With conspiracy-minded leadership installed at the F.B.I., and federal prosecutors now broadly applying the president’s controversial pardon, will a still-unidentified bomber escape justice?
∎ ∎ ∎
Within hours of taking office, President Donald Trump issued sweeping pardons for nearly sixteen hundred people charged or convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the United States Capitol.
Compared to the flood of executive orders issued by the president in recent weeks, the text of this order was brief and focused: It provides legal relief to anyone who committed “offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
Those in prison were immediately released. The Justice Department was directed to dismiss pending indictments and abandon any remaining investigations, which it quickly did. Within days, career prosecutors and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who worked on January 6-related cases were fired or demoted.
And an F.B.I. webpage titled, “Most Wanted: U.S. Capitol Violence,” which included graphic video of rioters attacking police officers, was deleted and its videos removed from YouTube. (The page, without videos, remains available at the Internet Archive.)
Among those released from prison were Trump supporters who overwhelmed and violently attacked police officers at the Capitol, as well as members of two right-wing militias, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy.
The pardon’s first sentence said its purpose was to end “a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people.” Based on the words and actions of the president and his supporters, including Republicans in Congress over the last four years, that alleged injustice was the prosecution of those who sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election with political violence.
But little discussed, if at all, has been the pardon’s impact on a less-well-known thread of the January 6 story: The pipe bombs found that day outside the national headquarters of the Democratic and Republican parties, located only a few blocks from the Capitol building. Those devices were discovered, and law enforcement dispatched to investigate, just as the Capitol was breached by the pro-Trump mob.
In the weeks after January 6, the F.B.I. disclosed that both bombs were “viable” and, had they exploded, could have injured or killed people nearby. It released images and video footage of a hooded, masked person walking around the Capitol Hill neighborhood during the early evening of January 5 and then placing a device in bushes next to the Democratic National Committee, just off South Capitol Street, and another in an alley behind the Republican National Committee, located at the corner of First and D Streets. (It’s about a seven-minute walk from either location to the Capitol building.)
In both cases, the bombs, which were filled with black explosive powder and rigged with sixty-minute kitchen timers, were not hidden inside a bag or box, suggesting they were meant to be discovered.
More than four years later, no one has been apprehended or charged. No suspects have been publicly named.
The F.B.I. has been leading the investigation with help from the D.C. Metropolitan Police, the U.S. Capitol Police, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In early January, new details were released, including an estimate of the bomber’s height, at five foot seven, along with more video footage. A reward of up to $500,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction is still offered.
“As we mark the four-year anniversary of the night the pipe bombs were placed on Capitol Hill, the F.B.I. and our partners are renewing our call for tips from the public to help us identify the suspect,” the bureau said in a news release on January 2. “We are releasing additional details about the suspect, as well as previously unreleased video of the suspect placing the bomb at the Democratic National Committee.”
The Washington field office of the F.B.I. told me last week that the pipe-bomb investigation, which it said has so far included more than a thousand interviews, a review of nearly forty thousand video files, and chasing down more than six hundred tips, is “still ongoing.” (When asked for an update, the other investigating agencies all referred me back to the F.B.I.)
A video released by the F.B.I. on January 2, 2025, shows the bomber walking around the Capitol Hill neighborhood and placing pipe bombs. (Source: F.B.I.)
This part of the January 6 affair—and particularly that a suspect has not yet been captured by the F.B.I.—has been fertile ground for those on the political right hawking so-called “deep state” conspiracy theories.
Prominent among them is Dan Bongino, the podcaster, former Fox News commentator, and outspoken Trump supporter, who was recently named deputy director of the F.B.I. He has long suggested that the F.B.I. itself, or operatives working for the agency, may have placed the devices—one of many inside actors, the argument goes, who were actually responsible for fomenting the Capitol attack.
In a January, 2025, podcast episode, Bongino said, “I’m obsessed with this story because I’m convinced it’s the biggest scandal of our time.” He insisted that the F.B.I. knows the bomber’s identity, doctored CCTV video, lied about cell-phone geolocation data, and has purposely slow-walked the investigation.
“I believe the F.B.I. knows the identity of this pipe bomber . . . and just doesn’t want to tell us because it was an inside job.”
