Witness: Nichols Wanted Government Overthrown

A Kansas rancher who hired Terry L. Nichols in the year before the Oklahoma City bombing testified Wednesday that the defendant in the second bombing trial “felt the government needed to be overthrown.”

“He felt it was too big and too powerful, that it had too much power,” Timothy Donahue told the jury hearing Nichols’ capital murder trial in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, in which 168 people were killed.

He said that Nichols, hired as a ranch hand, boasted about his knowledge of making bombs and also railed about the government’s assault on a religious compound near Waco, Texas, in which more than 80 members of a cult died. He quoted Nichols as saying that “they had raided the compound and killed innocent people.”

Donahue testified late in the day and is to continue his testimony today.

Also Wednesday, prosecutors in the trial matched Nichols’ far-right anti-government ideology with that of his already convicted co-defendant, Timothy J. McVeigh, by presenting a series of underground newspaper articles and other documents found both in McVeigh’s car and Nichols’ home.

The materials were recovered from McVeigh’s 1977 Mercury Marquis after he was arrested in Oklahoma following the federal building bombing and similar items were discovered during a search of Nichols’ home in Herington, Kan.

The two men are former Army friends. McVeigh was convicted earlier this year and sentenced to death.

The political literature is often violent in tone and sometimes urges armed action against the federal government for the failed raid on the religious compound near Waco on April 19, 1993. The Oklahoma City bombing occurred on the two-year anniversary of the Waco raid.

In McVeigh’s getaway car was a sealed envelope that included the phrase “Obey the Constitution and we won’t shoot you.” Other literature claimed that the Waco raid was similar to the Nazi attack on the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw in 1943.

McVeigh was arrested wearing a T-shirt with a quotation from Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and martyrs.”

He also was known to pass around copies of an anti-government novel called “The Turner Diaries,” which depicts the destruction of FBI headquarters in Washington.

Two FBI agents described the items they found during a search of Nichols’ home after the bombing, specifically materials taken from a storage room off the kitchen.

“The articles are the same” as McVeigh’s, said Agent William K. West. Agent Leslie Earl said he recovered a book at Nichols’ home called “Hunter,” written by the same author as “The Turner Diaries.” “Hunter” tells the story of a series of bombings that are similar to the one in Oklahoma City.

The defense is contending that Nichols was not involved in the bombing plot and that others who have not been arrested helped McVeigh.