The Scant Reporting on Federal Criminal Cases & "Major Crimes" Investigations
A quick datapoint that illustrates how little we know
Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue, seeking out details on the obvious prison murder by federal agents of his brother Kenneth Trentadue in August 1995, has uncovered over 2 million documents by litigating FOIA.
One of the most powerful things he has revealed, is the existence of “PATCON” which stands for “Patriot Conspiracy.” PATCON operates to infiltrate, subvert, and lead, extreme right organizations.
The FBI is alleged to have founded a Neo-Nazi bank robbery gang, the “Aryan Republican Army” or “ARA.” From this position, they could use violence to help solve other problems and investigations, as well as entrap the members of the ARA who were not in on the con.
Why fight bank robbers when you can simply become a bank robber, after all.
But this operation, “PATCON,” gets scant little attention from the national press.
Now that might be because they simply don’t know, you might say.
Though it’s not hard to get in touch with Trentadue and the others who have uncovered these things, such as the wonderful Substack OKC Facts. These PATCON actions are well-documented with federal documents.
It’s wrong to label it a ‘conspiracy theory’ since these things are so well documented, they are simply unreported.
PATCON is Jesse Trentadue’s mission, he is out to get it shut down. The official story is that it existed only from 1991-1993, but Trentadue’s witness, former FBI contractor John Matthews, has a plaque that offers Bureau appreciation for this work from 1991-1998, so it certainly lasted longer than we officially know.
Trentadue thinks it continues today. He sees elements of PATCON in the Whitmer Kidnapping Hoax of 2020 and the January 6th 2020 Capitol protest.
PATCON is labeled a “Major Case” internally at the FBI. It is apparently treated differently as a result, and bureaucratically certain funding sources and intelligence-sharing is handled differently as a result of the classification.
It is also a “Major Case Group 1 Undercover Operation.” This means it is reviewed by the ‘undercover review committee’ which Danny Coulson sat on. OKC Facts’ Richard Booth believes that PATCON was officially shut down in 1993 or so and reopened under a new name.
These kind of bureaucratic determinations are very hard to discern from the outside, and rarely shared with the audience, making understanding federal operations opaque and byzantine.
There’s only a few other “Major Cases” that we seem to know the name for: “VAAPCON,” which was a way to investigate abortion clinic bombers. Also, there is “BOMBROB” which was the investigation into the Aryan Republican Army, as well as “OKCBOMB,” which was the Oklahoma City Bombing investigation in 1995.
There is simply one Washington Post article referencing VAAPCON from January 25, 1996.
The goal was to prove a national conspiracy among anti-abortion activists to target clinics and providers.
The investigation did not produce any indictments for a national conspiracy, and a grand jury was allegedly disbanded in 1996. Federal prosecutors ultimately determined that while a broad conspiracy could not be proven, evidence of smaller, localized conspiracies existed.
The designation for “VAAPCON” was “MC-111” suggesting that there were at least 110 other ‘major crime’ investigations similar in scale and scope.
I tried to reconstruct this list, and this is the best I’ve come up with so far, for the FBI’s “Major Cases” by their designation number:
MC-1: Brinks Robbery (New York, 1981) – linked to Weather Underground/Black Liberation Army.
MC-3: FALN (Armed Forces of National Liberation, Puerto Rican militants, 1970s–80s).
MC-12: ABSCAM (late 1970s undercover bribery sting involving Congress).
MC-18: “Pizza Connection” (Mafia heroin trafficking case, 1980s).
MC-55: WTC Bombing 1993 (first attack on World Trade Center).
MC-65: Pan Am Flight 103 / Lockerbie Bombing.
MC-98: World Trade Center Bombing Conspirators (related trials).
MC-109: UNABOM; The Unabomber investigation that ended with the imprisonment of Ted Kaczynski (1942-2023).
MC-111: VAAPCON; Building a conspiracy case for clinic bombers to be tied to pro-lifers.
MC-117: OKBOMB
MC-124: BOMBROB; Investigation into the Aryan Republican Army’s bank robberies across the Midwest.
MC-135: KHOBAR; Khobar Towers Bombing (Saudi Arabia, 1996).
MC-161: UNABOM continuation (arrest and prosecution phase).
MC-198: USS Cole Bombing (Yemen, 2000).
MC-212: PENTTBOM; 9/11 attacks, Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing
MC-???: PATCON; “Patriot Conspiracy”, the infiltration, subversion, and leadership of extreme right political groups.
It’s interesting that the alleged goal of “VAAPCON” was a conclusion in search of evidence: they were seeking to prove a national conspiracy to bomb clinics. It looks an awfully lot like they were simply trying to dragnet together pro-life activists and organizations to bring them all down.
FBI contractor John Matthews related to Utah Attorney Jesse Trentadue that agents involved in these operations don’t even know the names of the operations, they don’t know that what they’re doing and engaged in, is part of this wider enterprise.
Trentadue also claims, that at least for PATCON in the 90’s, that it was clear it was being run out of the White House.
Trentadue claims that Matthews told him that no FBI Agent, and not even FBI leadership, would take these kind of risks without having official approval all the way to the top. Trentadue suggests that the White House visitor logs show a very odd pattern with many of these claims, where obvious false names, ones like “Daffy Duck” and “Mickey Mouse” were on the logs to cover-up the fact that FBI Agents and leadership were regularly updating and getting approvals from, the senior levels of the White House.
He also notes that the day before the McVeigh trial started, Merrick Garland was meeting with Hillary Clinton in the White House before flying out to Colorado. High stakes investigations and major crime operations were being run by senior people and reporting to the very top of the government at the time.
And meanwhile we, the public, don’t even know the names of the various operations, much less the scale and scope, of what long-term programs like this were being conducted by federal law enforcement.
Trentadue believes agents from this program killed his brother Kenneth in August 1995, and then staged his death scene to make it look like a suicide. They appear to have been in a hurry however, so they did a very sloppy job.
added your story to the information page on kennethtrentadue.com
"show a very odd pattern with many of these claims, where obvious false names, ones like “Daffy Duck” and “Mickey Mouse” "
I also discovered that!
:)