A Christmas Day Mystery
The FBI's investigation into the Nashville bombing leaves key questions unanswered.
In the early hours of December 25, 2020, Antony Quinn Warner loaded explosives into his Thor Motor Coach Chateau RV and drove into downtown Nashville, Tennessee. He parked adjacent to the AT&T building at 166 Second Avenue North and waited. About four hours later, someone, presumably Warner, fired three bursts of gunfire into the air, awakening nearby residents around 05:30. Shortly thereafter, a computerized, female voice began blaring out of a sound system inside the RV: “All buildings in this area must be evacuated now. If you hear this message, evacuate now.” “Your primary objective is to evacuate these buildings now.” “Stay clear of this vehicle.” The RV exploded an hour later at 06:30, destroying the AT&T building and damaging others nearby.
Following a multi-agency investigation into the bombing, the FBI released a so-called “report,” more accurately described as a press release, on March 15, 2021. The FBI concluded—without explaining their reasoning or offering any evidence for public review—that Warner acted alone and committed suicide in a random bombing.
Warner’s detonation of the improvised explosive device was an intentional act in an effort to end his own life, driven in part by a totality of life stressors – including paranoia, long-held individualized beliefs adopted from several eccentric conspiracy theories, and the loss of stabilizing anchors and deteriorating interpersonal relationships.
Thanks to Warner’s intentional efforts to minimize loss of human life, no one was killed in the blast. The timing of the bombing, at 06:30 on Christmas Day, when only a few people would be out and about on the street, and when people would not be deep asleep, suggests Warner intentionally avoided causing casualties. Moreover, Warner fired warning shots an hour before the bombing to wake the residents of nearby buildings so they could evacuate. And he programmed the bomb to go off about 20 minutes after repeated, loud warnings told people to stay away from the area.
These facts led the FBI to assess, “Warner specifically chose the location and timing of the bombing so that it would be impactful, while still minimizing the likelihood of causing undue injury.” However, “The FBI’s analysis did not reveal indications of a broader ideological motive to use violence to bring about social or political change, nor does it reveal indications of a specific personal grievance focused on individuals or entities in and around the location of the explosion.” In short, the FBI never established Warner’s motive; never identified the target of his attack; and never explained how “conspiracy theories” may have driven Warner to commit the attack.
Law and Politics’s OSINT investigation into the bombing raises more questions than answers: was Warner a madman whose goal was to kill himself in spectacular fashion, or did he have another motive for the bombing? Did Warner target the AT&T building specifically? Where is the evidence Warner committed suicide? Is there even conclusive proof Warner is dead?
According to reporting by AP News, the FBI learned in the course of their investigation that Warner believed in aliens and was interested in the reptilian conspiracy theory.
[I]investigators scrutinized Warner’s interest in conspiracy theories after being told by some of the people they interviewed that he believed shape-shifting reptiles take on a human form to gain control over society and that he discussed taking trips to hunt aliens.
Absurd as it sounds, the idea alien reptiles control government is a commonly-held belief among a significant number of members of the UFO community. It should go without saying, though, that the overwhelming majority of people who believe in the theory are not suicidal. And, while such beliefs may indicate paranoia (rather than a keen interest in more exotic explanations for the government-admitted UFO phenomenon), again, the vast majority of people suffering from mental health issues are not irrational, let alone suicidal. (See former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon’s blog post from yesterday, “Unprecedented UAP Legislation”) (“Unbeknownst to most Americans, President Biden just signed into law far-reaching legislation that could soon confirm the existence of an alien presence on earth.”) There is simply no logical connection between believing in aliens and blowing oneself up. Nor is there any evidence Warner actually believed in the 5G conspiracy theory.
The official rationale for Warner’s apparent suicide is therefore reduced to the conclusion Warner suffered from a “loss of stabilizing anchors and deteriorating interpersonal relationships,” unexplained. The only publicly available evidence supporting this conclusion is the fact the song “Downtown” by Petula Clark played from the RV immediately before the explosion. (The song begins with the lyrics, “When you’re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go downtown.”) But, if Warner was suicidal simply because of problems in his personal life, why would he he kill himself in such an utterly bizarre manner, rather than any one of the much more common methods of committing suicide?
Of course, it is possible Warner was a depressed lunatic, motivated by fantastic ideas, who decided to blow himself up in his RV on a random street in downtown Nashville. According to Warner’s former attorney, Ray Throckmorton III, Warner talked about building bombs—a lot.
Throckmorton described Warner as a "techy, computer-geeky guy," who came across as intelligent, though reserved.
"He just seemed like he hated life and he hated everything and everybody," Throckmorton said.
