How The FBI Botched The Olympic Park Bombing

Special Advisor to the Trump Administration for Pandemic Preparedness. He has some relevant background here. He spent most of his career as a pathologist and a biological weapons expert, training US soldiers and how to deal with biological weapons, specifically weaponized viruses, And like a lot of people in Trump world, he's recently gotten into what we might call the alt science side of medicine. In twenty twenty, he advised the first Trump administration on COVID nineteen and became a major

advocate of hydroxychloroquin as a treatment. Yeah, he's one of those guys. And in an article a couple of years ago, The Washington Post cited his statements as evidence supporting the idea that the Trump administration neglected pandemic response after losing

the twenty twenty election. Quote Stephen Hatfield, a virologist who advised White House Trade advisor Peter Navarro, said he was intimately involved in the pandemic response, repeatedly described in the emails how stuff took precedence over a coronavirus even as the outbreak surged more than two hundred and fifty thousand

new coronavirus cases per day in January. Now, with the election so close, COVID is taking a back seat, yet the disease is rearing its ugly head again, Hatfill wrote to an outside colleague in October of twenty twenty, following

the election, which was disputed by Trump. Hatfel wrote another email that he personally shifted over to the election fraud investigation in November, which says a lot about like the how the people close to Trump viewed themselves was like, well, I'm a virologist and a pathologist, but I'll get involved in the election frauds. I guess that makes sense for me to be working on during a pandemic more than the pandemic, right.

a bad person. I think he's done bad things for

the world. Here's where it gets weird. He's kind of the protagonist of our story this week, right, because this is we're going to be telling a story, and we're gonna be telling two stories, really, and in both of these stories, the bad guy is the FBI, and in more broadly, our entire justice system, right, and the media and how the media interacts with the justice system around high profile cases, you know, when people are desperately trying to figure out who did it and at a point

at which you know, the cops decide literally we need to throw some name out there, and the media decides content, content, content, right, Like that's the evil here. We're talking about two different tear attacks where innocent people were accused by both law enforcement and journalists of having done terrible things. And hat Phil is one of those innocent people. So he's like a bad person, but he's also really unique among members of the Trump administration and that all of them hate

the media. Hatfil is a really good reason to hate the mainstream media. They did him so fucking dirty, and it's a very weird story for that reason.

Cops aren't very good at their jobs, are they. We're also telling a story of this is how law enforcement and the media kind of feeding off of each other created a month because the present day Steven hat Phil who was a member of the Trump administration, is created to a significant extent by how much this destroys his life and pisses him off, Like this really radicalizes him

in a major way. And so it's interesting to understand for that perspective too, because we are talking about a bad guy, but he's not the bad guy in the story we're telling, which I haven't done before. So I'm excited for this kind of episode.

for that attack and how that happened. And then and this is where hatfil comes in, we're going to be talking about the two thousand and one anthrax attacks in the United States after nine to eleven, because hat Phil is the guy who gets blamed for that, right, And so that's what we're talking about this week, is how both of you because these are with similar cases and they are emblematic of similar problems that still exist within

law enforcement in the media to this day. Right, So that's what we're talking about.

does some an act of legitimate heroism. And his name was Richard Jewel. Richard Allensworth Jewel was born Richard White on December seventeenth, nineteen sixty two, in Danville, Virginia. His father worked at Chevy and his mom helped. She was like an insurance claim adjuster type pursuit. She had some job in that hole. But I don't think she was an adjuster, but she was involved in the whole insurance claim thing. Something to do with insurance. I don't know.

You don't come to this to hear about what people's moms did for the insurance industry. They divorced when he was four, and she remarried a guy named John Jewell who adopted Richard, and that's why he's known as Richard Jewel. Most of his life is not very interesting. The most important thing to know about Richard Jewel, Sophie will pull up a picture of him. This guy is like his phenotype is cop right, like he was born with cop in his blood. Like you just take one look at

this man. He grows the kind of mustache that if you were, like, if you're biologically a cop, your body just produces that mustache, right, Like, I don't know that he ever had a choice in not wanting to be a cop, Like in terms of his character and personality, that's what he always wanted to be for the time he's a child. Richard idolizes the police. This is the

only job he wants to do. Right, You're looking at the picture like that, that is a cop mustache, right, There's just simply no other way to describe it.

Like a lot of us were his kids. And when he grows up. You know, he doesn't immediately get into law enforcement. His first job, I think is working at and eventually managing a Tcby yogurt shop. But he shows some promise that like, oh, maybe this guy, you know, maybe this law enforcements what he's actually going to do, because while a manager of the store, he stops a robbery in progress, which you're not supposed to do when

managing a retail store or a food store. You're not supposed to do that in any store, stop a robbery. But he does. I don't have any more details than that, but it gets him written up in local papers and it fuels his desire to get behind a badge. He's like, oh man, this is what I made for, Like, look at what I was able to do behind the desk at a Tcby treaty shop. Give me a gun and a badge. I'll really fox some shit up.

