What’s Not Being Said about the Alleged Pipe Bomber
The arrest affidavit for Brian Cole, the 30 year old guy charged as the pipe bomber today, is here.
The evidence consists of:
Phone records placing him on Capitol Hill at the time the FBI believes the bombs to have been placed.
The seven transactions between the COLE CELLPHONE and Provider’s towers occurred at approximately 7:39 p.m., 7:44 p.m., 7:59 p.m., 8:14 p.m., 8:23 p.m., and 8:24 p.m. Two transactions took place at 7:39 p.m. During this time period, the COLE CELLPHONE had transactions with five different sectors on Provider’s cell towers.
a. At approximately 7:39:27 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with a particular sector of Provider tower 59323, which faces southeast (approximately 120˚) from its location at 103 G Street, Southwest in Washington, D.C. (“Sector A”). Also at 7:39:27 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with a particular sector of Provider tower 126187, which faces east1 (approximately 90˚) from its location at 200 Independence Avenue, Southwest in Washington, D.C. (“Sector B”). Video surveillance footage shows that at approximately 7:39:32 p.m., the individual who placed the pipe bombs walked westbound on D Street, Southeast and then turned southbound on South Capitol Street, Southeast. These locations are consistent with the coverage areas of Sector A and B.
b. At approximately 7:44:36 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with Sector B of Provider tower 126187. Video surveillance footage shows that at approximately 7:44:36 p.m., the individual who placed the pipe bombs walked east on Ivy Street, Southeast. This location is consistent with the coverage area of Sector B.
c. At approximately 7:59:36 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with a particular sector of Provider tower 147990 which faces south (approximately 180˚) from its location at 200 Independence Avenue, Southwest in Washington, D.C. (“Sector C”). Video surveillance footage shows that at approximately 7:59:38 p.m., the individual who placed the pipe bombs walked southbound on New Jersey Avenue, Southeast then turned eastbound on E Street, Southeast. These locations are consistent with the coverage area of Sector C.
d. At approximately 8:14:36 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with Provider tower 45111 which faces west (approximately 255˚) from its location at 101 Independence Avenue, Southeast in Washington, D.C. (“Sector D”). Video surveillance footage shows that at approximately 8:14:15 p.m., the individual who placed the pipe bombs exited Rumsey Court and walked westbound through an alley between the Capitol Hill Club and the RNC then walked northbound onto First Street, Southeast. This location is consistent with the coverage area of Sector D.
e. At approximately 8:23:59 p.m. and 8:24:06 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with Provider tower 144340, which faces west (approximately 295˚) from its location at 600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Southeast in Washington, D.C. (“Sector E”). Video surveillance footage last captures the individual who placed the pipe bombs at 8:18 p.m. walking eastbound on Rumsey Court in the direction of tower 144340, which is approximately 1/2 mile east of the individual’s last recorded location. The last recorded location is consistent with the coverage area of Sector E.
A license plate reader showing his car arriving at Capitol Hill that evening.
On January 5, 2021, at approximately 7:10 p.m., COLE’s Nissan Sentra was observed driving past a License Plate Reader at the South Capitol Street exit from Interstate 395 South, which is less than one-half mile from the location where the individual who placed the devices was first observed on foot near North Carolina and New Jersey Avenues, Southeast at 7:34 p.m. Approximately 5 minutes later, at 7:39:27 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE began to interact with Provider towers in the area.
Purchases of components consistent with the construction of the pipebombs, including paying cash for a battery connector consistent with the pipe bombs in 2019.
Both pipe bombs were manufactured using a nine-volt (9V) battery connector with attached red and black wires. The nine-volt battery connectors used in the pipe bombs had identifying information on the black and red insulated wires that were consistent with those distributed in North America by a known company and its predecessors (the “Nine Volt Distributor”). COLE purchased five of the Nine Volt Distributor’s nine-volt battery connectors from Micro Center in northern Virginia on or about November 12 and December 28, 2019, including cash purchases made during the December transaction. Fewer than 8,000 of Nine Volt Distributor’s nine-volt battery connectors were distributed in the United States between December 2017 and January 5, 2021. [my emphasis]
A purchase made across the street from the alley way on December 14.
