Pipe bomb suspect nabbed, but Trump officials stay silent on Capitol riot violence

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has arrested a suspect accused of placing two pipe bombs outside the Republican and Democratic national party headquarters on the eve of the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack. The arrest underscores the Trump administration’s insistence that it will not tolerate acts of violence targeting its supporters.

But what about the 2021 Capitol riot?

The Trump administration has taken a starkly different approach toward those involved in the January 6 siege. They argue that efforts to pardon rioters, fire prosecutors who pursued cases stemming from the attack, and recast the events of that day represent an attempt to rewrite history.




The disconnect, they say, is striking for a government that positions itself as tough on violent crime and a defender of law enforcement while downplaying the documented violence inflicted on police during the Capitol breach, AP news agency reported.

“The administration has ignored and attempted to whitewash the violence committed by rioters on Jan. 6 because they were the president's supporters. They were trying to install him a second time against the will of the voters in 2020,” said Michael Romano, who prosecuted the rioters before leaving the Justice Department this year. “And it feels like the effort to ignore that is purely transactional.”

FBI Director Kash Patel, who previously as a conservative podcast host called the January 6 rioters “political prisoners” and offered to represent them for free, said on Thursday that the arrest of the pipe bomb suspect, 30-year-old Brian Cole Jr., was in keeping with President Donald Trump’s commitment to “secure our nation's capital.” “When you attack American citizens, when you attack our institutions of legislation, when you attack the nation’s capital, you attack the very being of our way of life,” Patel said.

“And this FBI and this Department of Justice stand here to tell you that we will always combat it.” Patel's deputy, Dan Bongino, had previously suggested that federal law enforcement had wasted time investigating Jan. 6 rioters and anti-abortion activists. “These are threats to the United States?” he once said on a podcast. “Grandma is in the gulag for a trespassing charge on January 6th.” Bongino speculated last year that the pipe bomb incident was an “inside job” that involved a “massive cover-up.”

After joining the FBI, he repeatedly described the investigation as a top priority that was receiving significant resources and attention. “We were going to track this person to the end of the earth. There was no way he was getting away,” he said Thursday.

No public link has emerged between the pipe bombs and the riot. Cole's arrest was a significant development in its own right after a nearly five-year investigation had confounded authorities, who are now assembling a portrait of Cole.

People familiar with the matter told The Associated Press that Cole told investigators he believed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, which President Donald Trump has insisted was stolen in favour of Democrat Joe Biden. There was no widespread fraud in that election, a conclusion confirmed by election officials across the country, including Trump’s former attorney general William Barr.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department asked the FBI for the names of agents who participated in January 6 investigations, a demand feared within the bureau as a possible precursor to mass firings. In August, Patel fired Brian Driscoll, who as the FBI's acting director in the early days of the Trump administration resisted handing over those names.

The administration has also fired or demoted numerous prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases, including more than two dozen lawyers hired for temporary assignments to support the investigation but moved into permanent roles after Trump won the 2024 election. In October, two federal prosecutors were locked out of their government devices and told they were being put on leave after filing court papers that described those who attacked the Capitol as a “mob of rioters.”

The Justice Department later submitted a new court filing that stripped mentions of the Jan. 6 riot. One man whose case was dismissed because of President Donald Trump’s pardons was accused of hurling an explosive device and a large piece of wood at a group of officers defending an entrance to the Capitol. Some officers later said they had “believed they were going to die,” prosecutors wrote in court papers, and several reported suffering temporary hearing loss.