—Dan Bongino, prior to his appointment last month as deputy director of the F.B.I.
A former Secret Service agent, Bongino also questioned why that agency’s bomb-sniffing dogs—which swept the D.N.C. on the morning of January 6 in advance of a midday visit by Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris—missed the pipe bomb, suggesting that’s more evidence of a grand conspiracy and cover-up.
(At the time, the Secret Service did not dispatch the same resources, or follow the more rigorous protocols, that were required once Harris was sworn-in, according to a 2024 report by the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general.)
In the podcast episode, during which he called the law-enforcement agency the “Federal Bureau of Obfuscation,” Bongino said, “It is clear this all adds up to they know who this person is. They just don’t want you to know who it is.” He added, “I believe the F.B.I. knows the identity of this pipe bomber on January 6, four years ago, and just doesn’t want to tell us because it was an inside job.”
Another high-profile advocate of this view is the new F.B.I. director, Kash Patel. Speaking last year to the right-wing YouTuber, Benny Jones, Patel said, “How can you not arrest one person? Do you think the Federal Bureau of Investigation can’t find a bomber in the United States of America? Has any one bomber ever gotten away?”
In May, 2023, Patel posted on Truth Social that the F.B.I. had “ID confirmable” video of a suspect, and said the evidence would uncover the bomber as “a government confidential human source.” (He put the words “pipe bomber” inside quotation marks.)
For his part, at a press conference held at his Mar-a-Lago resort last month, prior to his inauguration, Trump said, “Why didn’t they find the bomber, the pipe bomber? You know, they know who the pipe bomber is. The F.B.I. knows who it is.”
But since returning to office on January 20, the president has not shared the identity of the pipe bomber. Patel, who was sworn-in as F.B.I. director on February 21, has also been silent.
Republicans focus on “diversion” and a clear link to January 6
Meanwhile, the G.O.P.-led Congress has announced plans for a new select committee that will “correct the incomplete narrative” of January 6, as Speaker Mike Johnson put it last month. Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a Georgia Republican who, perhaps more than any other member of Congress, has focused on the pipe-bomb case, will lead the new committee. His spokesperson, Nick Petromelis, told me that the committee, once formally established, will continue to examine the F.B.I.’s investigation into the matter along with other January 6-related subjects.
At one point, Loudermilk was himself a subject of investigation by the January 6 Select Committee, which examined a Capitol tour he gave to picture-taking constituents in a basement tunnel near the Capitol subway on January 5, 2021. At least one person on the tour was filmed at the Capitol the next day. Loudermilk strongly denied it was nefarious, telling reporters the visitors were taking pictures of a “golden eagle sconce” lighting fixture and of the subway used by members of Congress. Still, he declined to appear before the select committee.
In early January, Loudermilk and Rep. Thomas Massie, a seven-term Republican from Kentucky, issued an eighty-page report detailing errors made during the pipe-bomb response by the U.S. Capitol Police, D.C. Metropolitan Police, and the U.S. Secret Service—mistakes and oversights the agencies readily concede, pointing to the unprecedented attack on the Capitol that was also underway at the time.
In that report’s conclusion, Loudermilk and Massie wrote, “Discovered shortly before and after the initial breach of the Capitol’s outer perimeter, the pipe bombs played a role in enabling the security breach at the Capitol by causing USCP to divert significant resources away from the Capitol.”
In addition to linking the pipe bombs directly to the events of January 6, their conclusion supported a key Republican argument: The problem on January 6 was not the mob of thousands who, inspired by the president’s claims of a stolen election, overwhelmed law enforcement to storm the Capitol, but that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, did not do enough to ensure the building was adequately defended.
There’s bipartisan agreement that there was plenty of public information about what was coming: One investigation, led by Senate Democrats, highlighted the substantial intelligence failures in the run-up to January 6, when right-wing groups like the Proud Boys were openly posting on social media about their plans and goals. A report issued in 2023 by the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee was called, “Planned in Plain Sight: A Review of Intelligence Failures in Advance of January 6, 2021.”