I did not realize. I thought that was a joke in American Dad. I didn't know hotels had detectives, but apparently they do.

Maybe I don't know, it could be more. Come In nineteen ninety, he gets hired as a jailer for the Habersham County Sheriff's Office. Right now, this is kind of a do nothing job. You're sitting in a small, smoke filled room occasionally dealing with the restees. It's not what he wants to be doing. He doesn't like it, but

it's his foot in the door. And I guess in the nineties it was maybe there were enough the cops weren't like today, he would just find some police department in a big city that is offering like twenty thousand dollars signing bonuses because there's not enough cops because people

don't want to do that job anyway. But I guess back then you had to really like work your way up to being a cop, right like, for whatever reason, I don't know, maybe it's just where he lives in Georgia, or maybe he's just not doesn't I don't know what. Maybe he doesn't go at Maybe there was an easier way to do it than he just didn't do I don't know yet, but yeah, he becomes a cop through

working at the jail, right. Like, he does this for like a year or so, and it's one of the you can tell it's frustrating him because like working at the jail, he's almost a real cop. He could like, he could taste it, right, he could taste the authority, and so he starts to get over eager. One of my sources for this episode is an epic long form article in Vanity Fair by Marie Britter, and she writes,

this is while he's still a jailer. Quote. He arrested a couple making too much noise in a hot tub in an apartment building where he did part time security work. He was arrested for impersonating an officer, and after pleading guilty to a lesser charge, was placed on probation on the condition that he seeks psychological counseling. You get to like, this guy wants to be a cop so bad it's kind of a problem, like man.

this is funny. I'm sorry, this is just this is just funny, Richard. This is a stupid thing that you did. He's dead now, it's fine. It doesn't care. So if a guy is so eager to be a cop that the instant he gets a job, sitting in the same room as a cop, he illegally arrests a couple for a noise complaint. That might be a warning sign not to give that person a badge and gun. But somehow Jewel worked his way up to being hired as a deputy. In nineteen ninety one, he goes to the North in America.

I love it. Let's go and it's one of those yeah. Well, he goes to Northeast Georgia political Academy. He does well. He graduates in the upper twenty five percent of the class. He said that he read the Georgia Legal Code for fun, like he's obsessed with cop stuff. So I have no doubt that when it came to the in class portions of it, he aced everything right, like he's been prepped for this forever.

crime a las. Poor Richard is about to run face to face into a reality that it's I don't know if he ever really fully accepts it, right, But this is like the great tragedy of Richard jules life, which is that he wants to be a cop. And I say, this is a guy who doesn't want there to be cops. He wants to be a cop for what you would say are the right reasons. He cares deeply about the law. He thinks it is important to abide by the law, and he wants to protect people. Check right, that's why

he wants to become a cop. Police And this is not me the left wing radical saying this. The Supreme Court has ruled police have no duty to protect people, and it is a fact, an undeniable fact, that police all over the country break the law regularly, both in pursuing suspects and lying on the stand about them and falsifying evidence and planting evidence and using physical force that they are not legally supposed to be using. Cops break the law constantly. They are not there to protect people,

and they do not uphold the law. These are facts, right, Robert.

have made it long. Like literally, within like a month or two of making my first calls for the police and like setting up that starting that process, I started experimenting with drugs. And as soon as I took two CI, I was like, oh, I'm not going to be a cop. Oh what the fuck? Was I thinking? Absolutely not? Are you kidding me?

run off into the sunset. It'll be great when you're twenty nine, and maybe start to start pulling back on that throttle, you know, hit the brakes.

I make a statement like cops break the law constantly. So. A twenty sixteen study by researchers at Bowling Green University looked into nearly six seven thousand cases of police officers being arrested and charged with crimes between two thousand and five and twenty eleven. They concluded, quote, police crimes are not uncommon now. One of the things this study notes is that only about a thousand officers are arrested each year in charge with crimes. But there are a lot

more cops than that. Commit number one cops, it's very easy for them to get away with crimes. The number of cops who could break the law and don't get caught because they're cops is exponentially higher than a thousand. But there's also a lot of cases, and there's documentation of how often there's interviews with other cops that'll talk about this, of police breaking the law and having it

swept under the rug. Right. Well, they'll get a warning from you know, maybe someone above them or something, but like, look, you know, just get your car home. I know you're drunk tonight. Because you're another officer, I'll let you off you as a professional courtesy you know, protector own again, there's data on this. It happens constantly. That said, the data on win cops do actually fuck up enough to get charged with crimes, the data on what crimes they

commit is really interesting. From a summary in a Huffington Post article by Matt Ferner, quote, the alleged crimes cops whore arrested fore most frequently were simple assault, driving under the influence, and aggravated assault. Altogether, those crimes made up

one third of the total cases. There were also a considerable number of sex crime cases, including forcible fondling and forcible rape, about ten percent of all cases, and disturbingly, the sex crimes included some victims under the age of eighteen. If you are looking at the vast majority of child sex abuse is people who are related to the child.