Approximately three weeks before the pipe bombs were placed, on or about December 14, 2020, COLE made a purchase at a restaurant located near First and D Streets, Southeast. The restaurant is located across the street from the entrance to Rumsey Court on D Street, Southeast.
There’s nothing that ties those weird sneakers to Cole at all. [Corrected]
Certainly, he’s a candidate, and should have been IDed as such in 2021. But the affidavit lacks the kind of thing we saw all the time in real January 6 affidavits: Personal communications. Signs of planning in the period after Trump announced the rally. While there are a bunch of components purchased in November 2020, after the election, there’s not a single data point in the affidavit between when Trump announced the rally on December 19 and when Cole was on Capitol Hill on January 5, 2021.
Surely, FBI has already obtained warrants for all that and it is at least consistent with someone who had been playing with bomb-making for two years before placing these bombs.
But they’re not telling what’s in them.
You get the feeling they might not tell the story Kash Patel and Pam Bondi want to tell. What if finding the pipe bomber gets them fired, just like responding competently to COVID got Anthony Fauci fired and targeted?
DOJ has assigned Jocelyn Ballantine to this case. You may recall that she made false claims in support of efforts to throw out the Mike Flynn case in 2020.
“responding competently to COVID got Anthony Fauci fired and targeted”
Correction – Fauci was not fired, he continued to serve into the Biden Administration and retired in 2022.
Are you missing a word after “the”, Marcy, in “What if finding the pipe bomber gets the fired”? “investigator”?
Or maybe you mean “them”–referring to Bondi & Patel?
The latter. I think.
Correct. I have a cold, and it’s killing what accuracy I normally aspire too.
Y’all didn’t notice my 3-L alleged in the title!
“What if finding the pipe bomber gets the [sic: them?] fired, just like responding competently to COVID got Anthony Fauci fired and targeted?”
This.
I can’t tell you how many folks I know – federal workers, federal contractors, folks with federal grants, etc. — ask themselves some version of this question every day. What used to be an ordinary “I’m happy doing my work” kind of thing now has this additional layer of “will doing my job right get me fired?” concern.
“Those weird sneakers are not mentioned at all.”
another small correction (unless I am misunderstanding your point), the shoes are mentioned on pg 2:
“In video surveillance, the individual was wearing dark pants, a grey hooded sweatshirt,
dark gloves, Nike Air Max Speed Turf shoes,”
It is mentioned as a known fact of the case, but I think Dr. Wheeler meant it’s not mentioned as part of the new evidence presented in the affidavit.
This affidavit strikes me as “here’s enough to justify the arrest” without giving away everything they have that will come out at trial. It will have to come out sometime, but not necessarily all at the beginning.
Right. Or it’s possible that’s all they’ve got.
There are still things that ring funny about this: such as why someone who covered themselves so well would do everything else in a way that left a trail.
A bit surprising they didn’t piece this together a long time ago. Admittedly there are a lot of possible cars entering the city from many routes and if the holder of the registration registers a blank in law enforcement records nothing would signal him out for a closer look, like cell tower records.
That cell tower info is available to law enforcement only with a warrant? They are available in bulk or on a person by person basis? With bulk data, license plate cameras and some AI finding this becomes more likely. Just guessing.
The FBI raided the family bail bonds business as well. One analysis I heard was that the videos had indicated the suspect was 5’7” but Cole is 5’6”.
The affidavit discusses this:
I am struck by the dates in this affidavit. Items they cite as being purchased by Cole go back to 2019 – well before the events of January 6, 2021.
