A suspect arrested Thursday morning and charged with planting pipe bombs outside the Democratic and Republican National Committees on the eve of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot started building the deadly devices in 2019, federal investigators say.
Brian Cole Jr., 30, of Woodbridge, Va., was charged with one count of transporting explosives across state lines with intent to kill, injure and cause damage and one count of attempted malicious destruction — with authorities saying more charges were possible.
“You’re not going to walk into our capital city, put down two explosive devices and walk off into the sunset,” FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who has made the case a priority since taking office in March, told reporters at an afternoon news conference. “Not gonna happen.
“We were gonna track this person to the end of the earth. There was no way he was getting away.”
Federal agents swarmed Cole’s home following the break in the case that has vexed and embarrassed the bureau for nearly five years.
Neighbors living near the suburban cul-de-sac described a young man who shunned most human interaction and doted on a pet Chihuahua.
“He’s very antisocial. Very,” a woman who said she had lived in the neighborhood since 1991 told The Post of Cole. “He keeps to himself.”
“He has a dog that he loves,” she added. “He walks every day, twice a day, to 7-Eleven with his dog and he wears his headphones.”
“He seemed very quiet. He would never make eye contact. Almost like he just didn’t see you,” added a second neighbor, a man who noted that Cole would “wear shorts all winter long, and red Crocs.”
“I’m pretty shocked,” said this neighbor, who lived in the area for seven years. “This is a very uncommonly friendly and neighborly place to live.”
According to a probable cause affidavit, bank account data showed the seemingly docile Cole was manufacturing his would-be instruments of death beginning in the fall of 2019 with the purchase of electrical wire, battery connectors and explosive caps from local retailers. He also bought steel wool, end caps and galvanized pipe throughout 2020.
Cole’s arrest comes one month before the fifth anniversary of the melee that briefly delayed congressional confirmation of Joe Biden’s election victory.
Surveillance footage showed a person carrying a backpack and wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt, mask, gloves, glasses, and a pair of Nike Air Max Speed Turf sneakers who planted what investigators called “viable explosive devices” at the headquarters of the two major parties on the night of Jan. 5, 2021.
The second neighbor said he doubted that Cole was the person recorded planting the bombs, claiming Cole has “uncommonly short legs” and a simple “gait analysis could rule him out or confirm” him as the culprit.
Law enforcement officials, led by Attorney General Pam Bondi, stressed that there was “no new tip” or “no new witness” that led to Cole’s arrest, with the AG crediting “good, diligent police work and prosecutorial work, working as a team along with the ATF, Capitol Police, the [DC] Metropolitan Police Department and of course, the FBI.”
FBI Director Kash Patel told reporters that investigators sifted through “three million lines of information … you can think about the amount of cell phone data that has to be ingested and triangulated and dumped and received.”
“When you develop evidence, you get a search warrant,” he added. “When you get a search warrant, you get an address. When you get an address, you hit the house, and that’s what we did.”
According to the probable cause affidavit filed Thursday afternoon, investigators used cell tower data to place Cole in the vicinity of Capitol Hill around the time the devices were planted.
The bombs were discovered the following afternoon — approximately 17 hours later and at around the same time Congress convened to count the 2020 electoral votes, a session which was suspended for several hours after supporters of President Trump broke into the Capitol and stormed the House and Senate chambers.
Then-Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) both came “within feet” of the devices as they traveled to and from the DNC headquarters on South Capitol Street on Jan. 6.
In Pelosi’s case, her motorcade drove past one of the bombs after it was discovered by law enforcement, according to a congressional report that blamed law enforcement for failing to adequately secure the perimeter.
That report, released in January of this year by Reps. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), assessed that “little meaningful progress” had been made in the pipe bomb investigation and charged that the feds had “refused to provide substantive updates to Congress.”
Despite “a promising array of data and … numerous persons of interest,” the lawmakers’ report said, “[b]y the end of February 2021, the FBI began diverting resources away from the pipe bomb investigation.”
The same day the report was issued, investigators released additional information about the suspect — including video of the person planting one of the bombs and an estimate that the perp stood 5 feet 7 inches tall.
The absence of a break in the case — or even clarification on whether the suspect was a man or woman — led to fervent speculation, mainly among conservatives and even some Republican lawmakers, that the failed bombing was the work of a far-left terrorist whose actions would cause embarrassment to a Biden administration whose Justice Department was pursuing charges against hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters.
Steven D’Antuono, the former head of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, fueled additional speculation when he told House Judiciary Committee lawmakers in a June 2023 transcribed interview that he was not sure the devices were ever meant to explode.
“I saw the same kitchen timer as you,” D’Antuono told Massie, who had asked whether the bombs were viable at the time they were discovered on Jan. 6. “I agree. I don’t know when they were supposed to go off. Maybe they weren’t supposed to go off. We can’t — we don’t know. We honestly don’t know.”
“Should it have exploded in the hour?” D’Antuono asked. “Or should it have been waiting there to — for somebody to find? Those are the theories that we have … There’s a lot of unanswered questions. There really are.”
Before joining the FBI, Bongino suggested last year on his popular podcast that the act was an “inside job” and involved a “massive cover-up.”
“Today’s arrest happened because the Trump administration has made this case a priority,” Bondi said. “The total lack of movement on this case in our nation’s capital undermined the public trust of our enforcement agenices. This cold case languished for four years until Director Patel and Deputy Director Bongino came to the FBI.”
“This is what happens,” Bongino added, “when you have a president who tells you to go get the bad guys.”
