Federal agents finally arrested Brian Cole Jr. on December 4 for planting pipe bombs near the DNC and RNC on Jan. 6, 2021—nearly four years after the attack. The delay wasn't due to investigators lacking evidence. The FBI had everything it needed to find Cole all along. Was it in competence, partisan politics, or both? What we can say for sure is that the investigative file sat in the bureau’s archives, collecting dust. At the same time, the Biden administration focused on a nationwide dragnet for peaceful January 6 protesters, even if they did nothing wrong.
"This case languished. It sat there for four years, collecting dust. No one did anything to solve this," Attorney General Pam Bondi said Friday on Fox and Friends, crediting the breakthrough to "old evidence, new people, great police work." A House Republican aide involved in the congressional investigation echoed that assessment, calling the resolution the result of "a fresh set of eyes on evidence the FBI has had for almost five years." The aide characterized the prior inaction as "either incompetence or gross negligence."
The only publicized breakthrough before Cole's arrest was the FBI narrowing down the suspect's height from surveillance footage. No significant new witnesses or physical evidence have recently emerged. The material used to identify Cole had been sitting in FBI possession since 2021. Former FBI Director Christopher Wray, who served under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, testified to Congress in July 2023 that the bureau had essentially exhausted its investigative leads.
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Now that Cole is in custody, left-wing media outlets are scrambling to fit him into a convenient narrative. Early reporting from the Daily Wire suggested that Cole was a black leftist. Subsequent coverage from NBC News, MS NOW, CNN, and other outlets pushed a different story: that the belief that the 2020 election was illegitimate motivated Cole, which framed him as aligned with "MAGA" narratives.
Those claims relied heavily on anonymous sources claiming that Cole said he believed the 2020 election was stolen during a four-hour FBI interrogation. However, that may have been a false flag because, according to The New York Post, Cole "also made conflicting statements" in that same session, yet NBC News, MS NOW, and CNN never mentioned that.
Federal campaign finance records and voter data don't support the MAGA framing. Cole didn't register with either party in Virginia and didn't vote in primary races, though he did cast ballots in general elections in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2024. A Republican operative told the Post there was "zero indication" that Cole was a Trump voter. Cole also bought bomb-making materials well before the election, so the 2020 election likely wasn't a motivating factor.
As PJ Media previously reported, Cole’s family threw cold water on the idea that Cole was a Trump supporter, and reports also described him as likely on the autism spectrum.
The central question remains: why did a high-profile domestic terror case tied to January 6 go cold for four years? Does anyone else think that if Cole were a diehard Trump supporter, the Biden administration would have found him?
