The Trump administration blamed Biden for failing to catch the Jan 6 pipe bomb suspect – with Dan Bongino even alluding to a ‘massive cover up.’
The FBI deputy director told Fox News Thursday that the Biden administration somehow let the suspect walk free while launching partisan witch hunts.
‘I don’t know what the hell they were doing!’ Bongino told Sean Hannity about the past administration.
‘Outside of targeting political opponents, weaponizing the FBI. Destroying its reputation, embarrassing agents, I don’t know what they were doing.’
Brian Cole, 30, was identified on Thursday as the man who allegedly left homemade bombs across DC on the eve of the January 6 riots in 2021.
Both Bongino and FBI head Kash Patel have suggested that President Biden’s FBI was too busy raiding President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home or looking into ‘Russiagate.’
‘There is a massive cover-up, because the person who planted those pipe bombs—they don’t want you to know who it was, because it’s either a connected anti-Trump insider, or this was an inside job,’ Bongino said in 2024.
‘Those bombs were planted there. This was a setup. I have zero doubt.’
Hannity confronted Bongino on his 2024 statement that the pipe bomb case was a ‘massive cover-up.’
Although Bongino said that he ‘pretty comfortable we have our guy’ he also stressed that ‘this investigation’s just begun.’
‘Listen I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions,’ Bongino said. ‘And one day I will be back in that space, but that’s not what I’m paid for now. I’m paid to be your deputy director and we base investigations on facts.’
In an appearance on Donald Trump Jr’s podcast, Patel suggested that the prosecution of Cole will have all fingers pointed at the FBI under Biden.
‘What you’re gonna see is as this case presents itself in court, you’re going to see where we were able to collect the evidence and make the case against [Cole] and then common sense journalists and investigators are going to be able to look at it and wonder why these people didn’t do X, Y and Z years ago,’ he said.
MAGA influencer Benny Johnson said the Biden administration ‘knew exactly who did it’ and called the incident ‘the biggest FBI cover-up scandal in history.’
‘This explains exactly why the FBI & DOJ could not “find” this guy for 4 years,’ Johnson wrote on X.
‘Brian’s profile destroys their entire “MAGA white supremacist insurrection bomber” narrative in one blow. The FBI didn’t “fail” to catch him. Leftists protected their own.’
Cole has been charged with attempted malicious destruction by means of explosive materials and laying explosives outside the Democratic and Republican National Committee headquarters, which did not detonate.
In an affidavit released soon after Cole’s arrest, authorities described the suspect as a five-foot-six man who lives at home with his mother in Woodbridge, Virginia, and works as a bail bondsman.
Images circulated social media showing a heavy police presence descending on the suspect’s home as he was arrested in the early hours of Thursday morning.
The arrest marks the first major breakthrough in the five-year investigation that had baffled the agency and sparked a wave of conspiracy theories.
It comes weeks after the FBI offered a $500,000 reward for leads to identify the suspect, when authorities shared previously unreleased footage of the perp stalking the streets of Washington DC the night before the infamous riots.
But the arrest was reportedly not the result of a breakthrough in the investigation, but came after the FBI reviewed existing evidence it had collected in 2021 and 2022.
Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday hit out at Biden’s Justice Department for missing key evidence which allowed the suspect to remain free.
‘There was a total lack of movement,’ Bondi said.
She emphasized that Cole’s arrest came after ‘no new tip and no new witnesses’ were found, and said the evidence used to snare the suspect was ‘collecting dust.’
According to the filing, Cole bought the pieces used in the bombs from October 2019 to November 2020, in a meticulous plot to carefully construct the explosive over a long period of time.
Officials also alleged that Cole purchased electrical wiring and battery connectors from separate Home Depot and Lowes stores from May 2019 to November 2020, and steel wool in December 2020.
After allegedly laying the two pipe bombs at the RNC and DNC headquarters on the eve of January 6, 2021, Cole continued buying bomb parts in the following weeks, including two more galvanized pipes on January 22 and a kitchen timer the next day.
In surveillance footage from the plot, video showed the hooded suspect setting down a backpack on South Capitol Street in the evening of January 5, before putting on glasses and scanning their surroundings for witnesses and walking off.
The suspect then walked to the nearby DNC headquarters, where a bomb was placed at 7:54pm.
Surveillance then showed the suspect walking to the RNC headquarters and placing a bomb at 8:16pm, and he was last seen on video two minutes later.
The explosives never detonated, but sparked panic and chaos across DC as they were discovered as the capital was being overwhelmed by Trump supporters who descended on Capitol Hill to protest the 2020 election results.
Prosecutors also said in the arrest affidavit that Cole’s phone network pinged off cell towers that placed him in the vicinity of the pipe bombs as they were placed.
And the suspect’s 2017 Nissan Sentra was also observed on license plate readers driving near the locations of the explosives on the evening that they were planted.
