Josh Clark

It was nothing like that.

It was like negotiating with somebody who had different views with you than you that were so...

far out as far as religiousness goes, that even a religious negotiator wouldn't have common ground in that sense, right?

So they seemed crazy to the FBI, even though they weren't crazy people.

It's really hard to get that across and not sound like an apologist or like I'm crazy myself.

Right.

Do you want to take a break and come back and start talking about the siege and the negotiation attempts?

Okay, Chuck, so like I said, the raid very quickly turned into a 51-day siege, which makes it very ironic that one of the ATF agents was so confident that the raid would be over and done with very quickly.

He had set up a tee time for the same afternoon as the raid, and he missed the tee time, obviously, because like I said, it turned into a siege.

At first, so the FBI was on the scene almost immediately because when a federal agent is killed, the FBI investigates and they're like, well, we might as well stick around since this is now a siege.

We're going to take over from the ATF.

So basically on day one, the FBI took over this and their negotiators started getting to work.

Apparently, they had trouble finding the phone number for the compound.

But I think the Branch Davidians called them first.

Is that correct?

OK, well, at any rate, they were in communication on the phone very, very quickly.

I think maybe even the same the same day.

Yeah.

And I'm sure the FBI negotiator pinched the bridge of his nose harder than he ever has in his life.

So that kind of did that.