Barack Obama Knew, Often Went Fertilizer Shopping With, Timothy McVeigh

Barack Obama’s ties to domestic terrorists run far deeper, and are far more disturbing, than he’s willing to admit. We uncover the truth about how much Sen. Obama hates the government he wants to lead and the country he hopes to change. 

Second in a Four-Part Carbolic Smoke Ball Investigative Report.

WASHINGTON, DC - Thirty years after he last went to the movies with Lee Harvey Oswald, Barack Obama befriended another shy, quiet, profoundly angry young man who would soon become one of America’s most infamous domestic terrorists.

Obama met Timothy McVeigh in the Garden Center of a suburban Illinois Home Depot in May of 1993, a little less than two years before McVeigh carried out what was then the deadliest peace-time attack in US history. The two struck up a conversation over perennial bulbs and mulch, then ran into each other again at a God Damn America Rally co-sponsored by Trinity United Church of Christ and the Northern Illinois Militia. By the end of the night, after an especially spirited debate over the use of religious symbolism in The Turner Diaries, the two had become friends.  

Obama long refused to talk about, or even to acknowledge, his close friendship with the late Oklahoma City bomber, but recently declassified ATF and FBI documents suggest the two spent countless hours together playing basketball, discussing Constitutional Law, and shopping for ammonium nitrate fertilizers. Obama liked to trash-talk “Timmy V” on the court, telling him repeatedly to “Give it up, because white men can’t jump.” “That’s alright,” McVeigh would respond, “because black men can’t be president.”

Despite some political and ideological differences, the two shared common bonds: tall, wiry frames, big, funny ears, and a belief that without radical redistribution of wealth and violent destabilization of bureaucratic power, the United States government would continue to oppress its citizenry. McVeigh and Obama served together on the advisory boards of several extremist movements, including the Agents of Change and the Weather Overground, before helping each other launch the careers that would make them famous.

McVeigh suggested that Obama should run for the Illinois State Senate. Obama suggested that McVeigh should, on a road trip to Texas, stop off in Oklahoma City to admire the “stately architecture of the Murrah Federal Building.” “Who knows,” Obama reportedly told McVeigh, “it just might inspire you.” Within four years, Obama had earned a seat in the Illinois’ state senate, and McVeigh had earned a seat on the Indiana Federal Penitentiary’s lethal injection table.

The two friends traded letters and occasional phone calls in the six years between McVeigh’s arrest and his execution, but the last time they saw each other was a rainy Saturday afternoon in April of 1993, when Obama helped his friend load five-thousand pounds of fertilizer into the back of a Ryder rental truck. “He said he wanted to plant the seeds of American destruction,” an FBI report quotes Obama as saying. “I told him to be sure and water them with hope.”   

The friends communicated one last time in May of 2001, when McVeigh invited Obama to attend his execution. Obama sent his regrets, telling McVeigh, “I wish I could, but I have a big fundraiser that night. Good luck anyway!”

Seven years later, on the verge of holding an office the legitimacy of which his good friend once hoped to undermine, Barack Obama still doesn’t like to talk about “Timmy V.” When he does, his voice betrays a wistful mix of nostalgia and dismissiveness. 

“Timothy McVeigh was like a cousin to me,” Obama said recently. “He did a despicable thing when I was thirty-one, but he will not be a part of my administration, so I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”

Tomorrow, Part 3: A Communist Organizer
 

Oct 30

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