When you move out from people who are directly related to the child, the most common people who abuse kids are like members of the clergy, medical professionals, and police officers, not in that order necessarily, but yes, because they have access and because they have plug you know.

it called testa lying. And if you know, I have a friend who became a lawyer and was briefly a prosecutor and stopped being a prosecutor because he was like, I just kept going. I kept sitting down with police officers and saying, are you sure this is accurate, and then when it came to trial it would be like they lied, right, Like that happened. That happened so many times that I put my ass out there as a prosecutor because a cop told me no, this is definitely

what happened, and they were fucking lying. It happens all the goddamn time. And again there's documentation about this. This is such a problem that in New York City prosecutors have a secret database of untrustworthy cops. Again, a secret database of cops that like, yeah, we if you're a prosecutor, don't let this guy up on the stand if he's telling you something it's like full of shit. But also,

we're not going to report this anywhere. More broadly, in the nineteen nineties, the Malin Commission carried out a sweeping investigation of the NYPD, and it found that perjury and falsification of records were routine by police and quote the most common form of police corruption. You might want to note that those two crimes tend to be committed in

order to get a conviction against a defendant. Right, if you are lying under oath and falsifying records, the most likely reason you were doing that is because there was a crime and you're pretty sure the guy you got did it, but you can't prove it, so you're lying to make it easier to secure a conviction. Right, Or you don't know the guy did it, or think the guy did it, you just hate him because you're a bigot, or you want to fuck his wife or whatever. Right,

and you're doing that, you know. But the most common crime committed by cops all over is lying under oath and falsifying records, and that those two things are generally done to get people convicted, right, Cops lie to get convictions.

all this. This is a bit of a digression from Richard Jewel, but it's important to note that the vast majority of criminal behavior inside our justice system is perpetrated by police officers, and not just police officers, but by people who are in the justice system who are attempting to get convictions and have to futz with the truth in order to secure conviction because the actual evidence isn't

strong enough. Right. That's an important point. And I know this has been a long digression, but I need to emphasize it a little further. So I'm going to read one quote from a very good Slate article by Mark Stern titled the police lie all the time? Can anything stop them? Quote? When NYPD officers are accused of illegal behavior, the department itself usually investigates, then conceals its findings in imposes at worst a slap on the risk like brief

paid leave. Prosecutors could separately investigate, but they have little incentive to question an officer's story. If they know an officer is lying, they cannot legally rely on his testimony. If they remain in the dark, they can still use his perjury to clinch a conviction. Moreover, prosecutors and police work together to put defendants behind bars, developing a team mentality that prevents prosecutors from scrutinizing officers testimony with appropriate skepticism.

As long as officers lies cannot be proved false, prosecutors have little reason to question their account of events. As a New York assistant district attorney told the Maulin Commission, taking money is considered dirty, but perjury for the sake of an arrest is accepted. It's become more casual. Great, this takes us to Richard Jewel. But first, you know what Richard Jewel would have loved if he were alive to see this.

He does. He is a true believer, right, and that's gonna cause him problems, right, because I'm not saying this to like, I don't think he's a he's not a person I would consider. I don't consider his ethics to be ethical, right, Like, I don't think it's ethical to arrest people for making noise in a hot tub, right. And he's very serious about a lot of stuff that I don't agree with. But he's consistent. He's internally consistent. He does believe in the law, and he's not a liar.

seventies in terms of law enforcement. In other words, this is a place where there's good old boys who enjoy limited immunity to crimes, and there's other people, skin color dependent who are You're much more free to harass or hassle, right, and that's not the kind of cop Jewel wants to be,

right if this were. He's kind of like Sergeant Nicholas Angel in Hot Fuzz, right, where he's like he's too good for the rest of the department, Except he's not very good at the job either, right, Like, he has really good and very strict intentions, but he's not like the most competent at police work. And he's also pissing everyone off because he takes a lot of stuff seriously that they don't take seriously, and he doesn't like it when other people are kind of more loosey goosey with

the rules. So he gets sidelined mostly into dealing with car accidents, right, because that's the part of the job he does well and nobody else really wants to do it. He works really hard, he puts in fourteen hour days. He volunteers to host community events. He's the cop that

they'll he'll go talk to a school or whatever. He loves doing that kind of shit, But his fellow officers are kind of just after they get to know him, waiting for an excuse to shitcan him and get him off of the force, right, because again he's kind of cramping their style and he's attempting to the story. He tells us that he was trying to pursue someone and he crashes his police car in nineteen ninety five, and that's the chance these people had been waiting for, right,

