(Ken Silva, Headline USA) At a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing of the FBI on Wednesday, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., played a video showing a passerby “miraculously” finding a pipe bomb outside of the DNC headquarters on Jan. 6, 2021.
To Massie, the timing of the pipe bomb discovery is suspicious. The representative suggested that the pipe bombs placed outside the DNC and RNC were distractions to divert law enforcement away from the Capitol, right around the time as the election protests were about to become violent.
“It was specifically at the same precise time to cause maximum distraction from the events going on at the Capitol,” he said. “It appears to me that that wasn’t a coincidence.”
However, FBI Director Chris Wray declined to answer any of Massie’s questions about the matter, including whether agents interviewed the person who found the DNC pipe bomb.
“I’m not going to get into that,” Wray said.
Massie’s questions follow an interview he and other House Judiciary Committee members conducted with former FBI official Steven D’Antuono, who oversaw the bureau’s pipe bomb investigation until he retired last November. In that interview, D’Antuono disclosed that some of the cell phone evidence from the FBI’s pipe bomb investigation was “corrupted.”
The retired agent said the FBI conducted geofencing, but received “corrupted data” from one of the cell phone providers.
“We have complete data. Not complete, because there’s some data that was corrupted by one of the providers—not purposely by them, right,” D’Antuono said, stammering through the interview.
“It’s just unusual circumstances that we have corrupt data from one of the providers. I can’t remember right now which one. But for that day, which is awful because we don’t have that information to search.”
The former FBI official added: “I don’t want any conspiracy theories.”
D’Antuono’s information prompted Massie and several other lawmakers to write to Wray last month, demanding all the bureau’s report on the pipe bomb investigation.
Wray said Wednesday that he’ll “work with his department” to see what information he can provide in response to Massie’s letter.
Massie chided Wray for stonewalling Congress on the matter.
“It was 900 days ago when this happened, and you said you had total confidence that you’d apprehend the subject,” Massie said. “It’s 900 days. You need to tell us what you found.”
The reason for the FBI’s stonewalling could be that the pipe bomber has a connection to the federal government, according to FBI whistleblower Kyle Seraphin.
According to Seraphin, technicians who worked in the Joint Program Office for Countering IEDs told him that the devices left at the RNC and DNC were incapable of detonating. And in a later interview on the No Way, Jose! podcast, he said fake pipe bombs are often used in government sting operations.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
