(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The defense attorney for the man accused of planting pipe bombs outside the RNC and DNC headquarters on the eve of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill protest says that President Donald Trump’s sweeping pardon for Jan. 6 offenses should apply to his client.
Brian Cole Jr.’s lawyer, Mario Williams, told local news station Fox 5 DC that he plans on making legal arguments about the pardon issue soon.
“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.
The pardons Williams was referring to were made by Trump on the day of his inauguration.
Accused J6 pipe bomber Brian Cole Jr's lawyer says Trump's pardon applies to his client.
He also says he watched a recording of the FBI's interview with Cole (where he supposedly confessed), and that the government's characterization of that interview is misleading. pic.twitter.com/kGQsiZqKJF— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) January 13, 2026
Trump granted a “complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” He also directed the Justice Department to “pursue dismissal with prejudice to the government of all pending indictments against individuals for their conduct related to the events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
DOJ prosecutors have said that Cole confessed to placing pipe bombs outside the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee headquarters on Jan. 5, 2021.
Williams said he’s watched a recording of Cole’s alleged confession, and that the DOJ has misrepresented in court filings what was really said during that two-hour-plus interview.
“Some of the representations that the government made, in our opinion, are false,” he told Fox 5.
The news station has not aired the full interview, and it’s unclear what Williams specifically says the DOJ is lying about.
If convicted of both charges against him, Cole 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.
Williams has also said in court that the defense team has an expert witness who will testify that the so-called bombs “cannot explode and are not viable.”
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 didn’t make an arrest at the time.
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 bizarre circumstances 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.
“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.