So he is demoted, he loses his badge. He's offered to stay working at the jail, but Richard is unwilling to return to that kind of life, so he resigns from the force and he gets the kind of job that you get when you're a failed cop. He becomes a campus cop, right, perfect, Yeah, that's the it's the circle of cop. So Piedmont College hires him and he

immediately gets a reputation. Again, he's super diligent, like he will absolutely write people up for every infraction he sees, and he will pursue the kind of infractions you know. College campus cops generally you understand like it at certain times and stuff. People are going to party, there's going to be underage drinking, and you don't always go after that, right because, like for what they it's kind of impossible to police it all. So you kind of triage that

sort of shit. Right, Richard can't stand any kind of violation of the rules, and so he goes after kids whenever he sees any kind of infraction. He's issuing tickets, he's trying to arrest people. He is very aggressive about this, to the point that the president of the college gets calls three or four times a week from different people

complaining to him about Jeweles behavior. Right, Like, he thinks, my job is to be a cop, and the real job is to basically be a babysitter and make sure kids don't.

their parents. Oh and this obsession, yeah, this all clashes with what his employers want him to do. The president of the university repeatedly begs him, hey man, calm the fuck down, like he's up. This is not what we want you doing, and Richard refuses to bend, so he resigns rather than accept that some kids are going to drink on campus and maybe you need to chill out.

nightmarish summer weather and horrible traffic. But they only host cities in places with horrible traffic, or host Olympics in places with horrible traffic, which is why they're doing it in La next maybe the only city worse than Atlanta to do the Olympics in the good fucking lucky Olympic dick shits. I hope you enjoy it.

A lot of the time. I helped desk as a security guard in the situation. But you need a lot of those guys, right, because it's the fucking Olympics. So Jewele later recalled thinking, I thought working at the Centennial Olympic Park will look really good on my resume. I don't know that that's the case. That's the kind of man Richard was. He gets the job easily enough, and he brings the same attitude to this next gig that he brought to his previous career as a real cop.

It was actual job, as best as I can put it together, was to stand overnight by a sound and light tower near the main stage area. The people who'd planned for the Olympic Atlanta Olympics did a terrible job, as is always the case when people planned for an Olympics, and so the whole downtown area, the whole Olympic Park downtown, which is like twenty one acres, was constantly claught. It was a nightmare. Athletes are regularly late for their events

because they just like can't get through this shit. Almost nobody who's in this park is from Atlantis. They don't know where they're going anyway, and everything's like walled off and fenced off in a weird way. It's just a fucking Titanic mess. So his job is helping to manage foot traffic and help lost people get where they're going. Now.

Marie Brynner talked extensively with Richard Jewel for her piece, and he gives us in some of these interviews, we get clips, like pieces of his day to day life that do not make this sound like a demanding job.

to be any less serious than being a police officer. Right. He treats the job the same way, and thank god he did, because he's going to save a shitload of people's lives. This is really like a wild moment of like this guy. Every other thing else I've said about him is this is like the fucking set up to a very depressing not Adam Sandler Rob Schneider movie, right, or I guess Paul Blart Malcot might be a better

fucking comparison or whatever. But like, it doesn't sound like we're setting up for this guy to have be very impressive, but he is, because again, he treats this job like it's life and death and it's about to be a bit after midnight on July twenty seventh, nineteen ninety six, jul is doing his rounds and he notices that the people at Budworld, which I'm assuming was a pop up bar sponsored by Budweiser, we're getting kind of rowdy and loud. Now.

