Federal prosecutors tore apart an accused pipe bomber's bid to pin his January 5, 2021, attack on a cleared Capitol Police officer.
On Friday, the Department of Justice filed an opposition in D.C. federal court that urged the judge to reject a renewed motion by Brian Cole. The DOJ's opposition handed a fresh embarrassment to the MAGA figures who spent months pushing the debunked theory that former Capitol Police officer Shauni Kerkhoff was the real bomber.
Chief among them is Ed Martin, the "Stop the Steal" organizer who until this month served as the DOJ's pardon attorney. Hours after the filing posted, Lawfare senior editor Anna Bower dared him to spread the exoneration as loudly as he once amplified the accusation. "Hey Ed, are you going to tweet this one out too?" she wrote, linking the document and quoting its finding that the FBI turned up "zero evidence connecting Kerkhoff in any way" to the bombs.
The motion from Cole demanded subpoenas for Kerkhoff, whom online conspiracy theorists have baselessly branded "the real pipe bomber," the court document reads.
The FBI ran down the claim "as it did many others, and found it to be baseless," prosecutors wrote. Its investigation "yielded zero evidence connecting Kerkhoff in any way" to the bombs.
Prosecutors said the subpoenas "fail the Nixon test at every turn," referring to the Supreme Court's three-part test requiring subpoenaed evidence to be relevant, admissible and specific. The requested subpoenas "utterly fail" that test and amount to a "classic fishing expedition," prosecutors wrote.
Cole, by contrast, "confessed to the crimes during a videorecorded interview" and kept bomb components plus searches including "how to make a pipe bomb." Kerkhoff was "exonerated," home in Falls Church with her boyfriend and their dog as Cole planted the devices.
Prosecutors said Cole never offered any "nexus" linking Kerkhoff to the crime, which was the threshold for blaming a third party, and that the FBI investigated Kerkhoff only because of a now-retracted story by The Blaze.
Bower's jab pointed back to Martin's role in boosting the story. As the Blaze's gait-analysis claim went viral in November 2025, Martin posted and quickly deleted a cryptic "P-I-P-E" thread and told an interviewer he had spoken with FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino about the case. At the time, though, Martin stopped short of naming Kerkhoff and said the DOJ had "not identified" her as the suspect.
The defense leaned on a polygraph test that they said Kerkhoff failed. Prosecutors said the defense was relying on a "misleading and context-free assertion" from an exam that ended after midnight. The filing also flagged the "unsettling" fact that three of Cole's lawyers are now part of the legal defense for The Blaze journalists who spread the theory in a defamation suit Kerkhoff brought.
The subpoenas Cole sought were "not a good faith effort to obtain relevant and admissible evidence not otherwise procurable," prosecutors warned. "They are a gambit by the defense to fuel baseless conspiracy theories targeting [Kerkhoff], an innocent person."
