DENVER - An Oklahoma City judge has criticized the U.S. Justice Department's conduct in resisting a person's request to make public the FBI's secret files about the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
U.S. District Judge Wayne Alley, in recent court orders, called the department's conduct "shoddy" and "unacceptable."
The judge's criticism was disclosed in a court filing Wednesday in Denver. In the filing, David Hoffman contends that public disclosure of the FBI's investigative files is needed to determine whether everyone involved in the bombing was prosecuted.
Hoffman's filing asks the judge who presided over the trials of the two bombing defendants, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, to undo his 1996 order that kept secret all evidence not presented at the 1997 trials.
In his request to U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch in Denver, Hoffman attached court orders by Alley in June and July in which Alley criticized the Justice Department's court conduct in its efforts to maintain "its shroud of secrecy."
Alley is assigned to Hoffman's 1998 lawsuit against the Justice Department seeking the FBI records under the Freedom of Information Act . The judge criticized the department's several written arguments against disclosure as "patently insufficient," "ambiguous," and "cursory."
"Defendant's conduct has been unacceptable, to the point that one might question whether the FBI views its FOIA obligations seriously," Alley wrote.
The Oklahoma City judge said, however, that the Denver judge is "the only federal judge who can alter the existing limits on the FBI's disclosure of its (bombing case) records."
Matsch ordered that evidence not presented in court be kept secret, a practice sometimes used in high-profile criminal cases in federal court.
Alley said Hoffman should give Matsch a copy of Alley's comments "so that Judge Matsch will know how defendant (the Justice Department) has behaved in this case" in the past two years.
Hoffman pleaded guilty in 1999 to tampering with the state grand jury in Oklahoma City that investigated the 1995 bombing. He had sent his book about his theory of unsolved conspiracies in the bombing to an alternate grand juror.
Alley was assigned to the bombing case until an appeals court in 1995 turned the case over to Matsch who moved it to Denver.
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