I wanted to know what bud World was, so in order in an effort to do my due diligence, I googled bud World Olympics, which brought up this television ad which I'm just gonna get everybody so weaken before we move on here. Everyone just needs a little hit of the nineteen nineties, just like just like one quick dose, you know, just a little bump to get us through.

to the terrorist attack that we're talking about. So Jewel Richard jewel here's people getting drunken rowdy at the bud World event where you're supposed to get drunken rowdy, right, and worse, he sees that people have spilled out of the event itself and there's like leaving beers on the ground and wandering around and you know, being a problem. And him being the campus cop who got fired for being too angry at people partying, he leaps into action and he goes off to report the trash and the

quote carousing. And this may be the only time in history where a rent a cop being overly a buzzkill works out because on his way to report the not really a crime in progress, he notices something. Someone has left a green military style backpack lying on the ground unattended. So Richard reports the bag and a small team of law enforcement bears down on the area and they start looking around to try to find the bag's owner. And interviews after the fact, Jewelry recalled that he didn't take

this seriously at first. They'd found a similar unattended bag a few days ago, and he expected this to end like that had, right, So as soon as he calls out the bag and you cops start trying to figure out who the bag belongs to. He winds up in an argument with a group of drunk people who like smudge a camer lens, and then he kind of realizes

like they're not finding the owner of the bag. So he walks over to this GBI, the Georgia's Bureau of Investigation, it's like the state FBI for Georgia, and he asked the guy, are you going to open it? And then here's Jewell quote. At that point, it was not a concern. I was thinking to myself, well, I'm sure one of these people left it on the ground. When Davis, that the GBI agent, came back and said nobody said it was theirs, that's when the little hairs on the back

of my head began to stand up. I thought, uh, oh, this is not good. So he and that agent clear a twenty five foot square. They start getting people away. They're like, everyone needs to clear the area. Clear the area, and they clear a twenty five foot square around the bag.

So he does a circle while they're clearing people where he starts sticking his head in different structures in the park and basically saying, hey, get out of whatever, cause there's you know, there's different Like you've got these like booths where people are like filming for different day and like yelling at people, get the fuck out now, get the fuck out now, right, And he deserves a lot of credit here. He flips from normal day wandering around

angry at drunk people too. I have to clear this area, something really bad could be happening. And he does this before he knows there's a bomb there. He just I think that it must just be instinct or whatever. But as a result, because of how many people he and this other guy Davis clear away. When the bomb goes off, and it's sometime after one in the morning, it's like a little after one am, it doesn't harm nobody, right, but it harms only a fraction of the people who

might otherwise have been present. Like the if the pipe bob, if the area had been as crowded as it was supposed to be, I mean, it could have been a dozen or more people dead, like potentially dozens and dozens injured, you know, and like.

a dozen lives. I don't know how. It's impossible to say how many, but I would have been shocked if it had been if it was any less than that, right, they This really is a significant thing that Jewel does, and Jewel and this other guy Davis do, But Jewel is the guy who notices at first. Probably nobody would have picked it out if he hadn't, right, because this was his area and it was his job to be

on guard. And he was right, which kind of justifies his entire life up to this point, right, you know, And that should be a happy story, right, this kind of happy hapless you know, guy who couldn't hack it as a cop, rent a cop, never got respect. He's finally a hero, He's legitimately a hero.

died of a heart attack soon after. Right, so again, and that's, you know, a death from a heart attack, so potentially, assuming that hadn't happened, Like you're talking one death directly from the explosion as opposed to an additional seventy five to one hundred people being in the blast. Ratis right, not not hard to imagine how much worse it could have been. Jewel kind of becomes a hero immediately, like he it's very clear from the jump that he's the guy who spotted this and what he had done.

And he gets interviewed by local and national news later that day, he tells CNN, the only thing I wish we could have done is got everybody out of the area. I feel for the victims and their families, and I mean, it's the Olympics. It's supposed to be a time of joy for the world, and it's a very very bad thing. And obviously he's traumatized by the explosion. He's there, he's at ground zero, he sees the injuries, he sees the person who's killed, so that he's fucked up by this, obviously,

but he's also undeniably the hero. And in a better world, he would have gotten the validation he'd always sought and it probably would have been good for his career. Right. I have trouble if this had been where the story ended. I have trouble imagining him not getting hired by a police department somewhere only to get the good pr of bringing on this hero security guard. Right.

right here. But because he doesn't like Richard Jewel, he doesn't trust him, and he thinks that he's because he's kind of been He's this weird guy, right, he's like weirdly into being a cop. He's just had rubbed Clear

the wrong way. And so Clear calls the Georgia Buer of Investigation and he reports, Hey, this guy who everyone is saying is the hero, I think he's got a lot of attension seeking behavior and bad judgment and maybe you should take another look into him, right, basically saying, maybe maybe he's set it up right, and you could almost see you can see it a logic there. Okay, sure this guy had failed out of being a cop.

He wants to be a hero. Maybe he planted a bomb so that he could get everyone away from it. Right now, that's a stretch, and the there is not any evidence ever that this was the case. So again, I think this is just a guy who didn't like Richard calling the GBI and trying to, like, out of jealousy or something, fuck up his former employee. But the tip gets passed along to the FBI, and the FBI takes it seriously and they send out investigators to look and do every aspect of Jules life.

