Your tax dollars are funding the sex change of an ex neo-Nazi tied to the OKC bombing.
Last month, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) disclosed in court records that it’s searching for someone to conduct a sex change on a biological male inmate residing in a women’s correctional facility in Texas.
The recipient of this sex change isn’t your typical gender dysphoric inmate, such as they are. The prisoner, Peter Kevin Langan, who now goes by the first name Donna, is the former leader of the domestic terrorist group Aryan Republican Army (ARA), a gang of neo-Nazi bank robbers with ties to the Oklahoma City bombing.
The ARA’s connections to the OKC bombing are no secret, despite the FBI’s long-held assertion that Oklahoma City bombing Timothy McVeigh acted alone when he detonated a truck bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah building on April 19, 1995—killing at least 168 people, including 19 children. Mainstream outlets such as The Washington Post reported on these links contemporaneously—while attempting to downplay them at the same time—and the Associated Press followed up years later with more revelations.
What remains less publicized is the fact that Langan himself has implicated his former ARA colleagues—who are walking free today—as being involved in the bombing.
Given his ostensible goal is to crack down on white supremacist extremism, one might think that Attorney General Merrick Garland would be interested in neo-Nazis culpable for the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in U.S. history. However, cutting off Langan’s genitals is apparently more pressing for the U.S. government than acting on his information and the dozens of other sources that link the ARA to OKC.
Perhaps Garland—who helped prosecute McVeigh—has reason to continue to ignore the ARA-OKC links. Doing otherwise could threaten to expose the fact that many of the same Aryan robbers allegedly involved in the bombing were made FBI informants to help convict Langan. Moreover, Langan himself was a one-time informant for the Secret Service.
Langan and the ARA
Langan’s early years were tragic, as documented by criminology professor Mark Hamm in his 2001 book about the ARA, In Bad Company: America’s Terrorist Underground.
His father a CIA agent, Langan grew up in Saigon, Vietnam in the 1960s. He lived a privileged life akin to the son of a diplomat, but following his father’s death, struggled to fit in upon returning to the states—turning to drugs and crime in his teenage years.
A 16-year Langan was sent to prison in Miami in 1974 for a bevy of crimes, including armed robbery. He was raped during his incarceration. Fast forward to October 1992, when Langan and his neo-Nazi friend, Richard Lee Guthrie, robbed a Pizza Hut in Georgia. At the time, Guthrie was also wanted by the Secret Service for plotting to kill President George H.W. Bush and incoming President Bill Clinton.
Law enforcement authorities caught Langan for the Pizza Hut robbery in August 1993, but the Secret Service intervened and made him an offer: help them track down Guthrie in exchange for having the robbery charges dropped.
It was an offer Langan couldn’t refuse—except he did. When the Secret Service let Langan loose to find Guthrie, he went rogue and disappeared with the man he was supposed to help apprehend.
Langan and Guthrie went on to declare war on the U.S. government and formed the ARA with the goal of robbing banks to fund the Aryan Nations and other neo-Nazi extremist groups. To that end, the ARA was one of the most prolific gangs of the twentieth century, robbing at least twenty-two banks in the mid-90s before its members were apprehended in 1996.
The arrests of Langan, Guthrie, and other ARA members came as the FBI was still conducting a massive manhunt for “John Doe 2,” prompted by dozens of witnesses who reported seeing McVeigh with another person on the morning of April 19, 1995.
Around that time, it was revealed that the ARA and McVeigh had a common nexus point: a notorious white supremacist compound in eastern Oklahoma called Elohim City, which McVeigh had made a phone call to earlier in April 1995—around the same time as three ARA members were residing there.
The link was so obvious that national outlets such as The Washington Post questioned it when covering Langan’s trial.
“One of the enduring mysteries of the Oklahoma City bombing investigation is why, two weeks before the blast, Tim McVeigh placed a 1-minute 46-second phone call to Elohim City. Whom was he calling?” the Post asked in February 1997.
However, the Post failed to pursue that enduring question, concluding that “[ARA members Scott Stedeford and Kevin McCarthy] were hanging out at Elohim City then, but there is no proof that McVeigh knew the Aryan robbers.”
Despite the Post and other outlets dismissing the ARA-McVeigh-Elohim City connection as a bizarre coincidence, FBI documents showed that McVeigh’s infamous phone call was allegedly for an Elohim City resident named Andreas Strassmeir. A German national with numerous ties to intelligence agencies, Strassmeier has been a figure at the center of OKC bombing conspiracies for decades, and for good reason: not only was he seen with McVeigh on multiple occasions in the run-up to April 19, 1995, but former ATF informant Carol Howe told her handler before the attack that Strassmeir was planning to bomb federal buildings.
And who was Strassmeir rooming with while residing at Elohim City? None other than the same ARA members mentioned in the Post article, Stedeford and McCarthy, as well as Michael Brescia, according to the aforementioned FBI records—notes from an interview agents conducted with McCarthy.
