couldn’t —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeffrey Toobin: — because he would go to gun shows, but he didn’t have the kind of personality and there was not the mechanism to mobilize people on a large scale. And, you know, he listened to Rush Limbaugh, but that was a one way, you know, you couldn’t talk —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Jeffrey Toobin: — to other Limbaugh followers. The internet changed all that. And if you look at all the right-wing violence since, in the last, you know, 15 years, since the internet has become ubiquitous, the internet is ever present, whether it’s the Michigan conspirators using Facebook chats or Dylann Roof using neo-Nazi websites. The ability to become radicalized and find fellow travelers on the internet is something that is a big part of how this kind of activity has continued in recent years.
Chris Hayes: I guess my final question is sort of an open ended one that I always end up sort of thinking on. I remember reading like, you know, I’ve read profiles of Ayman al-Zawahiri and of Mohamed Atta, Zawahiri being the sort of number two in al-Qaeda and Mohamed Atta being one of, sort of, the chief planners of 9/11. And I’ve read profiles of Dylann Roof, you know.
And there’s something that happens on all these, right, which is like there’s just some sort of, like, but for question that can never be answered, right? Like, to get back to the point you said in the beginning of like, you know, there’s all sorts of people who go through all sorts of horrible things or who have all sorts of resentments or get all sorts of really terrible politics.
And in the end, it becomes this sort of almost irreducible question of human nature about like the thing that tips over someone from that sort of mundane category of being resentful or angry or rageful or violent or whatever, into being this. And I wonder what you’re having spent so much time thinking about it, how you think of it.
Jeffrey Toobin: You know, I think about this in the broader sense of, you know, having been a prosecutor and having been a journalist covering a lot of crimes, you know, that were just terrible. You know, what is it about people leading seemingly ordinary lives that tips them into true evil and malevolent activity?
And the short answer is, I don’t know, you know.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Jeffrey Toobin: I would talk to McVeigh’s lawyers. As I spoke to at length, you know, they would often fixate on his flunking out of the Green Beret School. Said, you know, if they’d only just made him a Green Beret, none of this would have happened. And they were saying that sort of as a joke, but not really. And that may be true.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Jeffrey Toobin: You know, I come back, and this is, you know, perhaps simple-minded, but it’s like, there’s evil in the world. I mean, there are bad people in the world. We don’t know who they are in advance. You know, we can’t predict who’s going to do what. But there are people out there who are just going to do terrible things, and they’re among us and it’s never going to go away, I’m afraid.
Chris Hayes: Yeah (ph). The book is called “Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism.” It is available wherever you get your books, including your local library.
Jeffrey Toobin, thank you so much.
Jeffrey Toobin: Thanks, Chris.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Jeffrey Toobin. We would love to hear your feedback. Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHPod@gmail.com, and be sure to follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod.
“Why is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Bob Mallory and Cedric Wilson and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. Follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.