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Crime Story Episode 34: Jeffrey Toobin

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The following episode contains difficult subject matter. Please take care while listening.

SOUNDCLIP

JEFFREY TOOBIN: This was meticulously planned. There was a five minute timer and a two minute timer, and it went off with such explosive force that it could be heard 55 miles away. It registered on the Richter scale as almost like an earthquake. And people may remember photographs. A third of the building collapsed into a heap.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: 30 years ago, a bomb went off in a federal building in downtown Oklahoma. I was a pretty young reporter, but I do remember the aftermath. Floor after floor, just a mess of concrete and debris. And you couldn't imagine that anyone lived through this attack. And then you found out that many of those killed had been kids, really little kids. Because on the second floor, there was a day-care. 19 young lives were lost that day. Early reports suggested that it was the work of Islamic terrorists. But the truth, it was closer to home. It was an American who lit the fuse, a disgruntled Army vet named Timothy McVeigh, who wanted to send the government a message.

SOUNDCLIP

JEFFREY TOOBIN: I as a journalist missed the biggest significance of the case, which was the political aspect of it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Jeffrey Toobin was an up and coming journalist when McVeigh's name was all over the news. In the years since, he's come to see McVeigh in a new light, as a kind of warning sign. It's all there in his new book and podcast called Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right Wing Extremism. I'm Kathleen Goldhar, and this is Crime Story.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So let's talk a little bit about Timothy McVeigh and just acknowledging that he wasn't the start of the alt right. And we will get to where he got his inspiration, but he is a pretty major figure that still is sort of in the consciousness of a lot of the people that are either on the alt right or watching it. Who was Timothy McVeigh? Can you tell me about him?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Sure. I mean, just to back your audience up a little bit. I don't think we should assume too much familiarity with this story. It's been a long time. On April 19th, 1995, Timothy McVeigh, in a rented Ryder truck, set off a bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City. And he killed 168 people. He was later convicted and executed in 2001. That's the broad outline of why Timothy McVeigh is important. But to answer your question of who Timothy McVeigh was, he came from a very ordinary middle class background, although there are revealing hints of what he would become. He grew up outside Buffalo, very close to the Canadian border, in a suburb that was dominated by a General Motors plant that his father worked at for 30 years and his grandfather worked at for 30 years. By the time McVeigh came of age, he was born in 1968. So by the time he came of age in the 1980s, he was aware that the industrial economy of the American northeast was declining a lot and there were no more jobs there. So this unsettling economic insecurity that he grew up with was part of what shaped him. His parents had a rancorous divorce when he was a teenager, and his mother moved to Florida with the two daughters, leaving McVeigh behind with the father. So there is this element of abandonment by his mother, kind of a Sophie's Choice, where I think you see the roots of some real hostility to women. He never had a real relationship with a woman, and I think that that's part of what made him. He graduated from high school. No problems. Decent student. Didn't show any interest in going to college. Worked as a security guard for a while, didn't really know what to do, and then joined the American army where he was a very good soldier. And he won a Bronze Star in the first Gulf War in 1991 in barrack. But it was during that period that his anger and his radicalization really set in. And it was after he flunked out of the Special Forces. He tried to make it to the Special forces, and the failure left him adrift and angry. And it was at that point he went into, you know, full, full bore right wing extremist activity leading to the bombing in 1995.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I just want to spend a bit of time during his time in the military. I really appreciated how you had some of the people saying that they quite liked him, and he didn't seem all that memorable in a way. But then you had a few guys who were like black servicemen who were like, no, he was racist. So I mean, I found that really interesting that it could be hidden, I guess, or just not noticed. But he was already sort of entered that world heading in that direction.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: The key thing you have to understand about McVeigh's roots is that late in high school, but before he even joined the military, he mailed away for a book called The Turner Diaries, which was a dystopian, horrible novel about a race war in the United States. He found the advertisement for The Turner Diaries in a magazine from the National Rifle Association. And the great cause of McVeigh's life was guns, his obsession with guns. And his fear that the evil federal government was going to take away his ability to own and use guns was the central motivating factor of his life. The Turner Diaries postulates that the evil blacks and Jews take over the federal government, pass a law calling for confiscation of all privately owned firearms. And Earl Turner, who was the protagonist and narrator of the novel, leads a rebellion which begins with a truck bomb placed outside the FBI building in Washington, which was very much the model for the Oklahoma City bombing. So the racism and the anti-Semitism and the gun obsession that led to the bombing in 1995 was very much there while he was in the Army, but he was also a very competent soldier. And, you know, it is not unknown for people who were and are racist also to be competent soldiers. So I don't necessarily see a contradiction between those views of his fellow soldiers. It's just an illustration of who he really was.