Georgia Bureau of Investigation. This is like somebody that he had been social with. I think somebody that he idolized, because this guy is a real, you know, special agent, right, that's kind of what I want to do, right. And so the FBI when they find out that there's someone and the jerge of Bureau of Investigation who knows Jewel, they're like, hey, he likes you, right, he thinks you're his friend, gets some info out of him, right, Yeah.

So this guy at the GBI calls Jewel and he's like, hey, buddy, who I probably hadn't talked to in weeks. I was out of work the day the bombing happened. Mind if I come over to your house and you tell me what happened. I'm just really curious about how you were such a hero. Obviously, this guy's wearing a wire the

whole time, right. So Jewel is unaware, though he thinks that his cool friend in the GBI is proud of him and just wants to hear about his triumph and Mayami, who knows, maybe I could get a job at the GBI after this, right, you know, having just saved all these people's lives. Now again, Jewel does not catch on. But what's happened here is at this early stage, the FEDS have gone from considering Richard Jeul a hero to

within days suspecting him of being the bomber. Right almost immediately, he becomes their prime Like there's a couple of guys earlier, as we'll talk about who they'd seen, but very quickly he becomes the primary focus of the investigator, and the reasoning why they focus on him boils mostly down to laziness. And this is my opinion here, but I think there's some professional jealousy going on here too. Because the fbis out in at every Olympics in the US. Obviously, the

GBI is there because it's in Georgia. These are the premier law enforcement agencies in the region that are supposed to be making sure a bombing doesn't happen. They both fuck up. A bomber gets through security with a bomb, enters the Olympic park area and sets off the bomb

without being caught. And the only reason it wasn't worse and that dozens of people aren't dead is that a rent a cop outperformed the entire federal law enforcement apparatus, all of the millions of dollars in gear, the bomb sniffing dogs, the metal detectors, None of that did any shit. None of these highly paid special agents figured out fuck none of them caught anyone anything one Before this happened.

It was a rent a cop walking back to complain about some drunk kids who spotted the bomb and saved the day. Right, And I think that pisses off and embarrasses the FBI. I think the attitude for a lot of people in the bureau is like and it particularly is we'll talk about the guy who's the director of the BEAU at the time, is like, well, this looks really bad for us, unless that fucker was the bomber.

Then then then the FBI gets to be the hero again, right once we once we take this guy down, Right now, you know who would never sell you out to the FBI?

is still very fresh in the public mind. And then obviously the Oklahoma City bombing happens a year before this bombing, right, and the FBI fails to stop it.

he was very over zealous. But none of those things are like crime or terrorism adjacent.

of fame. He gets interviewed by CNN. The AT and T's publicity team basically works up an appearance and makes him wear a company shirt because he'd been a security guard for AT and T. I guess because AT and T wanted Americans to associate their favorite phone company with a terroristic bombing that killed and named people. I don't know why. It's a weird call at and D.

happens next here, that winds up being impossible. And the reason why there's no chance to keep this under wraps, and the reason why everything blows up and Jewel's life blows up is that the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which is a local paper of record in Atlanta, publishes an article on July thirtieth in which they announced that the FBI

had a suspect for the bombing security guard Richard Jewel. Now, the Journal was owned by Cox Newspapers, who had flown something like three hundred people in from other papers to report out of the Journal's office. They had like sent reporters around, flown them all around the world to like study up on different sports that they could report well on the Olympics, because they're putting out a daily special Olympics edition and the expense they've spent millions preparing to

cover the Olympics. Right now, this is a time in which there's more money in the newspaper biz. But you got to remember whenever you're investing that kind of capital into an endeavor, you have to make a return, right. And so the new editor of the paper, John Walter, is expecting the fact that there's been a bombing that's like a huge boon potentially to the media, right, Like, this is something people are going to read about. And we're the paper of record for Atlanta. We've got to

be the ones breaking the scoops. We can't get scooped by the big national papers. We can't let the New York Times take this from us, right, get something out about this, you know. And the editor is this guy, John Walter, who is he had replaced a more traditional

ethical newsman. Walter is of this kind of generation of guys who's trying to find more exciting and profitable ways to package news content as opposed to doing good journalism, pro vanity fair quote more and more, the paper's influence was on what John Walter called chunklets, short bits, and soft news style known as eye candy, published features on

couple's massage and how mushrooms grow in the rain. Walter had fired off several terse memos to ensure that there would be no more jumps of news stories to back pages and no more unsourced news stories except on rare occasions. I don't see any reason why you can't report hard news in a short form, one editor told me. The AJAC style of reporting and declarative sentences had a name too, the Voice of God. It was omniscient because it allowed