"He was extremely reserved and suspicious and paranoid and distrustful. There was no chitchat with him."
Throckmorton said he met Warner through another client, the woman who police on Tuesday identified as Warner's girlfriend.
The 64-year-old woman began to call Throckmorton's office frequently in 2019 to report she feared for her safety, saying Warner was stalking her and even potentially drugging and poisoning her.
"She believed that Tony was spying on her, believed that he was breaking into her house at night while she was asleep," Throckmorton said. "She believed all kinds of things. We had no way to know whether or not that was true."
Throckmorton said the woman told him Warner was building bombs.
The attorney said Warner never mentioned anything to him about building bombs.
"He'd said it to her on numerous occasions, allegedly," Throckmorton said. "My understanding is he never showed her anything. He would just boast or brag about it."
On Aug. 21, 2019, Throckmorton got a call from the distraught woman. Afraid she would harm herself, he said he called 911 as he drove to the woman's house in Antioch.
Police, firefighters and medics beat him to the scene, he said.
According to a Metro Nashville Police Department report from the day, the woman told officers Warner "was building bombs in the RV trailer at his residence."
Throckmorton told officers Warner "frequently talks about the military and bomb making," the report said.
Warner "knows what he is doing and is capable of making a bomb," Throckmorton said to the officers at the time, according to the report.
In an interview with The Tennessean Tuesday night, Throckmorton said Warner had previously mentioned to him that he was in the Navy. Police reports show the FBI and Department of Defense have no military records for Warner.
Nashville officers, while at the woman's house with Throckmorton, called for a mental health crisis expert, and the woman voluntarily agreed to be transported for psychological evaluation, according to MNPD spokesman Don Aaron.
Officers then traveled a mile and a half to Warner's home at 115 Bakertown Road, where they saw an RV in his fenced-off backyard. Warner did not come to the door, and the officers alerted supervisors and the bomb squad.
"They saw no evidence of a crime and had no authority to enter his home or fenced property," Aaron said of officers' unsuccessful attempt to make contact with Warner or look inside the RV.
The next day, Nashville police passed along the report to the FBI, which "reported back that they checked their holdings and found no records on Warner at all," Aaron said in a statement.
"At no time was there any evidence of a crime detected and no additional action was taken," Aaron said. "No additional information about Warner came to the department’s or the FBI’s attention after August 2019."
(Emphasis added.)
This story could be just another example of the FBI’s perennial incompetence at following up on tips of real threats. The Bureau has yet to explain how they had no record of Warner, even though Warner was arrested and convicted in 1979 on felony drug possession charges. (The FBI should have access to all felony records via the National Crime Information Center.)
On the other hand, the madman-bomber theory does not fit neatly with other facts of the case.
Even if Warner didn’t leave behind a clear motive, he did take steps in the weeks leading up to the bombing that suggested he didn’t expect to survive. For instance, he gave away his car, telling the recipient that he had cancer — though it was not clear if he did — and signed a document that transferred his home in a longtime Nashville suburb to a California woman for nothing in return. He told an employer he was retiring.
A neighbor who made small talk with Warner about the upcoming Christmas holiday later recalled to the AP that Warner said something to the effect of, “Oh, yeah, Nashville and the world is never going to forget me.”
(Emphasis added.)
Warner selected Nashville as a target weeks before allegedly carrying out the bombing. He had the wherewithal to plan ahead, dispossessing himself of his car and his home. He had the technical ability to build a large bomb. He planned the bombing to minimize casualties and went to great lengths to ensure no one was hurt. He thought he was doing something so important that he would never be forgotten. It begs the question, does this sound like the behavior of a delusional madman? Perhaps, but the FBI’s investigation is not conclusive and far from satisfactory.
Despite online speculation that Warner may have been motivated by conspiracy theories about 5G technology, given the proximity of the explosion to an AT&T building and the resulting havoc to cellphone service in the area, FBI spokesperson Joel Siskovic said the investigation found no indication that AT&T had anything to do with Warner’s selection of the location.
(Emphasis added.)
The FBI has offered no evidence or explanation for their conclusion Warner did not target the AT&T building. The idea the bombing could have been random flies in the face of substantial circumstantial evidence that the building was a noteworthy potential target.
For starters, Warner’s father, Charles B. Warner, worked for BellSouth, a former subsidiary of AT&T that merged into the parent company in 2006. Like his father, Warner also worked for AT&T in the very same building he would later bomb. Warner’s girlfriend, Pamella Perry, told the FBI she “knew that [Warner] harbored some animosity toward AT&T for some bizarre reason. He worked there, was familiar with the building and knew what they did there[.]” (Emphases added.)
