The Salt Lake Tribune | November 7, 2008
By Pamela Manson

The FBI said Tuesday it will appeal a federal judge's order allowing a Utah attorney to conduct taped depositions of Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols and a death-row inmate.

Salt Lake City lawyer Jesse Trentadue believes Nichols and David Paul Hammer have information about his brother's 1995 death in an Oklahoma City federal prison - and about the FBI's alleged withholding of many of the relevant documents requested in his Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suit.

Authorities say the August 1995 death of Kenneth Trentadue in a cell was a suicide, but the inmate's family believes he was mistaken for a bombing conspirator and that guards strangled him with a set of plastic handcuffs in an interrogation that got out of hand.

Nichols - who is serving a life sentence at the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Colorado - has claimed a high-ranking FBI official "apparently" was directing McVeigh in the plot. Both Nichols and Hammer, who says he had lengthy conversations with McVeigh while the two were both housed at the Terre Haute facility, say McVeigh claimed to be an undercover operative for the military.