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And he was a good soldier until he tried out for the Special Forces, right? Like he lasted a day, I think. Is that what you say?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Right. You know, Special Forces is a cut above the physical demands to make it into special forces, the Green Berets, as they're also known. It's just incredibly demanding in terms of physical strength and endurance. McVeigh took the test right after he got back from Iraq, where he had been basically cooped up in the tank-like vehicle where he was the gunner. He had not gotten much exercise. He was not all that fit and strong to start with. He was a good enough soldier to be, you know, a grunt. And I mean that with no disrespect during that war, but he didn't nearly have enough physical abilities to be a Green Beret. And that disappointment which he experienced after the Gulf War was really transformative for him and really alienated him from the Army and basically all of conventional American life.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So how do you go from somebody who is disgruntled and bitter and feeling alienated to start to think, I want to murder a significant number of people? And throughout your book and the podcast, you make it clear that he understood that if his plan worked, a lot of people would die, including kids. How do you get there?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: There's a famous line from Ernest Hemingway about someone who went bankrupt gradually, then suddenly.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It’s like the movie star who makes it after 20 years, but he’s an overnight success. Yeah.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Exactly. Exactly.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: The gradual aspect was, you know, the alienation from the Army, the failure to establish any connection with women, this obsession with guns, and the election of Bill Clinton, whom he despised, in 1992, and the fear that Clinton and Democrats would take his guns away. He was also radicalized by the changing tenor of American politics after Clinton was elected, most especially Rush Limbaugh, the radio talk show host who's angry and very entertaining diatribes generated a huge audience, including McVeigh, every day. And so that was the gradual process. But the sudden process was Waco. On April 19th, 1993, two years before the Oklahoma City bombing, the FBI was conducting a siege, a waiting out, a cult in Waco, Texas, called the Branch Davidians. And after waiting for more than a month, the FBI sent in tear gas and the compound caught on fire, and 76 people were killed. It was a horrible, horrible thing. It remains controversial to this day. I think most people believe, and I believe that it was actually more a mass suicide on the part of the Branch Davidians than a homicide by the FBI. But in any case, it was horrific. A lot of children died, and McVeigh was so horrified by what he regarded as the FBI's evil in what they did at Waco, that that was what turned him from sort of a grumpy guy in a car to an actual terrorist wanting to strike back at the federal government. So the combination of the ideological radicalization led by The Turner Diaries and the Waco raid was really what transformed him into something extremely dangerous.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I find it so interesting that the Waco raid, you know, McVeigh wasn't the only one who radicalized over it, right? Like there was other… the fallout from Waco still exists, like you said. But even at the time, there were other people, men, alt right men, I guess they didn’t call it alt right then, that saw Waco as a calling card.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Waco, to this day, remains a slogan, a motto of how the federal government is a force for evil. And again, bringing it to the present, when Donald Trump held his first rally running for president this year in 2024, I guess it was last year when he began his campaign for the 2024 election, he held a rally in Waco. And the symbolic resonance of that was unmistakable, and I am sure intentional, because Waco remains a symbol of the evil of a democratically led, that is capital D Democratic Party led federal government.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Let's get back to McVeigh then and his plot. So Waco happens. He becomes, like you said, a guy who was in his car listening to Rush Limbaugh, to somebody who wants to do something. How does that start? Where does he start to put this plot together?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Well, he joins forces with another person, for one thing. He joins forces with a guy named Terry Nichols, whom he met on the first day of basic training when he enlisted in the Army. Nichols had similar views, anger at the federal government, but he had none of McVeigh's energy and, frankly, evil charisma. I mean, he was a loser. He was almost a decade older than McVeigh. He had failed at job after job. He had a failed marriage. He was a lost soul who was led by McVeigh. I am certain that Terry Nichols, left to his own devices, never would have bombed the Murrah building. That's not to defend Terry Nichols. He just didn't have the energy or, frankly, the intelligence to do it. But the fact that…

