that. The court bent over backward and gave them a self-defense charge.

Mr. ZELIFF. But they basically were acting in self-defense?

Mr. JAHN. It was one of their defense claims, yes, sir.

Mr. ZELIFF. Is it true that no Davidian was convicted on the accounts mentioned?

Mr. JAHN. On the murder and the conspiracy to murder, that's

correct.

Mr. ZELIFF. Thank you very much.

I wanted just to ask you, during the days immediately after the ATF raid, a shooting review is conducted which involved asking questions of all ATF agents involved, and at some point, that review turns into questions that could produce information_that is helpful to understand exactly what happened. The Texas Rangers state and I'll refer you to Treasury Bates No. 14137-that you, Mr. Jahn, wanted the review cut off. I guess my question is, why would you of all people want to cut off a process that was designed to get at the truth?

Mr. JAHN. I think that was a mistake, Mr. Chairman. I didn't come on board until April 1. And it's my understanding that there was a decision made to stop the Treasury review and let the Rangers do all the all the investigation and gather their information. But I think that was a mistake on the report, because I had nono one consulted me about cutting off a Treasury review. So I think it might have been a mistake.

Now, perhaps they talked to the U.S. attorney who was on the case prior to April the 1st.

Mr. ZELIFF. Do you think any-do you have any knowledge of any other Federal prosecutors cutting that off?

Mr. JAHN. Not direct knowledge, no. As I say, perhaps they talked to Mr. Edder. That's the only thing I can think of.

Mr. ZELIFF. OK. Let me move on to another question. Let's see. We find a set-we had thousands and thousands of pieces of paper to go through and much of it was very, well, very unorganized. We found a set of handwritten notes that looks to me to be from someone at the Treasury Department; they read as follows:

1:20 p.m., per Tony, Ray Jahn advises us to tell Ron Noble not to open the envelope from Houston Chronicle. Contents are from illegal intercept. Lock in safe and keep. DOJ researching possible violation by paper for printing and distributing.

I couldn't help but be intrigued by what this Waco-related note means. Could you shed some light on what was in this mysterious envelope and why Ron Noble could not open it and why was it being locked in the safe?

Mr. JAHN. Yes, sir. We subpoenaed and obtained from Mr. Mulloney, the TV cameraman, or actually I believe it was the other one, his total tape. On his total tape, they had a scanner that was scanning cellular phones, which is probably illegal interception of those cellular phone telephone conversations. If we had permitted that to be circulated around, that would have been, in itself, illegal in terms of spreading it around, even letting Mr. Noble listen to what his agents were monitored saying.

That, in itself, would be illegal. So we stopped the spreading until we could edit out those portions of the illegally seized cellular phones. That investigation was referred to Justice, and I don't

know what they ever did in terms of whether or not that constituted an illegal wiretap by the press or not. I don't know what the final outcome of that was.

Mr. ZELIFF. If this is the last one, just a quick one.

If you knew all the bad things about David Koresh, why wasn'twhy didn't you arrest him in town?

Mr. JAHN. Well, I wasn't there, I didn't come on until April 1. I think what you need to do is address that question to Mr. Aguilera, who's going to be here, Mr. Johnston, who will. There's no obligation once the warrant is issued, there's really no obligation to do it. It's a matter of judgment, and we're willing to admit there were some mistakes made in judgment in this particular matter.

Mr. ZELIFF. OK. Thank you very much.

I'd like the Chair now yields to my friend, Karen Thurman, ranking minority member from Florida.

Mrs. THURMAN. Good afternoon. Mr. Reavis, you keep talking about these documents. Can you give me a better sense, since you'd like us to ask a question on this, of what it is and what documents you're still looking for? I saw your interview on TV the other morning that had suggested that now, since then, you've gotten the tapes. I guess since the trials you were given tapes from the FBI. What other documents is it that you're still requiring?

Mr. REAVIS. OK. The tapes, as you call them, I got transcripts of those tapes; and I got them through a process that I think was irregular. An attorney named Joe Turner, who had gotten them for discovery, gave them to me. No one has yet been able to get a copy of those from the FBI through the Freedom of Information Act, though about 2 weeks ago, the FBI put a set in its Washington office, and you can go in during working hours and look at them. So they've been declassified to the Washington, DC, press, which doesn't help us a lot in Dallas.

