Former MO senator investigated Waco. He says conspiracy theories have grown in power

As the United States marks the 30th anniversary of the deadly standoff in Waco, Texas, the Department of Justice special counsel who investigated the confrontation’s fiery end says the same conspiratorial thinking that clouded the incident’s aftermath still courses through the country.

Former Sen. John Danforth, a Missouri Republican, was named special counsel in September 1999 by then-Attorney General Janet Reno and told to investigate, in part, whether federal law enforcement started the fire that engulfed the Branch Davidian compound on April 19, 1993. Seventy-six people died from either the fire or gunshots.

The month before Danforth’s appointment, a Time magazine poll found 61% of the public believed federal law enforcement started the fire. It was into that atmosphere of suspicion that Danforth conducted his investigation, eventually reporting that law enforcement didn’t start the fire. Danforth said he reached the conclusion with 100% certainty.

Three decades later, the role of conspiracy theories in American politics has only grown. Former President Donald Trump fanned the flames of conspiratorial thinking, pushing the false notion that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Some of his followers latched on to QAnon, the fringe theory which posits that a cabal of sexual traffickers coordinated to thwart Trump and his agenda.

“I think that there is an appetite for conspiracy theories. I think that’s just out there,” Danforth told The Star in a recent interview.

“I think right now the political style, particularly in my party, is to bring” conspiracy theories “to life,” Danforth, said. “It’s a tactic.”

The “us vs. them” mindset at the core of many conspiracy theories has become a common political tactic, Danforth, 86, said. “Then it was an outlier, but now it’s morphed into the mainstream of the Republican Party,” he said.

The standoff at Waco began on Feb. 28, 1993, when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms attempted to execute a search warrant on the compound of the Branch Davidians, a heavily-armed religious cult, and arrest its leader, David Koresh, and other members. An ensuing gunfight killed four ATF agents and six Branch Davidian members.

What followed was a 51-day standoff, with an intense law enforcement presence that included tanks encircling the compound while negotiators tried to coax out those inside, including numerous children. On April 19, the FBI launched tear gas into the compound. A fire then spread throughout the building. Only nine people left during the fire.

The 30th anniversary has spurred a new wave of popular attention on the violent episode. Netflix has released a three-part documentary and a new series dramatizing the aftermath of the disaster is set to premiere on Showtime later this month.

Waco, along with the 11-day Ruby Ridge siege in 1992, helped fuel far right extremism throughout the 1990s. Timothy McVeigh, who traveled to Waco to watch the standoff, detonated a bomb outside an Oklahoma City federal building on the two-year anniversary of the end of the Waco standoff, killing 168 people.

Danforth said the Waco standoff played into perceptions that the world is divided into “us vs. them” or “us vs. the elite or the government.” They are bullying you and we’re pushing back, Danforth said, describing the message some took away from Waco.

The current right-wing embrace of conspiratorial thinking is embodied by Trump, who, since launching his campaign for president in 2015, has spread a variety of conspiracy theories. His repeated assertions that the 2020 election was stolen drove his supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump, who was indicted in New York last week on charges likely related to business fraud, is under criminal investigation in Georgia over whether he interfered in the state’s presidential election. At the federal level, special counsel Jack Smith is investigating Trump’s actions related to Jan. 6.

Trump held the first rally of his 2024 presidential campaign last month in Waco amid the anniversary of the standoff. Danforth said he prepared a statement in case Trump brought up the standoff, but the former president never mentioned it. Danforth said the location and timing of the rally could have been “happenstance” and the Trump campaign has said it chose the site for logistical reasons.

But Don Haider-Markel, a University of Kansas professor who has studied political extremism, said the timing and location was “definitely a dog whistle to the far right.”

“At least on the far right, Waco has never gone far away,” Haider-Markel said. “In other words, it’s consistently been part of the narrative on the far right about a tyrannical federal government and a way to sort of put everything in context around thinking about the federal government and opposition to the federal government by anti-government groups on the far right.”

Danforth, who served in the U.S. Senate from 1976 until 1995, is by today’s standards a moderate Republican. His old school political approach has all but vanished from Missouri, which has taken a hard right turn over the past decade. Trump won 57% of the vote in Missouri in both 2016 and 2020.

In recent years, Danforth has repeatedly criticized the direction of the Republican Party and its anti-democratic tendencies under Trump.

After Jan. 6, Danforth renounced his past praise and mentorship of Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican who was the first senator to announce he would support an objection to certifying President Joe Biden’s victory in an effort to overturn the election and raised his fist in solidarity with the crowd outside the Capitol before the riot.

When Reno asked Danforth to be special counsel in 1999, he had been out of the Senate just four years. While Danforth was an attorney and had served as the Missouri state attorney general from 1969 to 1976, he had never been a federal prosecutor.

“Questions have been raised, and he is the perfect person to find the answers,” Reno said at the time, praising Danforth’s “determination to get to the truth.”

Danforth ran the investigation out of an office in St. Louis – not Washington, D.C. – and ran a bipartisan operation. Democrat Edward Dowd Jr., former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, was his deputy special counsel. His chief of staff was Republican Thomas Schweich, who went on to serve as Missouri state auditor before dying by suicide in 2015.

“We spent more than a year on this and just exhaustively went into it. It’s hard to prove a negative, but we did it,” Danforth said, referring to the report’s conclusions that the federal government didn’t cause the fire at the Branch Davidian compound.

Before releasing a preliminary report in July 1999, Danforth said all the lawyers and investigators working for the special counsel crowded into a conference room. They projected the report on a screen and went through each page one by one.

“And we asked if anybody had any doubt about anything on this page,” Danforth said, “and nobody did.”