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but even as you go through it, it sounds like he doesn't even have the moral, moral fortitude is the wrong word, but the internal fortitude. He doesn't actually want to do it, it sounds.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Well, I was with you almost to the end there. How much you want… I mean…

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Fair.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: His lawyers claim that he sort of wanted to pull out of the conspiracy at various points. I never believed that. I think McVeigh remained part of the conspiracy throughout. However, I do think that he was led by McVeigh, there's no question. And McVeigh was by far the dominant partner, but it was a partnership. And they decided together that they wanted to strike back against the federal government in return for Waco. And they decided that they wanted to do it on the second anniversary of the Waco raid, April 19th, 1995. And again, because of The Turner Diaries, they thought that a truck bomb by a federal institution would be appropriately symbolic. In part, they thought, that as in The Turner Diaries, the bombing would set off a broader rebellion against the federal government. You know, McVeigh said that afterwards. I think he was probably too smart to believe that there really was going to be any such rebellion. But I think he wanted to galvanize just anger against the federal government. I don't think he really thought that, you know, that the people were going to rise up in great numbers, but this was a symbolic strike at the federal government. And what sealed the deal, and I think this is very important, is that what really solidified McVeigh and Nichols decision to commit this act of terrorism was that on September 21st, 1994, Bill Clinton signed an assault weapons ban. He signed a ban on possessing assault weapons, which is something to this day broadly supported by the American people, but always stymied by the Republican Party. That was such a threat to McVeigh's worldview, such a direct threat to his beloved sense of what he was entitled to as an American, that it was that change in the law that prevented Americans from getting assault weapons that led him and Nichols to decide in September that about seven months later, they would set off a bomb, and they spent the next seven months essentially full time planning the bombing.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And they planned the bomb in Oklahoma. But in The Turner Diaries, it's in Washington, DC. So why did they pick Oklahoma?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Well, McVeigh had never been to Washington, DC, and he understood, I think correctly, the security of Washington, DC. That whole part of the world was unknown to him. He didn't think he could really get to the FBI building and park a truck the way he wanted. So and he thought if he did it in the heartland of America, in the centre of the country, it would galvanize the people he cared about most, the people he thought were like him, the sort of middle Americans. But that still left the question of where to do it. And they looked at various options. They looked at Tucson, Arizona. They looked at Dallas, Texas, where they found there was not one big federal building, but a bunch of different federal buildings. They looked at Little Rock, Arkansas, where they saw that you couldn't really park a truck right next to the Federal Building in Little Rock. What sealed the deal for Oklahoma was really architecture. I mean, it seems bizarre to say that, like so much of the story is bizarre, but, you know, when McVeigh and Nichols scouted the Murrah building, they saw that there was a black glass facade and a little indentation by that black facade where cars could pull in and people could drop off and pick up passengers. But it was right next to the building. And McVeigh thought, I think correctly, that he could park a truck there in a city where people weren't too concerned about security, I mean, this was literally unthinkable, and walk away with the bomb on a timer and destroy the building. And that's how the plan was hatched. And one of the things I thought was just peculiar about the Oklahoma City bombing is that it really had almost nothing to do with Oklahoma City. It was just that there happened to be an accessible federal building there, and that's why McVeigh chose it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: How long did it take for him after he walked away? What was the timer set to?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: There were two timers. I mean, it was, you know, this was meticulously planned. There was a five minute timer and a two minute timer. His five minute timer he set going while he was still at a red light waiting to sit, waiting to pull into the, in front of the building. He set the two minute timer when he got out of the car and locked it and threw the keys inside so no one could get in and try to stop it. So it was about two minutes after. He and Nichols, the day before, had planted a getaway car in an alleyway about three blocks away. And so he was walking to the getaway car when the bomb went off at precisely 9:03 a.m. on April 19th.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And like you said at the beginning, not everybody listening is going to know. How devastating was the bomb?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: It was enormous. Over the course of those seven months of planning, they had purchased, using fake names, approximately £4000 of fertilizer, which they placed in barrels, and then used racing fuel to create an improvised bomb. And it went off with such explosive force that it could be heard 55 miles away. It registered on the Richter scale as almost like an earthquake. And people may remember photographs of the Murrah Building. It basically created about a third of the building. It's an eight story building. A third of the building collapsed into a heap. That whole black glass facade was destroyed. And I think another fact that I think people remember is that on the second floor of the Murrah building, there was a daycare centre. And that was precisely under the bomb, which absorbed almost, you know, the full brunt of the blast. And of the 168 people, 19 of the people killed were children.