This leaped out to me, too, as cited by Marcy above: “COLE purchased five of the Nine Volt Distributor’s nine-volt battery connectors from Micro Center in northern Virginia on or about November 12 and December 28, 2019, including cash purchases made during the December transaction. ”
I’m really curious as to how the FBI tied these cash purchases, over a year before the bombs were dropped off, to Cole. Video in the store? Cell phone records showing his phone in the store on those two dates? It’s not like an agent could have come into the store in 2021 or 2022 and said to the clerks “Do you remember selling a couple of battery connectors to a guy over a year ago?” I don’t know about cell phone data retention practices, but my sense is that video surveillance data is not regularly kept for over a year.
For the rest of the purchases cited, the assumption is that a credit card was used, and the DOJ could (and presumably will) introduce the credit card records of those purchases at trial. What, on the other hand, will they use to substantiate this claim with respect to cash purchases?
There’s a *lot* more that isn’t being said here.
Absolute naked speculation, but he might have had a loyalty account at Micro Center that he mentioned when he bought the battery connectors. They always ask if you have one, and if you give them the phone number associated with the account, even a cash purchase would be recorded to the account.
Golly Gee – not to add to the naked speculation and conspiracy thinking but which massive government data sets were accessed earlier this year and compiled and used to find these incredible and genuine nuggets of facts?
Did Frank Drebin unretire or did DOGE / Palantir et al deliver the connections?
No disrespect intended at any FBI or authority who did the real leg work to find this but I find it odd, at best.
Wen Ho Lee is on line 1, Steven Hatfill is on line 2, Richard Jewel ‘s relatives are on line 3. Maybe the FBI is right on this one but the bureau has a long history of screw-ups.
Convict-1 and his minions were in desperate need of a patsy, and now they will fling it out far and wide that they ‘solved’ a case that Biden’s DoJ could not solve. I have many of the same doubts as others here about the timelines and other gaps. A defense attorney will enjoy digging into them, perhaps with an opportunity for graymail as EW hinted above.
My initial suspicion is that the FBI found all the information in the affidavit after they identified him as a suspect. Everything in the affidavit is just data that is more likely to have been discovered after they knew who they were looking for.
Certainly the purchases would not make him a likely candidate absent some other reason to believe he is.
I’m also curious whether there’s a license plate reader saying when he left the Hill.
First thing I need to say is IANAL. I am a paralegal, which a species of law dog that can either be quite helpful or can be as hazardous as a second lieutenant with a map and a compass. So I’m prepared from the get-go to concede I could be wrong.
Cole was arrested under 18 USC 844(d) and (i). Depending on the underlying facts, the statute of limitations could have expired as soon as next January 5. Based on certain information in the affidavit in support of the criminal complaint against Cole, it appears the FBI was waiting to see if Cole would re-offend before arresting him. It is also possible they had had him in their sights for some time before January 6, and were waiting to see if he was involved with others in some conspiracy.
I’m calling bullshit on whatever story the Trump gang is spinning about why it took so long to arrest Cole. The feds were waiting until they had to play their hand. Statutes of limitations are inviolable. And Donnie needed to toss a distraction out to the public, take attention away from war crimes and sex crimes and whatever crimes he and his bunch are getting up to.
Enough for an arrest, but it’s a thin indictment.
The cellphone and license plate reader data probably matches thousands of people. A cash purchase more than a year before the deed? As others have noted, how did they tie that to an individual purchaser? Store videos are rarely kept a year. So how stale is some of this “evidence?” Hope they’ve got more, or they’re going to get their asses handed to them at trial.
OT, but speaking of indictments the GJ just returns no true bill for Letitia James.
Didn’t we learn from the Adnan Syed affair that you can’t reliably pinpoint someone’s exact location from cell towers, or has the technology fundamentally improved since then?
Just a guess on the cell towers. Given Capitol Hill security needs, I’m thinking that many towers in DC have a StingRay attached to them. The StingRay is an IMSI-catcher with both passive (digital analyzer) and active (cell-site simulator) capabilities. When operating in active mode, the device mimics a wireless carrier cell tower in order to force all nearby mobile phones and other cellular data devices to connect to it. Sort of a “pen register” with no warrant needed.
Also, our military and USSS have plenty of cool SIGINT devices to capture and ident cell signals. DC probably has a fair share installed here and there.