It was one of the nation’s most important mysteries for nearly five years. Hours before the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, someone placed pipe bombs outside Republican and Democratic headquarters in Washington, D.C., leading to a lengthy manhunt.
Earlier this month, there was a breakthrough. Federal agents arrested a suspect on Dec. 4, taking Brian Cole Jr. into custody. The Virginia man, who lives roughly 23 miles south of Capitol Hill, has been charged with transporting an explosive device and attempted malicious destruction by means of explosive materials, according to charging documents filed in court.
What was unclear at the time, however, was the suspect’s possible motives. According to the latest court filing from federal prosecutors, an answer is coming into focus. The Associated Press reported:
The man accused of placing two pipe bombs in Washington on the eve of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol told investigators after his arrest that he believed someone needed to ‘speak up’ for people who believed the 2020 election was stolen and that he wanted to target the country’s political parties because they were ‘in charge,’ prosecutors said Sunday.
The same Justice Department memo said that Cole confessed to placing the pipe bombs during an interview with FBI officials.
The AP’s report added that, according to prosecutors, Cole “acknowledged feeling disillusioned by the 2020 election, fed up with both political parties and sympathetic to claims by [Donald] Trump and some of his allies that the contest had been stolen.”
The same court filing quoted Cole telling agents who interviewed him that if people “feel that, you know, something as important as voting in the federal election is being tampered with, is being, you know, being — you know, relegated null and void, then, like, someone needs to speak up, right?”
In reality, of course, the election had not been tampered with, but the suspected pipe bomber apparently believed Trump’s lies about his 2020 election defeat.
As a political matter, the apparent motivations are relevant. The New York Times reported that conspiracy theorists on the right spent years focused on the pipe bomb case, “alleging that shadowy government forces had planted the explosives as a distraction to make it easier for the Capitol to be stormed, in an effort to ultimately blame the breach on Mr. Trump and his supporters.”
Among those touting this apparent nonsense was FBI Deputy Director Don Bongino, a former conspiratorial podcast personality, who told listeners to his conservative podcast shortly before Election Day 2024 that there was “a massive cover-up” in the pipe-bombs case and that the bombs might’ve been placed as part of an “inside job” launched by the federal government.
Earlier this year, Bongino went further, telling his audience that the FBI knew the identity of the bomber and “just doesn’t want to tell us because it was an inside job.”
If the Justice Department’s legal memo is correct, we now know that the right’s conspiracy theories were completely wrong, though it remains unclear whether Bongino and other conservatives who pushed these discredited ideas will now acknowledge their mistake. Watch this space.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