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And they knew those kids were there, right?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: You know, that is one of the disputed aspects of… there's not much disputed, in my view, about the facts. McVeigh told his lawyer, I did not know there was a daycare centre there. And I think it's entirely possible that he did not know there was a daycare centre there. But what he told his lawyer was, and I think this is important, even if I knew there was a daycare centre there, I would have set the bomb off anyway. Because so many children died at Waco, the federal government had essentially brought this on itself. And I think that comment to his lawyers really underlines what a total sociopath this guy was. I mean, you know, I speak about his intelligence and I mean it, but the evil of this man was deeply, deeply profound. And that comment to his lawyers I think distils it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: What were you doing on that day?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: From the ridiculous to the sublime to the ridiculous. I was covering the O. J. Simpson trial in Los Angeles. I was in Judge Ito's courtroom, and I found out about it on a break. And I remember, you know, very, very, you know, not to disparage the murders in O. J. Simpson's case. I mean, the two people died. It was a very serious crime, but it certainly wasn't as serious as this act of terrorism. And I remember thinking to myself, what the hell am I doing here when there's such a more important story? Interestingly, the O. J. Simpson case winds up being rather important in the unfolding of the Oklahoma City bombing, especially on the legal side. But it's easy for me to remember where I was on April 19th 1995.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, for sure. So now you can say you've covered Trump and you've covered O. J.. Feels like you get to the Seminole American ridiculous trials.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: That's what I do for a living.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Did you go to Oklahoma then, or did you stay in LA and finish O. J.?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: I stayed in LA, and I did not cover the bombing itself. But two years later after the bombing, in 1997, the trial of McVeigh and later the trial of Nichols was moved to Denver, Colorado, because there was so much pre-trial publicity in Oklahoma. And I did cover the trials of McVeigh and Nichols, which took place in Denver.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And we'll get there, but I just want to talk a little bit about how they were caught, because one thing that I remember quite well is the initial sort of idea that this was not homegrown, that it was Islamic terrorists that had made their way to the United States. Could you talk a little bit about that? Like where was the focus and how did it eventually find its way to the right people?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: There was a lot of focus on Islamic terrorism. And it had only been two years since the first World Trade Centre bombing in 1993, where it was Islamic terrorism. And it was a truck bomb, and it was even a Ryder truck. I mean, it was not irrational to think this might be Islamic terrorism. What I think is interesting, especially in retrospect and especially after 911 which was, of course, Islamic terrorism, there has been an effort, especially on the part of many on the American right, to define terrorism as exclusively something that comes from Islamic radicals. And there was an effort to dismiss what happened there in Oklahoma City and try to associate it somehow with Islamic radicalism. But it wasn't. The way the crime was solved was twofold. One was in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, a truck axle flew through the air, an enormous truck axle flew through the air 100 yards away. Think about that, you know, what kind of explosive force it takes to throw a truck axle a hundred yards. And there was a vehicle identification number, and it was traced to a Ryder truck rental in Junction City, Kansas, where it had been rented two days earlier by someone named Robert Kling. That was one route. 90 minutes after the bombing, an Oklahoma state trooper named Charlie Hanger noticed that a beat up old Ford Mercury was driving north on I-35 north to Kansas out of Oklahoma with no license plate. McVeigh… And it was McVeigh's car. Charlie Hanger stopped him and saw that McVeigh was carrying an unlicensed gun. If he had just stopped him for not having a license plate, all he could have done was getting him a ticket. But because he had an unlicensed gun, he arrested him and took him to the lockup in Perry, a small town north of Oklahoma City. Just a parenthetical note here. In the intervening quarter century, McVeigh's views about gun rights have prevailed, especially in states like Oklahoma. And now in Oklahoma, you don't need any sort of permit to carry a gun. So if McVeigh had been arrested today by Charlie Hanger, he couldn't have been held. But because in 1995, the rules were that you needed a permit, he was sent to lockup. Through essentially a bureaucratic mix up, he was held overnight in the jail, even though it was a minor charge because the judge wasn't available. In the intervening period, the FBI had swarmed the Ryder truck rental place in Junction City, and they started looking around Junction City, asking people in hotels, motels, stores, have you seen a Ryder truck? They found a woman who rented a truck to someone named Timothy McVeigh two days before the bombing. So the truck was rented under the name…