no references to unattributed sources. Subjects such as aids, which often required confidentiality, could not be covered properly in the paper. In the opinion of several reporters, the AJAC picked up news stories with unnamed sources from the New York Times, however,

and reporters groused about the hypocrisy of the double standard. Now, all this was going to cause problems because the journal can't let themselves be scooped in their hometown, but they get reached out to They get basically a leak from the FBI, who leaks them documents that make it clear that Richard Jewel is their chief suspect, right. That's what

happens is someone from the FBI talks to them. And this is a really ethically questionable thing because a person who is suspected of a crime has not been charged with it. They certainly haven't been convicted. Is it ethical at all to report that this guy is under suspicion right now, because you're going to nuke his life and make a huge number of people think he murdered someone

and tried to murder dozens more people. Right, But on the other hand, it's going to sell papers, so obviously print that shit, right And so General reporter Mary Scruggs writes an article titled FBI suspects hero guard may have planted bomb, and again it uses this kind of voice of God phrasings to where like they did they had a source that they couldn't admit that it had reached out to them, But they don't say that, right, Like, they don't address that at all. And I'm going to read

a quote from the article. Richard Jewell, thirty three, a former law enforcement officer, I fits the profile of the lone bomber. This profile generally includes a frustrated white man who is a former police officer, member of the military, or police wannabe who seeks to become a hero.

the bombing prime to make bad decisions. One of his closest advisors was former Deputy director of the FBI Larry Potts, who tried to cover up FBI incompetence at Ruby Ridge three, made himself responsible for the oversight of the bureau's efforts in this high profile case. He comes in and as immediately like I am, I am, like where the buck

stops with this case. I'm directly overseeing this as director of the FBI, because this is like obviously, given everything that's happen, and nothing matters more than us quickly finding a culprit, right, and they don't, you know, initially there had been like a suspect, a suspect who was like a drunk at a bar who the night before and made some threatening comments. So he's their first suspect. But

it turns out he's got an alibi. And this happens a couple of times, right where they'll find someone and he'll seem like it might this guy might have been the one who did it, and then it'll become clear that he could not have been the bomber, and Free flips out at his subordinates each time. He becomes, in their words, abusive, condescending, and dismissive every time they tell him, no, it couldn't have been that guy. And whenever they start to suspect a new person, Free will declare, we have

our man. He does that every time. And so when they settle on and they get this leak and they start looking in to Richard Jewel, Free is like, we've got our guy. This is him, this has to be him. Make sure it's him, right, and that there is some evidence that suggests that Free orchestrated the leaking of information hours after the bombing. Right because he does this seems possible.

We know he does this with the first time they have a suspect that drunk at the bar, like there's a leak, so the papers know the FBI's got someone, and then it's really embarrassing to him because that guy wound up not having done it right, So it's just very likely that he did the same thing with Jewel, Right, are.

I can't accept that, you know. So, for their part, the journal avoids telling anyone how they got because it's like a memo that they get that that lists Jewel is the suspect, and they don't. Oh again, it's this whole voice of God thing. They give no attribution and they don't cite a source Atlanta Magazine describes their reporting as quote, leaving the reader to wonder whether the claims came from a legitimate law enforcement enforcement official or from

a proclamation of God. It's this And I have so many issues with like the way a lot of media works with like objectivity in this book, and this is another example of that of like, no, this is the way our paper sounds.

but we're not going to tell you where it came from. Right, nobody's doing well here, you see it like it's the Meatia. Yeah, and particularly this one publication are being slimy as shit because it's good for business and because they've made a series of bad decisions editorially, and the FBI is just desperate to have to make it clear, No, we're doing our jobs, We're on the ball, you're safe, we know what we're doing. We know we fucked up and let a bombing happen, but you know it's really not our

fault because it's probably the security guard. How could we have known?

means destroying Richard Jewel's life, fuck him. Right, So you've gotten the FBI, you've got the director pressuring every lead to be the guy, and Jewel, you know, seems like their best bet. So that article drops on the thirtieth, the same day that two FBI agents show up at Richard Jewel's house and ask him if he wants to make a training film for them, So he doesn't actually get to see this article that the journal's published saying

that he's the FBI's main suspect. But on the same day they show up early at his house and like, Hey, you did such a good job. Would you make a training video for us about how spotted the bomb? Yeah, why don't you come in the station? And because we just we're such big fancy maybe you've got a career in the bureau Richard, right, Obviously there's no training film.

