I'm John Batchel with my colleague Patrick O'Donnell.

He is a best-selling author and most recently the author of The Unvanquished.

And one of the stories Patrick tells is the tragedy of Lincoln's murder, April 14th, 1865.

The pursuit of Booth through Maryland and his death April 26th. But the trial of the

conspirators, some of whom we've named, begins on May 12th, the next month within weeks. And it's a

military trial, prosecuted by General Holt, the adjutant general of the Union Army,

pressed into service and everyone there by the ferocious and extremely smart and mightily angry

Stanton, the Secretary of War.

Andrew Johnson is now the president of the United States,

and Johnson later will be castigated as sympathetic to the Confederacy.

At this point, he is with the Avengers.

They want to make certain that the people who murdered their president swing for it,

and some of them will be hanged, some will not be.

Importantly, however, there is an opinion, not mine. I read these things that Holt and Stanton overreach and use perjury. But is the

perjury something that's concocted by the Secret Service? There is that suggestion in your work, Patrick.

It's potentially, I think,

the last operation of the Confederate Secret Service. Another individual that we haven't introduced

yet is a guy by the name George Sanders. He's this ultimate political operative that believes

in the theory of the dagger. He was, it's multiple witnesses placed him and booth together in Montreal.

And he is in many ways the man that pulls many of the strengths.

And the, the suggestion, the evidence points to potentially Sanders,

helping basically coach the prosecution star witnesses who some surmised could be double agents

...