But, in particular, the documents I just mentioned were these. After the February 28 raid, the Texas Rangers interviewed all of the raiders, took a statement from each of them, typed it up; and we have only seen about 20 of these statements, from those raiders who the prosecution thought it might call as witnesses in the trial. I tried to get the other 60 statements, for example, from the Texas Rangers. They told me I'd have to sue to get them.

Let me think what else is still

Mrs. THURMAN. Could there be a reason why? Maybe Mr. Jahn, as a counselor-I, like you, am not an attorney.

Mr. REAVIS. I can tell you the reasons they've given me. They say that there's a lawsuit, and that they don't want to complicate that litigation. And my assessment of that is that if the owner of the Watergate building had sued Richard Nixon and we would have let him say, gee, there's a lawsuit, he can't give you any documents, history would be much different than it is today.

Mrs. THURMAN. Mr. Jahn, would you like to respond to that?
Mr. JAHN. Yes, ma'am.

I know there's a billion dollars' worth of lawsuits filed against the United States. And there are exceptions under the Freedom of Information Act, exceptions that are granted by this Congress to exclude the discovery of those items that would compromise litiga

tion, pending litigation. That's the reason, until the criminal trial was over, there was virtually no discovery whatsoever.

Since that time, I know Ms. Reno has given instructions to make as much as possible-but again because of the physical limitations on manpower and duplication and copying and everything, there's a big backlog on FOIA requests. I was told that this normal-this delay which he's meeting is just a normal delay because of all the other people who have come in ahead of him, filing their requests, and they have to be processed. You take out informants' names, you take out the names of people that were promised confidentiality, you take out privileged sources, and then you turn it over at the end. It's just a normal process.

There's no effort to conceal anything. In fact, Mr. Reavis, if he had called me and asked me some information-he prints in there that I was involved in the decisionmaking to inject the teargas; that's totally false. If he had given me the courtesy of calling me, I would have told him, no, sir, I wasn't involved in the decisionmaking to inject the teargas. So it's not a question of trying to hide something. It's simply a question that we operate under the rules that Congress imposes on us.

Mrs. THURMAN. I can tell you during the crime bill, everybody in the world wanted a copy of the crime bill. We couldn't get it to everybody either, so we kept having problems.

Mr. Reavis, on page 14 of your book you talk about the fact that the main premise of your book is that the press did not investigate the events at Waco and that only you really understand these events. Could you describe for us how your findings differ from the rest of the reports or the reporters who have covered this story? Mr. REAVIS. First of all, I want to say thanks for reading my book.

Mrs. THURMAN. You're welcome.

Mr. REAVIS. Always glad to meet someone who does.

Mrs. THURMAN. It's my job.

Mr. REAVIS. What happened to the press during that time—and I think most of its members will admit this to you now is that their budgets got spent during the 51 days. The search warrant, for example, was sealed for most if not all of that period. So the press couldn't even find out what it was that David Koresh was supposed to have done. It had to take the word of spokesmen for it.

After those 51 days were over, I went down and, for example, ran into the transcripts of all the telephone calls from Mount Carmel to the FBI. And for a year I had those, and I told people I had them, and nobody wanted them.

The biggest surprise I encountered in writing this book is that I had no competitors. And, naturally, my conclusions differ or my questions differ, because I learned a lot more than they did because they abandoned the story when the building burned down.

Now, of course, there were some who didn't abandon quite as quickly as others, but in general this represents a major failure of the press in our country.

Mrs. THURMAN. Mr. Jahn, another question that has been surrounding this has been about whether Koresh was having sex with girls as young as 12 and 13 years old. What evidence is there that Koresh was having sex with children?

Mr. JAHN. We were ready to present testimony of, for instance, the midwife who had given birth to some of the some of the young girls. We felt so strongly that—like I say, it was our plan to take his DNA upon leaving the compound and take the DNA of the children and prove it up, which is basically even-I've even heard Catherine Matteson, one of the ladies that was mentioned, a survivor that came out, she was interviewed in the Waco paper, and she admitted one of the girls was 14 years old when she gave birth to one of David's children. So it was a kind of a secret, but it wasn't a very closely held secret from within, within the members of the message.

Mrs. THURMAN. Thank you.

Mr. ZELIFF. The Chair now recognizes Chairman McCollum of Florida.

