On the menu today: Federal law enforcement gets its man and solves the long-simmering mystery of who left pipe bombs outside the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic parties on January 6, 2021. But it’s more than a little ironic to see FBI deputy director Dan Bongino taking a victory lap about the arrest of the suspect, because the version of events told in the FBI’s criminal affidavit is much more mundane than the vast conspiracy theory that Bongino was enthusiastically sharing with his listeners, less than a year ago.
The Massive Conspiracy That Wasn’t
Just ten months ago, the current deputy director of the FBI, Dan Bongino, was a podcast host. And on February 4 of this year, Bongino hosted an episode of his podcast, entitled, “The J6 Pipebomber: The Biggest Scandal in U.S. History.”
Got that? Bigger than Watergate, bigger than Teapot Dome, bigger than Iran-Contra or Chappaquiddick. And during the episode, Bongino says, “It is probably the most explosive story folks, you’re going to read this year. I make no effort at hyperbole at all.”
Bongino begins by declaring, “I believe it’s the biggest scandal of our time because there’s clearly a monster cover up going on.”
Much of the program is Bongino’s interview with Darren Beattie, who was a former Trump administration speechwriter, the founder of Revolver News. Since the interview, Beattie has become a current senior bureau official in public diplomacy at the U.S. State Department and, as of July, the acting president of the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Beattie’s contention during the interview was that federal authorities knew from the beginning that the pipe bombs they found outside the RNC and DNC headquarters were not a threat, and went through the motions of responding as part of an elaborate hoax. He told Bongino he had seen on security tapes evidence pointing to a conspiracy, a ruse, and cover-up:
After being informed that there’s an explosive device within feet of themselves, their protectee, Kamala Harris, and passersby, they [a plain clothes U.S. Capitol Police officer and the Secret Service detail at the DNC] exhibit zero concern. . . .
[F]or whatever reason, that the Secret Service is unconcerned for themselves, unconcerned for Kamala Harris, unconcerned for those children [passing by the site], and yet somehow it becomes so dangerous as to require a bomb safe dog, a bomb safe robot to dismantle. The question is, how did the Secret Service know that the bomb was fake? Either they’re the most negligent people and totally unconcerned for their own safety, or somehow they knew it was fake, which I think is clearly the case. . . .
The Secret Service missed it in a sweep that they’re on record as having conducted. So all of these people missed it for seventeen hours, and then, magically, this plainclothes officer discovers it at 1:05, and the Secret Service clearly knows it’s fake. . . .
How would this pipe bomber have counted on having the luck that these bombs would be sitting around there for sixteen, seventeen hours undiscovered and then magically both independently discovered by random pedestrian on one side and a plain close officer on the other side within a 15-minute window that corresponded exactly with the unfolding of the attack on the Capitol? Is this pipe bomber just the luckiest person alive that he could count on that happening? Or is there something more beyond that mere coincidence?
Bongino is a former U.S. Secret Service agent. At no point in the interview did Bongino express skepticism or push back against Beattie’s contentions; in fact, Bongino is credulously concurring and enthusiastically sharing them with his audience.
Bongino said:
Having a decade plus of actually doing these and overseeing and supervising security sweeps, there’s no way they missed that. There’s no way. The Secret Service, the January 6, the morning of, you figure, a building that size, given my experience in the space, Kamala Harris going there, and obviously that day, EOD teams are going to be at a premium. There’s people around. You got DC. It’s always tough to get a team that would have taken, based on that space, probably upwards of maximum, three to 4 hours.
It’s clear to me that the FBI has to be lying about the story because there’s no way there was a bomb there. There’s simply no way a skilled DoD team and a canine dog misses it.
Beattle concludes, “The January 6 scandal, the hoax of January 6, and specifically the hoax of the pipe bomb seems to implicate in some fashion Kamala Harris herself.”
And now, regarding that hoax, that conspiracy, and that wrongdoing by Harris . . . Bongino and the FBI tell us, “never mind!”
You can find the affidavit for a criminal complaint submitted by the bureau here. In the affidavit, the FBI states:
Subsequently, the FBI assessed that the two devices were both IEDs which contained a main explosive charge, a fuzing system, and a container.
The FBI Laboratory issued a report regarding the two devices, opining that the submitted items consisted of two disrupted destructive devices and that the use of a hard metal container showed that weapon characteristics were present.
That does not sound like an assessment that the pipe bombs were “fake” or that they were part of a “hoax.”
The affidavit identifies Brian J. Cole, Jr. as a 30-year-old resident of Woodbridge, Va., as the perpetrator and concludes, “During 2019 and 2020, COLE purchased multiple items consistent with the components that were used to manufacture the pipe bombs placed at the RNC and DNC. For all of the reasons stated above, there is probable cause that, on January 5, 2021, Cole placed pipe bombs outside of the RNC and the DNC.”
