All posts tagged "Brian Cole Jr."

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....

Revelations surrounding the Washington, D.C. pipe bomb suspect have become humiliating for the Trump administration, a security analyst said Friday.

Bradley Moss, a national security analyst, told CNN that the White House now has to manage the fallout after 30-year-old suspect Brian Cole Jr. told law enforcement that he believed that the 2020 election was “stolen." The claim was one that President Donald Trump had made and led to the Capitol mob attack on Jan. 6, just a few hours after the pipe bombs were placed outside the Republican and Democratic party headquarters.

"We're learning some rather awkward and embarrassing things for the White House and for, honestly, some of the senior members of the Justice Department and the FBI, because this defeated all of the theories, all the conspiracies for the last four years about who this particular pipe bomber could have been," Moss said. ...