Mr. MCCOLLUM. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Jahn, I want to ask a question of you, first with regard to the trial itself in terms of testimony. Was there any testimony at the trial about ATF officers carrying firearms while they were in helicopters on the day of the raid?

Mr. JAHN. Yes, that they were carrying firearms and they had been cleared, that the rules were that they could not have a round in the chamber and that was the rule that the pilots operated under as they flew toward the area.

Mr. MCCOLLUM. What was Kathy's testimony at trial relevant to the helicopters and firearms?

Mr. JAHN. She was on the front side of the building; she didn't have any personal knowledge, any direct knowledge.

Mr. MCCOLLUM. That was her testimony at the trial itself?

Mr. JAHN. Yes. Well, that's my-if she was even asked, that would have been her answer. I can't remember now whether she was even asked, because she was-she was at the front side of the building during the whole time of the transaction.

Mr. MCCOLLUM. OK. Well, we just have a lot of conflicting testimony about helicopters, as you know, and I wanted to find out what had come out at the trial.

Mr. Reavis, you have stated in your book, and in a couple of comments that you made here, quite a bit about the aftermath of the siege I should say "aftermath" of the February 28 siege and the fire itself. You didn't get to testify much about that today. Mr. Jahn made a big point, as I gathered from his testimony, that there was a lot of planning going on and that David Koresh never intended to surrender. As I recall, you got some indication that David Koresh would have surrendered right along.

I'm sure you sat there with me listening to Mr. Jahn's testimony, and I wondered if you could respond to us what your investigation unearthed and why, if you do disagree with Mr. Jahn on that point, why you disagree.

Mr. REAVIS. Mr. Jahn said this morning that there was never any testimony about Koresh planning to surrender and nothing in the tapes or transcripts.

In the transcripts on the 14th, 15th, 16th, and 17th of April, the 18th as well, there's discussion between Steve Schneider, David Koresh and several FBI negotiators, in which David says, As soon as I get the seals written, I'm coming out.

This was a big decision for him, incidentally, because he believed his doctrine should never be written down until April 14. And the FBI negotiators say at one point, Can we go to the bank with that? And Koresh says, Yes, you can.

And in another point, they say, Well, will you send us the seals out as you finish them? And he says, Yes.

My interpretation of those transcripts is that Koresh thought he had an agreement to surrender when he was finished writing those documents.

Mr. MCCOLLUM. Well, now, the other side of that coin is the impression being given maybe that Koresh was just simply lying all along, that he was just playing people along outside. I hear that throughout some of this hearing from the ATF side and the FBI side. Is that not your impression?

Mr. REAVIS. You know, when a man is dead, we can convict him of anything and accuse him of anything. David-I believe that David was being honest because always before he had said, My message cannot be written, God does not want it written, the Bible's already written and that's all we need. All of a sudden at the end of Passover, on April 14, he decided that he had to write his message.

I think he was persuaded by Tabor and Arnold, two theologians, but we can't know. We can know that he said that; we can't know now what would have happened, because we didn't wait to find out. Mr. MCCOLLUM. Would you care to give us your criticism, if there is any, of the final day of the fire? You said you didn't have time to give that, and what led up to it?

Mr. REAVIS. I think the best information on this point, and it supports what I say in my book, is that the methylene chloride that was injected into Mount Carmel with the ferret round, rounds, that its vapors are flammable. There's a long article in the Sunday issue of the Los Angeles Times by Glenn Bunning that has more expert information than my book had. It establishes, methylene chloride is dangerous; you should not throw it inside of buildings, its manufacturer says.

Mr. MCCOLLUM. What about "come along," you had an agent come along? You said that after he had his little period of time that things really changed when the FBI took over the negotiations. Can you tell us about that?

Mr. REAVIS. His name was Jim Cavanaugh. I can now say that; I'm away from Simon and Schuster's lawyers.

Mr. MCCOLLUM. All right.

Mr. REAVIS. I think he did a good job, and Koresh and Schneider were greatly displeased when he was pulled off. He did a good job because he let them lecture him on theology, and they thought they were making a convert out of him.

Mr. MCCOLLUM. And after he was pulled off?

Mr. REAVIS. They threw a fit because they felt he had been pulled because he had listened to them.

Mr. MCCOLLUM. And during the time he was on, quite a few people were let out; is that right?

Mr. REAVIS. That's right.

Mr. MCCOLLUM. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.