The arrest of the alleged J6 pipe bomber just lumps mystery on top of mystery.
What we know from court documents and media reports since his arrest Thursday is that suspect Brian Cole Jr., is a black, 30-year-old loner who lives in his mom’s basement in the middle-class suburb of Woodbridge, Va., a 20-minute drive from Washington, DC. According to his family, he is borderline autistic, and incapable of such a crime.
In interviews, Cole’s grandmother, Loretta Cole, has said he is “very naïve . . . He’s almost autistic-like because he doesn’t understand a lot of stuff.
“He’s slow. He may be 30, but he’s got the mind of a 16-year-old.”
Yet we are told this alleged criminal mastermind evaded the FBI for almost five years.
But surely there’s more to it than that. Patel hinted on Friday at a reason the FBI under Wray during the Biden administration may not have wanted to solve the case: “intentional negligence.”
‘Corrupted’ cell data
This, after all, was the FBI that managed to round up and charge 1,500 Trump supporters who set foot anywhere vaguely near the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, tracking them down through cellphone pings and video footage.
Yet, with all their technical ability, Wray’s FBI somehow missed the phone used by the suspect in the vicinity of the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee on the evening of Jan. 5 when the pipe bombs were planted. Surveillance footage shows the suspect, wearing a gray hoodie and COVID-style white mask, seemingly talking on the phone while walking around that night less than half a mile from the Capitol.
According to a FBI document presented to the DC District Court during Cole’s arraignment Friday, Cole’s cellphone “engaged in approximately seven data session transactions with [his cell phone provider’s] towers between 7:39 p.m. and 8:24 p.m. . . . in the area of the RNC and DNC on January 5, 2021” locating him at the right time and right place.
That information was obtained by the FBI within weeks of the discovery of the pipe bombs the next day. Investigators found 186 cellphone numbers “of interest” and 130 “devices of interest,” according to the congressional report released this January by Oversight and Judiciary House subcommittees chairmen, Barry Loudermilk and Thomas Massie.
By early February 2021, according to the subcommittees, FBI agents had been assigned to interview people associated with 36 of the 186 phone numbers; 98 still “required additional investigative steps.” A further 51 phone numbers were identified as “not needing further action” because, curiously enough, the phones “belong[ed] to law enforcement officers or persons on the exclusion list.”
The FBI never told Congress what came of those leads.
Then there is the curious tale of the “corrupted” cellphone data that turned out not to be corrupted, at all.
The story came from Steve D’Antuono, head of the FBI’s Washington field office until his retirement in December 2022, who was in charge of the crucial first year of the pipe bomb case as well as the Capitol riot investigation, which has been described as the biggest in FBI history.
Pixelation effect
He was assigned to Washington one month before the 2020 election from his previous role in Detroit, when he ran the disastrous Gretchen Whitmer “fednapping” case which resulted in multiple mistrials and acquittals, amid claims of FBI entrapment of patsies.
D’Antuono, who has since found a job at KPMG, also led the controversial FBI raid of Donald Trump’s home, Mar-a-Lago, in August 2022. He claims that he opposed the raid but was overruled by then-Deputy FBI Director Paul Abbate.
In any case, in June 2023, D’Antuono testified before Congress, claiming that the FBI had received “corrupted data” in the pipe bomb case from one of the three major cellphone carriers and that may have been the reason they couldn’t find the culprit.
“We did a complete geofence. [but] there’s some data that was corrupted by one of the providers, not purposely by them,” he said.
“It just [was an] unusual circumstance that we have corrupt data from one of the providers . . . I can’t remember right now which one. But for that day, which is awful because we don’t have that information to search. So could it have been that provider? Yeah, with our luck, you know, with this investigation it probably was, right.”
Yet all three of the cellphone carriers contacted by Loudermilk’s subcommittee confirmed that they “did not provide corrupted data to the FBI and that the FBI never notified them of any issues with accessing the cellular data.”
Another confounding mystery of the case is that in all the 39,000 video files the FBI obtained from surveillance cameras showing the suspect walking around and placing the pipe bombs on the evening of Jan. 5, 2021, there was not a single image released to the public that would help identify the person.
All images and videos released by the FBI were low resolution and choppy. Mike Benz, a former State Department official during Trump’s first term and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, also claims a “blur bar” or pixilation effect has been laid over the suspect’s eyes in footage which shows him/her looking directly at the camera while sitting on a bench outside the DNC building. Judging by the video, it might also be goggles, but, either way, nobody recognized the suspect, perhaps by design.
Diverting resources
What we do know is that in the first few weeks of the pipe bomb investigation, the FBI was pursuing promising leads and had identified “multiple persons of interest” as suspects.
But by the end of February 2021, according to Loudermilk and Massie’s report, the bureau actively began diverting resources away from the pipe bomb investigation. At the same time, Wray and Abbate were ramping up resources to track down and aggressively prosecute trespassing J6 grandmothers.
Demonizing Trump and his supporters and extracting every morsel of political capital out of J6 was the priority of Joe Biden and his congressional hatchet woman Nancy Pelosi. Wray, the consummate political animal who wanted to stay on as FBI director, tailored his response to suit.
Nothing would be permitted to interrupt the false narrative that J6 was an “insurrection” worse than 9/11 committed by “Ultra-MAGA,” “white supremacist domestic terrorists” who “killed four cops.” None of that was true, of course.
In the wake of Biden’s insane racial pandering followed the BLM riots, it would have been most inconvenient if a black man was the pipe bomber.
Maybe the answer to the mystery is as simple as the fact that Wray’s FBI just didn’t want to look too closely at a suspect who would wreck the White House’s narrative.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
