Mystery deepens as to why it took FBI nearly 5 years to finally bust the suspected J6 pipe bomber

POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Tuesday, December 9, 2025 04:49
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6IXSTRINGJACK

Monday, December 8, 2025 10:37 PM

The arrest of the alleged J6 pipe bomber just piles mystery on top of mystery.

https://nypost.com/2025/12/07/opinion/mystery-deepens-as-to-why-it-too
k-fbi-over-5-years-to-finally-bust-the-suspected-j6-pipe-bomber/

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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.
DC pipe bombing screengrabSurveillance video allegedly spotted DC pipe bomb suspect Brian Cole Jr. planting the devices the night before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. FBI

“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.
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Surely there’s more to it than that. Director Kash Patel hinted Friday at a reason the FBI under Biden administration Director Christopher Wray 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 supporters of President Trump who set foot anywhere vaguely near the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, tracking them down through cellphone pings and video footage.

Yet with all its 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 headquarters 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 an FBI document presented to the DC District Court during his arraignment Friday, Cole’s cellphone “engaged in approximately seven data session transactions with [his cellphone 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 in the right place at the right time.

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 the chairmen of the House Oversight and Judiciary subcommittees, Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.).
Brian Cole Jr.It took the FBI nearly five years to track down and arrest Cole Jr.

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 Cap

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