It is therefore plausible Warner knew that, behind the façade of the Nashville AT&T building, there existed an operational NSA OPERATION FAIRVIEW station, “NSVLTNMT,” which served as part of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s system of mass-surveillance.
NSVLTNMT is located at 185 Second Avenue North, directly across from 166 Second Avenue North, about 50 feet of where the vehicle-borne improvised explosive device exploded.
According to reporting by The Intercept, AT&T and the NSA work together to surveil internet and cell traffic passing over AT&T’s network.
NSA diagrams reveal that after it collects data from AT&T’s “access links” and “peering partners,” it is sent to a “centralized processing facility” code-named PINECONE, located somewhere in New Jersey. Inside the PINECONE facility, there is a secure space in which there is both NSA-controlled and AT&T-controlled equipment. Internet traffic passes through an AT&T “distribution box” to two NSA systems. From there, the data is then transferred about 200 miles southwest to its final destination: NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland.
AT&T/NSA are also involved in the collection and transmission of unofficial election results. Vote tallies are transmitted using insecure cellular modems, which academic researchers have shown can be hacked to change election results, according to leading election security experts interviewed by The Detroit Free Press.
With the Nov. 6 election less than 30 days away, Michigan officials tout the fact that the state's election machines are not connected to the Internet — eliminating a major hacking risk.
But does that fact alone make Michigan's election machines impervious to hacking?
Many researchers and election integrity activists say no.
They say Michigan could be vulnerable as one of at least four states — along with Florida, Illinois, and Wisconsin — that use cellular modems to transmit unofficial election results.
In an Oct. 2 letter to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, 30 academics, security experts and election integrity activists — including a computer science professor at the University of Michigan — expressed "grave concerns" about the devices.
They said use of the modems makes election results vulnerable to tampering and could result in malware infecting election machines. They asked the federal government to warn states and local agencies against their use.
"In short, they can wreak havoc on an election," the letter said.
[ ]
Cellular modems use a cell phone connection, not an Internet connection, and their use "is part of the reason why Oakland County, for example, has been able to report results more quickly than its neighbors in past cycles, and why reporters were pleasantly surprised when Detroit and Wayne County were able to report in after the 2017 local elections," Woodhams said.
He said use of the devices follows federal guidelines and processes that "prevent any portions of the systems from being accessed or altered outside of the established flow of the application."
But the letter, signed by academics including Alex Halderman, director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Science and Security, and groups including Common Cause and the National Election Defense Coalition, says modern cellular modems “in fact, are part of the Internet.”
Cellular networks have “known vulnerabilities that are subject to exploitation,” the letter said. A cellular device “can be fooled into connecting to false mobile cell towers (such as Stingray surveillance devices) to cause a server disruption, and if there is improper authentication of a connection, there could be false reports from devices impersonating precinct voting machines.”
Joe Rozell, director of elections for Oakland County, said officials there have used cellular modems for about seven years and are "very comfortable with the process that we're using." That's especially true since 2017, when the county paid AT&T between $15,000 and $20,000 for a private cellular network used to transmit the unofficial results from 520 precincts to the clerk's office in Pontiac, he said.
(Emphases added.)
The day after the bombing, Patrick Byrne reported the NSVLTNMT building was owned by Cerberus Capital Management, which was then run by Hootan Yaghoobzadeh. Yaghoobzadeh is now a Managing Director of Staple Street Capital. Staple Street Capital is the owner of Dominion Voting Systems, the election services provider at the heart of the 2020 election fraud conspiracy theory.
Byrne is a controversial figure, not least because he, along with Gen. Michael Flynn and attorney Sydney Powell, gained unauthorized access to the White House, and then the Oval Office, on the night of December 19, 2020. Byrne advised President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to seize voting machines in several states, in order to conduct forensic analysis of the machines to look for (or plant) evidence of fraud. But, before Byrne became one of the most vocal proponents of the 2020 voting machine fraud theory, he blew the whistle to the Senate Judiciary Committee on naked short-selling. Naked short-selling was once considered to be an unfounded conspiracy theory, but is now a proven part of Wall Street history. What is more, Byrne acted undercover at the direction of the FBI in the investigation and eventual conviction of a Russian agent, Marina Butina. Love him or hate him, it is undeniable Bryne is exceptionally well-connected at the very highest levels of Congress and the U.S. Intelligence Community, and has been involved in multiple operations under official authority of the United States.