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: His real name.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Robert Kling.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Oh, the truck. Sorry, the hotel.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: No, the truck was running under Robert Kling. The hotel room was rented under the name Timothy McVeigh. But what really sealed the deal was that they checked the phone records. McVeigh had ordered Chinese food, delivery Chinese food from a restaurant in Junction City, and he had used the name Robert Kling. So the FBI quickly determined that Robert Kling and Timothy McVeigh were the same people and that was the guy who rented the Ryder truck.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But how did they connect Robert, the Chinese food eater, with Timothy McVeigh?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Because he had ordered food delivered to room 25 at the…

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: At the motel.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: At the motel, which was the room rented to Timothy McVeigh. And later, they found the delivery guy who recognized him and…

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: God. Yeah. Okay.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: So they get the name Timothy McVeigh, they run it through the databases, and they find Timothy McVeigh has just been arrested north of Oklahoma City on this minor gun charge. They frantically call the lockup in Perry, Oklahoma, and say, don't let this guy out. We think he's the Oklahoma City bomber, and they don't let him out and he's arrested. So basically, McVeigh is arrested 90 minutes after the bombing and is never, you know, and never sees the light of day again after that.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It's incredible, good, lucky and good police work and also stupidity on his part to not keep the name.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Well, stupidity, perhaps. But, you know, one of the things that is… I mean, I think there are not… As I say, there are not a lot of mysteries about this. But there was a kind of fatalistic aspect to McVeigh, and I don't think he wanted to get caught in the sense of he really just wanted to get caught. But there was a sense that for all the meticulous planning that he engaged in, and it was really enormous to do the bombing, he had very little plan for what he was going to do afterwards. And part of why, you know, he sort of used the name Robert Kling, but also rented the truck under, I mean, rented the hotel under his own name, there was a kind of fatalism about it. So I'm not sure it was entirely stupidity, but there was an aspect that he sort of knew the gig was up after the bombing.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Do you think there was something to him wanting to be known for this? I mean, if you're going to do something so spectacular and in his mind, important, why would you want to be anonymous?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Well, this was why it was so hard to defend him, his lawyers found. And that's a substantial part of the book and the podcast, which is he had inconsistent goals. He sort of wanted to be acquitted, but he wanted it to be known that he did this. In the car, in the getaway car, he had an envelope full of photocopied right wing literature, including excerpts from The Turner Diaries, basically explaining the justification for why he did this, you know, that the federal government had become evil. You know, he said, you know, maybe he was going to mail it to, you know, the press later. So that is another aspect of why his post bombing security was so poor, was because there was an element of if not wanting to be caught, wanting people to know why this had been done.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. What happened to Terry Nichols? How did they catch him?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Terry Nichols, they went to McVeigh's father back in Buffalo, outside Buffalo, and they said, well, who are his friends? And basically, McVeigh didn't have many friends. He basically only had two friends, a Terry Nichols and a guy named Mike Fortier, who also was aware of this plot, although not involved in it. And they went and searched Terry Nichols home, which was not far from Junction City, Kansas. And they found receipts from the purchases of the fertilizer. They found a phone card, which is what people used to use in the 90s for long distance calls, that tied him to McVeigh. And that was how they found. That was how they caught Terry Nichols.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So let's jump now to the trial. Where they tried together or separately?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Separately.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So I guess McVeigh, we’ll start with him. It must have been quite… you were there. I mean, how big a spectacular deal was it?