The FBI untangled the mysterious Jan. 6, 2021, pipe bombs case by relying on a “new computer program,” which deciphered cellphone data that the agency had held for years.
Earlier this month, the government charged Brian Cole Jr. with planting the pipe bombs outside the Republican and Democratic national committees on the eve of Jan. 6, saying the Trump administration had made the arrest after nearly five years without “any new information.”
At the time, the FBI offered few details on exactly how it identified Cole, instead broadly characterizing the search as a massive forensic scrub of millions of lines of cell site data, retail records, CCTV footage, and other digital material.
But new details released this week shed more light on what led to Cole’s arrest. A “tech-savvy” law enforcement officer developed software in recent months that deciphered a tranche of cellphone data provided to the FBI four years ago by T-Mobile, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The breakthrough came after investigators had failed for years to make progress in decoding the data, which turned out to be essential to cracking the case, the outlet reported. And it followed the FBI’s renewed efforts under the Trump administration to track down the suspect, as agents and analysts were pressed by Deputy Director Dan Bongino to reexamine evidence gathered under the Biden administration, including the data from T-Mobile.
“Once investigators were finally able to read the data, they said it led them to Cole’s phone number because his cellphone’s movements tracked what investigators had seen in surveillance footage,” people familiar with the investigation said. “With that knowledge in hand, the feds said they were able to fill in the blanks. A search of Cole’s bank account and credit-card records indicated that he made a series of purchases, including at several Home Depot locations in Northern Virginia. The purchases matched the components of the bombs, according to court records.”
The development comes after Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Bongino said repeatedly during a press conference announcing Cole’s identity that his arrest was not the result of “a new tip.”
“It wasn’t some new evidence; it was the hard work of President [Donald] Trump’s administration,” Bondi said in early December. “I watched them, from Day One, come in here and say, ‘We are going to solve this crime.’ And they did.”
Patel reiterated that “we did not discover any new information,” stressing that the arrest resulted from a new investigative team “reexamining every piece of evidence” that was inside the FBI’s databases for years. Patel said agents “sifted through all the data, something that the prior administration refused and failed to do.”
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Bongino said, “This was our internal work, the FBI,” and that “there was no new public tip.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to the FBI for comment.