Other circumstantial evidence suggests further investigation is warranted into the possibility Warner intentionally bombed the AT&T/NSA building in Nashville. A month before carrying out the bombing, Warner transferred his house, by quit claim deed, to a 29-year-old Los Angeles woman named Michelle Swing. Warner ‘sold’ his property to Swing for $0.00.
In an interview with The Daily Mail, Swing refused to say whether she knew Warner. Warner’s 2020 transfer of property (115 Bakertown Road) to Swing was the second time he had given Swing a house for free within the space of two years.
In the state of Tennessee you can deed property to someone else without their consent or their signature or anything,’ Swing told DailyMail.com
'I didn't even buy the house he just deeded it over to me without my knowledge. So this is all very weird to me, that’s about all I can say.'
However, Warner also transferred another home on Bakertown Road to Swing via a quitclaim deed last year.
The $249,000 house had previously belonged a member of his family and Warner had only been in possession of it for five months before again giving it to Swing for free. She later also used a quitclaim to give the house to another person.
Swing declined to say whether she had ever met Warner or whether she had family links to him, adding: ‘I've been told to direct everything else to FBI.’
Later reporting by The Tennessean revealed Swing is the daughter of one of Warner’s friends. Swing would later transfer the house she received in 2019 (3724 Bakertown Road) to Betty Christine Lane, Warner’s mother, shortly after Warner transferred the same to Swing.
Lane had sued Warner for transferring, without her authority, her equity in the house to Warner’s brother, following the death of Warner’s father in 2011, according to the New York Post. These facts suggest Swing might have been involved in a family dispute over the property. But Swing reportedly told the FBI she had never met Warner.
However, this investigation found evidence Swing used to live at 3724 Bakertown Road, strongly suggesting Warner and Swing know each other, if not lived together.
In another strange, potential coincidence, Swing’s address in Los Angeles, at the time of the bombing, 810 South Flower St., is only three-and-a-half blocks away from another NSA OPERATION FAIRVIEW facility at 420 South Grand Avenue.
Since the bombing, Swing has deleted all of her social media, including her Facebook and LinkedIn profile, which claimed she worked as a talent-development executive for a live-entertainment company, AEG Presents. Under the circumstances, it is understandable Swing might erase evidence of a prior relationship with Warner to protect her privacy.
But records show Swing paid the property tax on the 115 Bakertown Road property on November 2, 2020, 23 days before Warner transferred the property to her on November 25. There are only two plausible explanations for this fact: either Warner somehow made the property tax payments in Swing’s name, although why he would do so is completely speculative; or Swing lied in the only interview she gave to journalists, by falsely claiming Warner “just deeded it over to me without my knowledge.” We can conclude with high confidence Swing made the tax payments herself because the “Payee” switched from “FTB Lockbox” (First Horizon Bank), during the years Warner paid the tax, to “FHB Lockbox” (First Hawaiian Bank) in the year Swing appears to have paid the tax.
Swing probably knew Warner intended to transfer her the property later in November, otherwise she would not have started paying property taxes on a house she did not own. This conclusion is supported by a report by the U.S. Sun that Warner wrote a “November letter” to Swing (presumably on November 1 or 2), telling her of his plans to take a Christmas “holiday” and warning her about what she would find at 115 Bakertown Road. “The attic has plywood and lighting, take a look. The basement is not normal, take a look. Woof woof Julio,” Warner wrote. Presuming Warner’s basement was “not normal” because it contained bomb-making equipment, it is notable that Warner, who, by all accounts, was paranoid, felt free to share this fact with Swing. Warner must have trusted Swing, perhaps as the result of a romantic or collegiate relationship.
Warner had a dog called “Julio” and often wrote to his friends under his dog’s name, according to News Channel 5 Nashville.
A man who knew Christmas bomber Anthony Warner got a disturbing surprise in his mailbox on New Year's Day when he received a package from the bomber.
The non-descript package was postmarked December 23rd, two days before investigators say Warner killed himself in the bombing.
Sources tell NewsChannel 5 Investigates that Warner mailed similar packages to other individuals.
The package, which contained at least nine typed pages and two Samsung thumb drives, was immediately turned over to the FBI.
The envelope does not have a return address, but the rambling pages inside left no doubt it was from Warner.
"Hey Dude," the cover letter starts, "You will never believe what I found in the park."
"The knowledge I have gained is immeasurable. I now understand everything, and I mean everything from who/what we really are, to what the known universe really is."
The cover letter was signed by "Julio," a name Warner's friends say he often used when sending them e-mails.
A source tells NewsChannel 5 Investigates that Warner also had a dog named Julio.
The letter urged the friend to watch some internet videos he included on two Samsung thumb drives.