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Well, under the American rules for federal courts, it was not televised. So that limited the public involvement in it, although it was so highly publicized. But it wasn't like a dramatic trial in the sense of will he be convicted because the evidence against him was over overwhelming. And the federal government did a very good job of distilling it into a comprehensible, limited time period, you know, limited number of trial days. You know, they didn't try to tell every inch of the story. So it was important and it was at times dramatic and it was always very sad, but it wasn't exactly a cliff-hanger. I mean, it was just obvious that he was guilty.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So now with the space you've had to look back, what has stuck with you then about that whole trial?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Well, that I as a journalist missed the biggest significance of the case, which was the political aspect of it, that, you know, we covered it and I covered it, I should say, sort of as a true crime case. You know, the truck axle, leading to the Ryder truck rental, leading to the motel, leading to the Chinese food, and all of that was compelling and sort of fun in a true crime way. But the why of the story, It wasn't invisible, but it was neglected. And the fact that McVeigh was part of a movement. Obviously, you know, most people in that movement weren't as violent and evil as McVeigh was, but he was part of a movement, and that was neglected, at least in my coverage of the trial. And that's what brought me back to it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, I think Americans particularly, but probably North Americans are still naive a little bit to that, or at least resistant. But what I found so interesting about your work is your interview with Clinton, who actually did see it.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Right. No, it was totally fascinating.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: I didn't know that, that Clinton, who had been governor of Arkansas for 12 years, had seen right wing extremism up close, had seen the militias in action. And when he saw the Oklahoma City bombing, he said to his staff, now, he didn't want to prejudge the case publicly, but he said privately, this was not Islamic radicalism. This was the militias. I know these people. And what brought me back to this story was something that happened in October of 2020. In October of 2020, a group of people affiliated with the Michigan Militia was arrested for plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. It's crazy plan, but I got interested in it because as Timothy McVeigh was from Buffalo, Terry Nichols was from rural Michigan, and he and his brother were affiliated with the Michigan militia. So when I saw the Michigan Militia was still around in 2020, I thought, wow, this is amazing. So I started following that case, and then I started connecting the dots and seeing how the militia movement and, you know, you call it the alt right, it has lots of different names, but sort of violent right wing extremism has been much more enduring and active since 1995 than I had expected. And that was a big part of Homegrown the book and Homegrown OKC the podcast.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And then that brings us to January 6th. You asked this question and I found your answer fascinating. Would we have seen Timothy McVeigh at January 6th?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: 100%.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: 100%. Because if you look at the obsessions of the people on January 6th, the ones who were arrested, you saw three things that were at the core. One was guns, the idea that the federal government was not going to take away. They weren't going to let the federal government take away their guns. Obviously, the precipitating factor of January 6th was to try to get Donald Trump inaugurated for another term. But the reason they wanted Donald Trump kept as president is because they wanted him. They knew he would protect their guns. So that's one. The other thing was if you look at the rhetoric surrounding January 6th, they were all talking about the American Revolution and the founding of the country and 1776 and the Constitution and the Second Amendment. This idea that the rebellion against the British was comparable to the rebellion against the federal government more than two centuries later is something that drove McVeigh, and it drove the January 6th people. And the third thing after guns and the Founding Fathers was simply the belief that the cause was so just that violence was justified. And those three things would have gotten McVeigh to the crowd on January 6th, no doubt in my mind.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Do you think that the people that were there on January 6th knew about Timothy McVeigh, understood what he had to say? Like how actively did they know his name, or how inherent was what he thought behind what they thought?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: That's a great question, because Timothy McVeigh is a name, I would say, that most Americans know to this day. It is likely Harvey Oswald who killed John F. Kennedy. I mean, it is a…

