Backtalk T
MIRANDA DEVINE / GUEST COLUMNIST FBI’s Inconvenient Truth
he arrest of the alleged jan. 6 pipe bomber just piles mystery on top of mystery. What we know since his arrest in December 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, Virginia, a 20-minute drive from Washington, D.C. According to his family, he is border- line autistic, and incapable of such a crime. Cole’s grandmother, Loretta Cole, has said he is “very
naïve . . . 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 fi ve years. Surely there’s more to it than that. Director Kash Patel
hinted at a reason the FBI under Biden administration Director Christopher Wray may not have wanted to solve the case: “intentional negligence.” This, after all, was the FBI that managed to round
up and charge 1,500 supporters of President Donald 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
D.C. District Court during his arraignment, Cole’s cell- phone “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 inter-
est” and 130 “devices of interest,” according to the con- gressional report released this January by the chairmen of the House Oversight and Judiciary subcommittees, Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky. By early February 2021, according to the subcommit-
tees, 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 identifi ed as “not
106 NEWSMAX | JANUARY 2026
needing further action” because, curiously enough, the phones “belong[ed] to law enforcement offi cers or persons on the exclusion list.” Then there is the curious tale of the “corrupted” cell-
phone data that turned out not to be corrupted at all. The story came from Steve D’Antuono, head of the
FBI’s Washington fi eld offi ce until his retirement in December 2022, who was in charge of the crucial fi rst year of the pipe bomb case as well as the Capitol riot investigation, which has been described as the biggest in FBI history. D’Antuono was assigned to Washington one month
before the 2020 election from his previous role in Detroit, when he ran the disastrous Gretchen Whitmer “Fed nap- ping” case that resulted in multiple mistrials and acquit- tals, amid claims of FBI entrapment of patsies. D’Antuono also led the controversial FBI raid on
Trump’s home, Mar-a-Lago, in August 2022. He claims he opposed the raid but was overruled by then-Deputy FBI Director Paul Abbate. In any case, in June 2023, D’Antuono testifi ed before Congress, claiming that the FBI had received “corrupted data” in the pipe bomb case from one of the three major cellphone carriers and that may have been the reason it couldn’t fi nd the culprit. Yet all three carriers contacted by Loudermilk’s sub- committee confi rmed that they “did not provide corrupt- ed data to the FBI, and that the FBI never notifi ed them of any issues with accessing the cellular data.” By the end of February 2021, according to Loudermilk
and Massie’s report, the bureau actively began diverting resources away from the pipe bomb investigation. At the same time, Wray and Abbate were ramping up resources to track down and aggressively prosecute trespassing J6 grandmothers. Demonizing Trump and his supporters and extracting
every morsel of political capital out of J6 was the prior- ity of Joe Biden and his congressional hatchet woman Nancy Pelosi. Wray, the consummate political animal who wanted to stay on as FBI director, tailored his response to suit. In the wake of Biden’s insane racial pandering follow-
ing the BLM riots, it would have been most inconvenient if a Black man was the pipe bomber. Maybe the answer to the mystery is as simple as the
fact that Wray’s FBI just didn’t want to look too closely at a suspect who would wreck the White House’s narrative.
Miranda Devine is a columnist for the New York Post.
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