In that same interview, McCarthy apparently satisfied the FBI with an alibi for him and Stedeford, telling federal agents that the two had left Elohim City for Pittsburg, Kansas three days before the bombing to stay at a safehouse owned by Langan and Guthrie.
Not so, according to Langan.
“McCarthy was not with me on April 19, 1995, in Pittsburg, Kansas,” Langan said in a 2010 sworn declaration to the court. “Nor was he, to my knowledge, anywhere that day other than in the state of Oklahoma.”
Langan also said in the sworn statement that Guthrie told him about McCarthy and Stedeford’s involvement in the OKC bombing. When Langan confronted McCarthy about this allegation in December 1995, McCarthy allegedly admitted to having “liabilities” concerning the attack.
“I remember thinking, ‘liabilities’ is a big word. But sometimes McCarthy talked like that. I asked him to be more specific concerning who, what and when, but he declined to give me any details,” Langan said. “McCarthy stated that he was only telling me this because he wanted me to know that he might need help in going underground if the Oklahoma City bombing connection became a problem for him. I realized, too, that it might be a problem for me due to our association and past travels.”
Langan attempted to provide evidence about the ARA’s connections to the OKC bombing to federal courts, but was shut down at every turn.
During his trial for his role in the ARA bank robberies, Langan subpoenaed ARA associate Mark Thomas to testify about McCarthy’s connections to the OKC bombing.
“Thomas was prepared to take the stand and reveal that McCarthy had assisted McVeigh,” Hamm wrote in In Bad Company. “A week before Thomas was scheduled to testify, however, he was indicted in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, thus cancelling his appearance at the Langan trial. With that, Kevin McCarthy became a protected government asset, and the FBI abandoned the entire McVeigh-ARA connection.”
Langan was convicted of five bank robbery-related charges in 1997, and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. His cohorts received lighter sentences: 30 years for Stedeford, five years for McCarthy (as part of a plea deal where he testified against Langan), and 57 months for Brescia.
Guthrie, for his part—the person who Langan says told him about the other ARA members’ connections to OKC—was found hanging dead in his prison cell in July 1996.
All that didn’t stop Langan from trying to reveal the ARA-OKC connections about six years later, this time in the state trial of Terry Nichols, who helped McVeigh construct the Ryder Truck bomb but wasn’t in Oklahoma on the day of the attack.
Prosecutors objected to Nichols using Langan as a defense witness to testify about the ARA-OKC connections. At a hearing over the matter, FBI agent John Hersley testified that it was impossible for McCarthy to be involved in the bombing because he was in Iowa on April 19, 1995.
In doing so, Hersley contradicted McCarthy’s own alibi that he was with Langan in Kansas. Nevertheless, the judge accepted the FBI agent’s testimony and rejected Langan from testifying for Nichols.
Langan tried once more to introduce evidence about the ARA’s connections to the OKC bombing in his aforementioned sworn court statement in a lawsuit by Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue, who had been suing the FBI for records about the bombing. But Trentadue’s case, too, was dismissed in 2010.
Since then, Langan has transitioned from trying to reveal information about the OKC bombing to championing transgender rights.
Langan’s Later Life
After struggling with his gender identity for decades, Langan fully embraced his feminine side in prison.
He was transferred to Federal Medical Center Carswell in March 2016, and The Intercept even wrote a sympathetic piece on the former neo-Nazi in 2018, when a lawsuit by the Alliance Defending Freedom threatened to send him back to a male facility.
“Donna Langan is very worried. Langan is a transgender woman in an American prison,” The Intercept wrote, failing to detail Langan’s neo-Nazi past or connections to the OKC bombing. “Today, however, a Christian legal advocacy group with a growing national profile, called Alliance Defending Freedom, is working to undo the regulations and policies that helped Langan move to Carswell.”
The Alliance Defending Freedom discontinued its lawsuit in November 2019, and Langan would soon mount his own offensive. In September 2021, he sued the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), claiming that the BOP was “violating the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment by not providing gender confirmation surgery.”
Unlike his robbery trial or attempts to introduce evidence about the OKC bombing, it looks like Langan is going to win this case. The BOP told a federal court in June that it was working to procure gender reassignment surgery for Langan, and last month the bureau said it has put out a request for bids to find a surgeon to perform the task. Bids were due October 10.
“In light of the steps defendants have taken towards providing surgeries to plaintiff, the parties believe there is a possibility that all claims in this case might be resolved without the need for further litigation,” the parties said in a September 14 joint status report. “Plaintiffs concur that the actions of the government appear to show that the surgery is on track, and will not be postponed excessively, or artificially delayed.”
By the time the parties’ next status report is due in December, Langan’s transformation might be complete.
And what of the OKC bombing? Will Langan ever publicly tell his side of that story? Will it matter?
In Bad Company author Hamm probably best summarized the reason why U.S. government will continue to ignore Langan’s information. “The real problem for the government…was the embarrassing fact that the Secret Service had sprung him from jail back in 1993,” Hamm concluded. “After that, of course, he went on to form the Aryan Republican Army.”
