(Ken Silva, Headline USA) President Donald Trump’s sweeping pardon for offenses related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill protest does not apply to the man accused of planting pipe bombs outside the RNC and DNC headquarters the night before, a judge ruled on Monday.
Lawyers for the pipe bomb suspect, Brian Cole Jr., had argued that Trump’s pardon applies to their client because the pipe bomb event was related to what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. Law enforcement found the devices right around the time the Capitol protest was turning violent. The discovery is said to have diverted law enforcement resources and contributed to the protest turning into a riot.
Cole Jr.’s lawyer, Mario Williams, made his case for why the pardon applies to his client in January to local news station Fox 5 DC.
“I think you have to employ some kind of common sense as applied to the allegations. So, if the allegations are that he went out there and he set down these components and that they were found on Jan. 6, the judge says that it’s a part of Jan. 6 apart and says that you were allowed to get a pardon for everything related to the events that occurred on or at the Capitol building on Jan. 6,” Williams said.
However, Judge Amir Ali disagreed.
“The pardon says that it applies to “individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” Even assuming that the conduct Cole is charged with is “related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021,” the pardon is expressly limited to people who had been “convicted of offenses” related to those events,” Ali said in his Monday decision.
“Cole had not been convicted of the conduct at issue when the President issued the pardon; indeed, he was not charged until many months after the President’s proclamation.”
Cole is set to have a status conference today at 2 p.m. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years of imprisonment on one charge and up to 20 years of imprisonment on a second charge that also carries a five-year mandatory minimum prison sentence.
Meanwhile, Cole’s attorneys have mentioned ex-Capitol Police officer and current CIA security guard Shauni Kerkhoff as possibly being the true culprit. Kerkhoff is the same person who was accused of being the pipe bomber in a Blaze Media article published last November. Kerkhoff’s lawyer has denied the accusations and filed a lawsuit over the matter. The FBI also reportedly cleared her as a suspect. Meanwhile, the Blaze has retracted the story and no longer employs the reporters who wrote it.
Pipe Bomb Case History
As Headline USA revealed in March 2024, the FBI had a suspect identified by Jan. 10, 2021 in the pipe bomb case, but never made any arrests.
FBI records released in September revealed that agents didn’t interview the woman who discovered a pipe bomb near the RNC around 12:40 p.m. on Jan. 6 until days later. That woman, former counterterrorism analyst and then-Commerce Department worker Karlin Younger, said she found the bomb while doing laundry.
Meanwhile, former Vice President Kamala Harris continues to be tight-lipped on the subject, despite the fact that her motorcade drove past the DNC pipe bomb on Jan. 6. Harris left the Capitol at 11:21 a.m. arrived to the DNC at 11:25 a.m., but the nearby pipe bomb wasn’t discovered until 1:07 p.m. by a plainclothes Capitol Police officer.
The lack of answers have driven many to suspect that it may have been a false-flag attempt overseen by the feds themselves to divert law enforcement from the Capitol right as the Jan. 6 protest was turning violent.
Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., has said that it may be impossible to successfully prosecute the pipe bomber, even if he or she is ever arrested.
“Here’s what a good criminal defense attorney’s going to say: If you identified the individual who’s believed to place the bomb, then hours go by, and you had a search by the Secret Service at the DNC and the dog didn’t find the explosive—so clearly, the device [the defense attorney’s] client might have left there wasn’t the device that was determined to be the pipe bomb, because it wasn’t picked up by the bomb-sniffing dog,” Griffith argued in March 2024.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
