← Pod Force One
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Foreigna With a new mini episode of Pod Force 1 to start off your week, this feature is a little more topical and more to do with my day to day job as a columnist for the New York Post. When I zoom in on a topic that I think will interest you. Today's subject is about the many mysteries of one of the most puzzling crimes of our time. Who who planted the January 6th pipe bombs in Washington? After almost five years, the FBI announced last week that it had a suspect, but they cracked the case without any new information. Just fresh eyes, they told us. So how on earth did Joe Biden's FBI miss what was right in front of them? The arrest of the alleged January 6th pipe bomber just lumps mystery on top of mystery. What we know from court documents and media reports since his arrest Thursday is that suspect Brian Cole Jr. Is a black 30 year old loner who lives in his mum's basement in the middle class suburb of Woodbridge, Virginia, a 20 minute drive from Washington, D.C. according to his family, Cole is a borderline autistic and incapable of such a crime. In interviews, Cole's grandmother Loretta Cole has said he is, quote, very naive. He's almost autistic like because he doesn't understand a lot of stuff. He's slow, he may be 30, but he's got the mind of a 16 year old, end quote. Yet we are told that this criminal mastermind evaded the FBI for almost five years. FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi both say it was just incompetence or quote, negligence that the FBI's big manhunt under Chris Wray didn't crack the case. There was no new evidence, just fresh eyes. But surely there's more to it than that. Patel hinted on Friday at a reason that the FBI under Wray during the Biden administration may not have wanted to solve the case. He said, quote, intentional negligence. This, after all, was the FBI that managed to round up and charge 1500 Trump supporters who set foot anywhere vaguely near the Capitol on January 6, 2021, tracking them down through cell phone pings and video footage. Yet with all their technical ability, Ray's FBI somehow missed the phone used by the suspect in the vicinity of the DNC and RNC on the evening of January 5th 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 Cole's arraignment on Friday, Cole's cell phone engaged in approximately seven data session transactions with his cell phone provider's towers between 7:39pm and 8:24pm in the area of the RNC and DNC on January 5, 2021. End quote. Locating him at the right time and the right place that that information was obtained by the FBI. Within weeks of the discovery of the pipe bomb, investigators found 186 cell phone numbers of interest and 130 devices of interest, according to the congressional report released this January by Oversight and Judiciary House Subcommittee Chairman Barry Loudermilk and Thomas Massie. By early February 2021, according to the subcommittees, 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 identified as not needing any further action.
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Because, curiously enough, the phones belonged to law enforcement officers or persons on the exclusion list, end quote. The FBI never told Congress what came of those leads. Then there is the curious tale of the, quote, corrupted cell phone data that turned out not to be corrupted at all. The story came from Steve Dantuono, head of the FBI's Washington Field Office until his retirement in December 2022, who was in charge of the crucial first year of the pipe bomb case as well as the Capitol riot investigation, which has been described as the biggest in FBI history. He was assigned to Washington one month before the 2020 election from his previous role in Detroit, where he ran the disastrous Gretchen Whitmer fednapping case, which resulted in multiple mistrials and acquittals amid claims of FBI entrapment of patsies. Dantuono, who has since found a job at KPMG, also led the controversial FBI raid on D. Donald Trump's home, Mar? A Lago, in August of 2022. He claims that he opposed the raid, but was overruled by then Deputy FBI Director Paul Abate. In any case, in June 2023, Dantuono testified before Congress claiming that the FBI had received, quote, corrupted data in the pipe bomb case from one of the three major cell phone carriers and that may have been the reason they couldn't find the culprit. Quote, we did a complete geofence, he said, but there's some data that was corrupted by one of the providers, not purposely by them, he said. It just was an unusual circumstance that we have corrupted data from one of the providers. I can't remember right now which one, but for that day, which is awful because we don't have that information to search. So could it have been that provider? Yeah, with our luck, you know, with this investigation, it probably was, right? End quote. Yet all three of the cell phone carriers contacted by Loudermilk's subcommittee confirmed that they, quote, did not provide corrupted data to the FBI and that the FBI never notified them of any issues with accessing the cellular data, end quote. Another confounding mystery of the case is that in all the 39,000 video files the FBI obtained from surveillance cameras showing the suspect, one, walking around and placing the pipe bombs on the evening of January 5, 2021, there was not a single image released to the public that would help identify the person. All images and videos released by the FBI were low resolution and choppy. Mike Benz, a former State Department official during Trump's first term and executive director of the foundation for Freedom Online, also claims a quote blur bar, which, or pixelation effect, has been laid over the suspect's eyes in footage which shows him or her looking directly at the camera while sitting on a bench outside the DNC building. Judging by the video, it might also be goggles, but either way, nobody recognised the suspect, perhaps by design. What we do know is that in the first few weeks of the pipe bomb investigation, the FBI was pursuing promising leads and had identified, quote, multiple persons of interest as suspects. But by the end of February 2021, according to Loudermilk and Massey's report, the Bureau actively began diverting resources away from the pipe bomb investigation. At the same time, Ray and Abate 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 priority of Joe Biden and his congressional hatchet woman, Nancy Pelosi. Ray, the consummate political animal who wanted to stay on as FBI director, tailored his response to suit. Nothing would be permitted to interrupt the false narrative that J6 was a, quote, insurrection worse than 911 committed by ultra maga white supremacist domestic terrorists who killed four cops. None of that was true, of course, in the wake of Biden's insane racial pandering following 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. Don't forget to come back on Wednesday for my full episode of Pod Force One One. This week, we are talking to Hami Dhillon. She's assistant Attorney General running the Civil Rights division at the Department of Justice. And she is a relentless warrior against big tech censorship and government overreach. And she's a crusader for voter integrity and religious liberty. She fills us in on all her battles to write the ship at the doj. I hope you can tune in and have a wonderful, wonderful weekend.