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After a media report claimed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had dismissed all three ransom notes in the Nancy Guthrie case, trial lawyer Mark Geragos thinks someone at the FBI planted the story.
Geragos made that claim in Saturday’s episode of 2 Angry Men, the podcast he cohosts with TMZ founder Harvey Levin.
“I don’t think the story was bogus,” Geragos said. “I think it was planted, frankly, by somebody in the FBI.”
The podcast came three days after a Reuters report in which an anonymous FBI official told the news organization that “none of the ransom notes are [sic] believed to be genuine.”
“There was a miss, is what I’m told, in the original and second [waves of] letters, and supposedly they missed something, which somebody else at the FBI subsequently picked up on, and that was the fissure, so to speak, between the two.”
Levin revealed that when TMZ received a ransom note demanding cryptocurrency in the Nancy Guthrie case, investigators sent money to that Bitcoin address in an effort to trace those funds. The FBI told TMZ not to publish that detail, Levin said. Levin also speculated that the FBI forgot to give the same instruction the Tucson news station that received the same ransom note. “That was definitely a screw-up,” he said.
“That fits precisely with what I was told, that there was an initial screw-up,” Geragos added. “They then figured it out, and then that is where the fissure happened, and … that fits exactly with what I was told, that it was people trying to cover their territory and [cover your ass] on this.”
On Wednesday, the FBI’s office in Phoenix, Arizona, released a statement about the ransom notes on X, seemingly in response to the Reuters story. “The FBI and its task force partners have received several ransom notes over the course of this investigation,” the X post reads. “Some have been deemed to be extortion attempts without legitimacy. Other ransom demands may potentially be legitimate and are still being investigated as such. This case continues to be investigated as a kidnapping for ransom case. The FBI has and will continue to offer all assistance possible in the investigation — however, local authorities remain the lead.