They want to in to review him, to see if he will slip up or be inconsistent or lie under the guise of recording his wisdom as a training video for new agents. Jewell started to realize something was up when his car was tailed by four other FBI cars on the way to the office and they're like, oh, yeah, I don't worry about it, it's fine, and he's like, that seems weird. I feel like you don't need four or five cars to take a guy to do a

fucking interview. And then they end the interview this this training video, by asking him to sign a waiver of his rights, and then he's like, wait a second, that's no Actually, I think I want a lawyer now, And as soon as he does that, they pull the standard cop Why do you need a lawyer, Richard? You didn't do anything right.

fucked up. Like I don't have a lot of inherent sympathy for the whole desperately wanting to be a cop thing, but you have to be sympathetic to a guy like Jewel who believes so strongly in this just saves a bunch of lives. And then his reward is this system he idolizes, absolutely turning on him.

articles a day about this one guy. On August first, so that's the day after he has his That first article drops in the day after he goes to the FBI office on August first, the same day he's rated by the FBI. The journal publishes a piece on Richard Jewel's history as a campus cop titled a bad Man to Cross on the Beat. Here's Atlanta Magazine. Students were also quoted as saying that Jewel went to extremes. He

was very macho, and he could get very belligerate. Piedmont College junior Nikki Lane said, I've seen him go from calm to angry, back to calm, back to angry in a matter of seconds. And like, I get that he's a dick and he like tried to bust people for smoking pot, But like that doesn't that doesn't mean he's a bomber, Like you're going in fact, like he was a bad man to cross. He tried to arrest a kid for weed. That's pretty far from pipe bomb.

That subject was drawn to the blue lights and sirens of police work like this one. He became famous in the aftermath of murder and like, yeah, it's just it's the yellowest journalism you could possibly do. Like they are, they are basically they're turning their whole paper into this guy,

like in his life is just hell. For three straight months, every day there's articles not just in the AJAC but in national pape Popers digging into his backstory, talking about every embarrassing thing he ever did, talking to everyone who worked with him, who didn't like him. The whole country reviles him. He is a subject of mockery and costs.

On The Tonight Joe Jay Leno gives him a nickname, The Una dufis right again, this man's crime was saving a bunch of people's lives from a bomb, like the und this the unidufis like Per The New York Times, government officials and news organizations descended on the apartment Jewel shared with his mother. Dozens of FBI agents scoured the home and totaway jewels truck in an apartment complex overlooking

his building. Four stations ABC, CBSCN AND and NBC paid a tenant one thousand dollars a day to set up a command post in her unit. Yet he was never charged. Inside jewel Watch TV, he read, he played video games. He couldn't go outside, not without setting off a high speed car chase if government vehicles and media vans anyway, And that's just so fucked up, Like he did nothing. You didn't do that that he saved people's lives and everyone in the country hates him.

She he's never charged, right, And it's one thing, and we can there is I still have a lot of issues with reporting on people who have been charged with crimes like this in the breathless way the media does when they have not been convicted, have not had their day in court, because they're still legally innocent. But this guy hasn't even been charged with shit, you shouldn't be doing this at all when someone's just a suspect like that is so that is so that such fucking malpractice. Yeah, agreed,

it's just really vile. On October twenty seventh, prosecutors send a letter to Jeles lawyer, not to Jewel, not to the public. They just send his lawyer your letter saying, hey, he's not a suspect anymore. By the way, we're done.

But like, man, you have the trauma of of this, like because who can imagine unless you have been unless the entire country has suspected you of being a mass murdering terrorist for three or four months, Like, you can't know what that's like, you know what kind of damage that does do?

as the suspect was written by Kathy Scruggs. She's the reporter who did this, and as far as we know, she just got it or she and the I think she worked with a colleague, got like a tip that probably traced back to an FBI person who had been directed by Free to put the tip out there. Right, That's probably what happened. In the film. Kathy Scruggs is shown as going up to an FBI agent at a bar a couple of days after the bombing and saying,

give me something I can print. She's played by Olivia Wilde. By the way, the FBI agent played by John Ham says basically, I'll give you the name if you fuck me, and so yeah, she starts like touching him, and he says Richard Jewel, right, and then they go fuck right. So basically it shows Kathy Scruggs, a real woman has played by Olivia Wilde, sleeping with a source in order to get Richard Jewele's name, which is not what happened.

No one's ever alleged that being what happened. That was invented by our old friend Clint Eastwood or whoever wrote the fucking movie, just because the the story didn't seem bad enough as it was, and because I guess if you talk about what actually happened, then you have to be deeply critical about the FBI because this is ultimately their fault as much as anything else, and fundamentally the profit motive in journalism, right, Like, both of those things

are the bastards here. But Clint's not interested in that.