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On 26 August 2002, conservative pundit Ann Coulter gave an interview to the New York Observer in which she stated My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building. Timothy McVeigh was an anti-government extremist and the perpetrator of the 19 April 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, an attack that left 168 people -- including 19 children -- dead and injured hundreds more. McVeigh was convicted of the bombing and was executed on 11 June 2001 for his role in committing the single deadliest home-grown terror attack in American history. Coulter has never denied she made the remark, which was apparently tape-recorded by Observer writer George Gurley. The relevant passage in Gurley's story that reported it read as follows: Coulter addressed the comment during a 29 June 2006 appearance on the Fox News program Hannity & Colmes. During that program, co-host Alan Colmes observed: The things you say, the things you write, when you say Tim McVeigh should have bombed the Times building, we should carpet-bomb [Middle Eastern countries] to convert them to Christianity ... I should be laughing at this, these are all jokes. After some back-and-forth, Coulter, who was apparently upset over a Times report detailing the U.S. government's sifting through Americans' bank records as part of post-9/11, counter-terrorism efforts, responded: I think the Timothy McVeigh line was merely prescient after the New York Times has leapt beyond, beyond nonsense straight into treason last week. Coulter so liked her comment that she included it in her 2007 book, If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans: McVeigh allegedly served as the inspiration for another would-be domestic terrorist. In August 2017, the FBI arrested 23-year-old Jerry Drake Varnell on suspicion of attempting to detonate what he thought was a 1,000-pound bomb (the explosive turned out to be a fake) at a bank building in Oklahoma City. Varnell reportedly harbored an admiration for McVeigh.
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