In other words, the FBI — where Bongino is currently deputy director — is charging Cole and so far, Cole alone. The affidavit does not mention any co-conspirators or accomplices. (This does not rule out additional indictments, but so far, nothing the government has submitted in a court of law points to a broader conspiracy to place those bombs. The affidavit lays out the evidence that Cole purchased all the components, assembled them, and placed the bombs at the two locations.) Nothing in the FBI’s affidavit indicates a hoax, nothing points to anyone in the U.S. government knowing about it, and no, nothing in the affidavit implicates former Vice President Kamala Harris in perpetrating some sort of elaborate deception.
No vast conspiracy, no sinister cover up, no ties going all the way up to the top levels of the incoming administration. Just yet another angry young man, this time one who kind of looked like Steve Urkel from Family Matters.
In case you’re wondering, Bongino was happily taking a victory lap on the investigation on Sean Hannity’s program last night:
I want to be clear with the public, This is chapter one of a ten, 20-chapter book. This investigation is not over, at all. The investigation has just begun. We have interviewed the subject at length, we are still going through an enormous amount of process, accounts. So, it would be very early for me to get out ahead of that on motive. Obviously, the motive was to drop a couple bombs that could have killed people. But what the actual ideology and motivation, I want to be cautious that this gets done correctly.
Did you notice that? “The motive was to drop a couple bombs that could have killed people.”
So, now Bongino himself is telling the public those pipe bombs were not “fake.” (There’s a separate question of whether they were functional or whether the bomber had made some error in assembling them. We went through this with the Cesar Sayoc case; in the end, it doesn’t really matter that much to the criminal justice system whether you were sending functional bombs or nonfunctional bombs, if your intent was to harm others. You’re not any less of a criminal because of deficiencies in your bomb-building skills.)
That Bongino podcast back in February was full of farfetched conspiratorial nonsense. And I suspect that the audience listening and watching at the time didn’t particularly care. They know it’s conspiratorial nonsense, and they consume this media because they want to hear conspiratorial nonsense, because they want to believe in conspiratorial nonsense.
People keep wondering how someone like Candace Owens can keep spinning ever crazier and more farfetched conspiracy theories about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and how her audience can keep watching.
The answer is simple, and unpleasant: A certain chunk of the audiences out there want to hear lies. They love it when someone tells them something false. The truth is usually comparably boring. The conspiracy theory narratives can get convoluted in their details but almost always amount to one simple and exciting storyline: Shadowy and malevolent figures at the top of society are fooling most of the public and getting away with terrible deeds by framing or using some hapless patsy. And you, the theory believer, get to be a minor hero in the story; you’re the one who’s not so easily fooled, the who can see through their lies.
The evidence presented in the indictment of Charlie Kirk’s shooter paints a picture of an angry young man increasingly involved in political causes who convinced himself that Kirk was “spreading hate” and that this conclusion justified Kirk’s murder in cold blood.
The evidence presented in the investigation of President Trump’s would-be assassin in Butler, Pa., paints a picture of another angry young man making, in the words of the FBI special agent in charge, “a sustained detailed effort to plan an attack on some events, meaning he looked at any number of events or targets. And then when this event was announced, the Trump rally was announced early in July, he became hyper-focused on that specific event and looked at it as a target of opportunity.” Just some snot-nosed punk who thought he’d be famous if he killed a presidential candidate.
The evidence presented in the trial of President Trump’s would-be assassin in Palm Beach County, Fla., pointed to a man with a long history of erratic and violent behavior who had traveled to Ukraine, generally came across as an unstable weirdo, and believed that assassinations were a justifiable tool to change world history. (After being found guilty, he had tried to stab himself in the neck.)
No vast conspiracies, no government cover-ups, no sinister cigarette smoking man showing up in a black helicopter and destroying evidence, or ensuring that the Buffalo Bills never win the Super Bowl. Just angry and usually young men, often with mental health issues, convinced that whatever has eluded them in their lives will be found by committing a terrible act of violence against someone who did nothing to deserve it. That’s a profoundly disturbing fact of modern American life. Perhaps that fact is so unsettling that people find it more reassuring to believe that all these horrific acts are the work of a vast shadowy conspiracy that will someday be exposed and brought to justice.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously warned, “live not by lies.”
The thing is, some Americans absolutely love living by lies.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has an unusual definition of “complete exoneration”; in a way, the federal government has a perfect record on detecting fraud in the Obamacare subsidies, and some guy out in India didn’t like my reporting, and I took his criticism well.