Brian Cole Jr., suspect in Jan. 6 pipe bomb plot, reportedly told FBI he believed 2020 election was stolen

The FBI announced Thursday that it had arrested Brian Cole Jr., 30, of Virginia, for allegedly planting pipe bombs outside the headquarters of both the Republican and Democratic national committees the night before the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, concluding a nearly five-year hunt that had vexed authorities and spawned numerous conspiracy theories.

“We solved it,” FBI Director Kash Patel said at a news conference, adding that “the American public and the world will learn even more information” when Cole has “his day in court.”

“We are going to make sure accountability is delivered to the fullest extent,” Patel said. Cole is expected to make his first court appearance on Friday.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said “there was no new tip” or “no new witness” that led to Cole’s arrest — just a reexamination of the evidence that Patel characterized as “more than 3 million [existing] lines of data.”

Neither Patel nor Bondi provided any further details Thursday about the investigation or Cole’s potential motives.

NBC News reported that Cole is cooperating with authorities, telling the FBI that he believed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. CNN reported that Cole told investigators that he believed the 2020 election was stolen.

How the pipe bomb plot unfolded

On the evening of Jan. 5, homemade devices — viable explosives that could have resulted in “serious injury or death” if detonated, according to investigators — were placed outside both the DNC and RNC headquarters. But they weren’t discovered until roughly 16 hours later, just minutes before President Trump’s supporters began to breach the barricades outside the Capitol in an attempt to prevent lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.

That morning, then-Vice President-elect Kamala Harris passed within 20 feet of the DNC pipe bomb when her motorcade entered the building, according to a subsequent report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general. Harris spent nearly two hours at DNC headquarters before the device was discovered, triggering her evacuation and a massive law enforcement response.

Surveillance footage showed a suspect, about 5 feet 7 inches tall, wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt, a mask and a pair of Nike Air Max Speed Turf sneakers with a yellow logo. The FBI offered a $500,000 reward for additional information; agents issued subpoenas to 18 sneaker vendors. But after more than 1,000 interviews, a review of more than 39,000 video files and over 600 tips from the public, the authorities still couldn’t determine the suspect’s gender — let alone their identity.

Wild theories about political motives and connections to the Jan. 6 riots proliferated in the absence of harder evidence. “There is a massive cover-up, because the person who planted those pipe bombs — they don’t want you to know who it was, because it’s either a connected anti-Trump insider, or this was an inside job,” Dan Bongino, now the deputy FBI director, said in November 2024. “Those bombs were planted there. This was a setup. I have zero doubt.”

After Trump returned to office earlier this year, Bongino and Patel sought to revive the investigation, identifying it as one of the bureau’s top priorities. Citing a person familiar with the matter, the New York Times reported on Thursday that Cole’s arrest “was not based on new information but came after agents bore down yet again on their investigative files and discovered a new lead.”

“Folks, you’re not going to walk into our capital city, put down two explosive devices and walk off into the sunset,” Bongino said Thursday. “We were going to track this person to the end of the earth. There was no way he was getting away.”

One of Trump’s first executive actions of his second term was to issue clemency to the nearly 1,600 defendants accused or convicted of “offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.” It remains to be seen whether Cole’s lawyers will try to argue that their client is covered by Trump’s proclamation.