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Maybe.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Well, we don't have to get into that. It is a name of American villainy that is almost universally known and reviled and reviled. And if you were to ask the January 6th people, other than a very tiny handful, they would say McVeigh was horrible. We're nothing like McVeigh. We don't believe in bombing buildings. We are very different from McVeigh. That's what they would say. That's what Rush Limbaugh said when Clinton quite correctly drew the line between Rush Limbaugh and McVeigh. He said, that's a calumny. That's an insult. You know, we are not mass murderers. What that neglects is the ideological links that are so clear between McVeigh and, you know, the people I call his heirs. I mean, yes, it's true, the vast majority of people who listen to Rush Limbaugh and the vast majority of people on January 6th would not have bombed a building and killed 168 people. But if you look at their motivations to do what they did do, it was very similar to what McVeigh’s were.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Okay. Interesting. So lastly, I just want to ask you a little bit about where we are today. I mean, it's a silly question to ask could it happen something like that again? Because obviously, it does and it has been, and January 6th is a perfect example of that. Has the government, has the US come anywhere closer to being able to deal with groups like this, to deal with that underlying idea that there should be a revolution, that a civil war is coming?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: I think Joe Biden has seen the threat directly. And he gave a speech before the midterm elections in Philadelphia that I thought drew the line pretty well. And I think the FBI has done a much better job of keeping an eye on right wing extremism in the years since. The paradox is that Merrick Garland, the attorney general, has been very cautious in calling out this risk. And that's a paradox and that's an irony because Merrick Garland was originally in charge of the Oklahoma City bombing investigation. And his caution and rhetorical restraint, I think, has continued to this day, particularly through him. And I think that's unfortunate, because he is in a position now where he could call attention to the continuing risks, and he's been very reluctant to do that.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Do you have any idea why?

JEFFREY TOOBIN: I think a lot of it has to do with his personality and the fact that he spent many years as a judge and does not believe in law enforcement officials talking much except through the cases they bring.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, they don't like to sway politics. They believe the cases speak.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Right. He's very averse to being seen as a political figure. I think he's been very naive in failing to see that the right sees him as a political figure anyway. It's not like that effort was successful. And I think he has failed to call appropriate attention to this threat. And, you know, just if I can, you know, draw one distinction between what's going on now and what's going on with McVeigh, you know, because of the assault weapons ban, McVeigh couldn't just buy an assault weapon and shoot up a school or a Walmart. So he went to all this trouble of building a bomb. Because that assault weapons ban expired under the presidency of George W. Bush, it's now very easy to buy an assault weapon in the United States. And if you look at the right wing extremists, they don't have to build bombs anymore. They just buy an assault weapon and they shoot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh, they shoot up a church in South Carolina, they shoot up a Walmart in El Paso. But all of that is because it's easier to engage in this mass violence than it was when McVeigh did the Oklahoma City bombing.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Can I just ask you, you said the thing about so Biden made a good speech, but he also is a Democratic president. You mentioned in the podcast how the Obama years torched this as well. Do we just need a different kind of Republican president to do this? Like will the Democrats be able to actually shift it? Because it feels like the Democratic-ness is the spark, or at least they will never listen to one.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Well, I mean, I think trying to accommodate these crazy people and saying we'll do a Republican president.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I don’t mean accommodate. Yeah.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: I mean, I think this is very close to what much of the Republican Party is today. I mean, look at Donald Trump. Look at how Donald Trump talks about violence. Look at how he says, you know, the people arrested on January 6th are hostages and he's going to pardon them all. I mean, this is who he is. So the idea that, you know, somehow his supporters will be talked out of it just seems fanciful to me at this point.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. So I didn't mean to accommodate. I just meant do we need, and I think you're saying the answer is yes. We need a shift in the Republicans as well.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: I would say I'm not holding my breath.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Fair. Well, Canada has a lot of space. Hopefully, all you Americans will come up when he becomes your next president again.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: You know, it's interesting that that is almost a cliché of American life.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It is.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: That, you know, if X wins the presidency, I'm going to move to Canada. If Trump wins again, I think it's not going to be a joke. I mean, I'm not coming to Canada. I'm very happy to visit, but I'm not moving to Canada. It will be a non-trivial number of people who move to Canada.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, that won't be surprising. Thank you. This has been great. Your work is great, and I really appreciate you giving me your time.

JEFFREY TOOBIN: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. We drop a new episode every Monday. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcasts’ YouTube channel or by subscribing to the CBC Podcasts’ true crime channel on Apple Podcasts. In addition to Early Access, subscribers to our true crime channel also listen ad free. Crime Story is written and hosted by me. Our producers are Alexis Green and Sarah Claydon. Sound design by Graham MacDonald. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Aagaard. Our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Executive producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is CBC Podcasts’ senior manager, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

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Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 34

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