On another page Warner wrote about 9-11 conspiracy theories, ending with the statement "The moon landing and 9-11 have so many anomalies they are hard to count."
Warner later wrote that "September 2011 was supposed to be the end game for the planet," because that is when he believed that aliens and UFO's began launching attacks on earth.
He wrote that the media was covering up those attacks.
But Warner's writings grow even more bizarre when he wrote about reptilians and lizard people that he believed control the earth and had tweaked human DNA.
"They put a switch into the human brain so they could walk among us and appear human," Warner wrote.
While Warner's writings cover a variety of bizarre theories, he never mentions AT&T or anything else that appears to suggest a motive in the Nashville bombing.
Warner did write extensively about "perception," adding that "Everything is an illusion" and "there is no such thing as death."
The official account of the bombing—that a paranoid lunatic who was obsessed with conspiracy theories ranging from alien reptiles, to the moon landing, to 9/11—seems almost too convenient. A more perfect cover story to dismiss the bombing as the work of a madman is hard to imagine. Recall the U.S. government, probably the CIA, fabricated the racist conspiracy theory that COVID-19 originated from Chinese people eating bats in the Wuhan wet market to discourage inquiry into the lab origin hypothesis. (See “It's Just The Flu: A comprehensive catalogue of COVID-19 disinformation from 'trusted authorities”) (“A peer-reviewed paper published in Nature in June 2021 found no bats or pangolins are sold in the Wuhan wet market.”)
Merely accepting as truth what the government—any government—says is antithetical to objective investigation. Taking this axiom to its logical conclusion, and after extensive review of official and mainstream media reports on the bombing, Law and Politics concludes with certainty there is insufficient publicly available evidence to prove to a reasonable degree of confidence that Warner is dead, let alone that he committed suicide in a random bombing. This conclusion is based on the dearth of publicly-available evidence regarding the government’s DNA analysis. The FBI press release claimed Warned was identified by “DNA process and review that resulted in the confirmation of the suspect’s identity,” without further explanation. AP News says, “Authorities were able to identify Warner through DNA recovered from the blast site[.]” The Tennessean similarly reports that authorities identified Warner“through DNA evidence.” In short, the only evidence Warner is the bomber are unsubstantiated claims by government officials, who have a long track record of lying to the public, especially on matters of national security.
The complete lack of evidence in the public domain leaves room for several possible conclusions other than Warner committed suicide in a random bombing. As any competent defense attorney knows, DNA can be accidentally transferred from one person to another, or from a person to an object. Unintentional DNA transfer has resulted in multiple wrongful convictions. Separately, of course, there is the possibility a third-party planted Warner’s DNA in the RV. And, it should go without saying, investigators would have expected to find Warner’s DNA in the RV no matter who did the bombing, because the RV was Warner’s vehicle! Although Warner is on camera driving the RV into Nashville, this evidence alone is not sufficient to eliminate the possibility Warner exited the RV before it arrived at the AT&T building. If Warner is not the bomber, the next most likely explanation is a state actor, probably elements of the USIC, is responsible for the bombing. In that event, there is no question the bomber(s) would have had the technical capacity necessary to drive the RV via remote-control to the AT&T building. Although somewhat outlandish, there is simply not enough publicly available evidence to conclusively rule out these theories, which are well within the realm of possibility. After all, where is the CCTV footage of Warner firing three bursts of gunfire from inside the vehicle? The bombing was caught on video from multiple angles, but no footage of the gunfire exists in the public domain.
In conclusion, the FBI claims Warner did not target the AT&T building specifically, even though:
Warner’s ex-girlfriend told the FBI that Warner had “animosity toward AT&T for some bizarre reason” and “was familiar with the building and knew what they did there.”
The bombing intentionally avoided human casualties, suggesting that, if the bombing was not random, it was designed to target infrastructure.
The bombing occurred directly outside the AT&T building.
The AT&T building housed a NSA surveillance facility.
If Law and Politics can foresee an attack on the Capitol 56 days in advance of January 6, 2021, and can predict Trump’s intention to use the Insurrection Act to seize voting machines 38 day in advance of the December 19 meeting in the Oval Office, then there is no question U.S. intelligence would have the foresight to destroy evidence of vote-rigging, if that is in fact what occurred.
Considering the known fact AT&T is used to transmit election results and, in light of the #TwitterFiles showing blatantly unconstitutional, partisan election interference by the FBI and DHS in the 2020 general election, Law and Politics strongly recommends further independent investigation into the 2020 Nashville bombing, the FBI’s handling of the case, and Michelle Swing.
This is Law and Politics. Merry Christmas, and until next time . . . .