But critics say ongoing Republican investigations and reports are largely meant to create more doubt and confusion about the Capitol riot and, perhaps most of all, keep G.O.P. members in the good graces of the president, who calls January 6—which included violent assaults on hundreds of police officers over several hours—“a day of love.”
At a hearing last March chaired by Loudermilk, California Democratic Rep. Norma Torres, the ranking member on Loudermilk’s House Administration oversight subcommittee, questioned the goals of Republicans’ persistent inquiries into the F.B.I.’s handling of the pipe-bomb case. “Why are we here? Maybe it’s to peddle crazy right-wing conspiracy theories about the January 6 pipe bombs [that are] spreading in the dark corners of the Internet,” Torres said. “Or maybe we are here so this subcommittee can once again try to muddle our history, villainize law enforcement, and undo the efforts of the bipartisan January 6 Select Committee.”
Torres concluded that G.O.P. efforts were meant to distract from Trump’s “corrupt scheme to overturn the results of a free and fair election,” she said, and called for the pipe bomber, and those involved in January 6-related crimes, to be prosecuted. “It is imperative that all who committed criminal acts [on January 6] be held accountable for their actions, including—and especially—whoever placed pipe bombs at the D.N.C. and R.N.C.,” Torres said.
After Trump issued his sweeping pardon, Torres issued a statement condemning the move. “The individuals who orchestrated and carried out these heinous acts do not deserve leniency,” she said. “They deserve accountability.”
(A spokesperson for Torres did not respond to a request for comment.)
The bomber’s motive and the applicability of Trump’s pardon
Loudermilk and Massie’s report focuses in several places on that question of whether the pipe bombs were meant as a diversion from the attack on the Capitol—intended to draw law enforcement away from securing the building, making it easier for attackers to get inside and stop the certification of electoral votes.
While the F.B.I. and U.S. Capitol Police officials have said this view remains speculation, Steven Sund, who was head of the Capitol Police on January 6, has embraced it. Appearing before Congress in February, 2021, Sund said, “We were dealing with two pipe bombs that were specifically set right off the edge of our perimeter to, what I suspect, draw resources away” from law enforcement protecting the Capitol, he said. “I think there was a significant coordination with this attack,” he added.
That view differs only slightly from that of Bongino and other right-wing commentators, who also say the bombs were planted as a diversion. But in their telling, it was a diversion meant to benefit Joe Biden and the Democrats: A sympathy-generating assassination attempt on Harris, whose motorcade passed just twenty feet from the D.N.C. pipe bomb, would derail the plans of Congressional Republicans to challenge to certification of Electoral College votes. That would allow Biden and Harris’s 2020 victory—which they baselessly attribute to a “rigged” election—to be sealed.
That Harris was at the D.N.C. that morning was not revealed publicly until a year later. It’s unclear how the bomber would have had that information and, therefore, a motive like assassinating the vice-president-elect—something that has further fueled the “inside job” conspiracy.
With Patel freshly sworn-in as F.B.I. director, last week the House Judiciary Committee chairman, Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, sent him a letter critical of the F.B.I. under President Biden. He requested documents about several matters that the former director, Chrisopher Wray, had declined to provide. Included on the list was information about the pipe-bomb investigation. (Separately, Loudermilk, Jordan, and Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, sent letters last month to telecom companies seeking information about the cell-phone geolocation data.)
In his letter last week, Jordan specifically notes the diversion created by the pipe bombs. “The discovery of both pipe bombs resulted in federal law enforcement diverting significant resources to the R.N.C. and D.N.C. and away from the Capitol,” he wrote. “As law enforcement responded to the pipe bombs, protesters breached security perimeters at the Capitol, thereby delaying congressional proceedings. The pipe bombs, whether intentionally or unintentionally, served as a critical diversion that substantially contributed to the weakened security posture, and ultimately the security breach, at the Capitol that day.”
“The FBI cannot speculate on any intention or motivation as the investigation is still ongoing. We are committed to following all leads to investigate this fully and provide answers to the public. Questions regarding charging issues should be directed to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”
—Statement by the F.B.I. Washington Field Office, February 26, 2025
Meanwhile, in the last few days, federal prosecutors appointed by the Trump administration have made court filings in several cases that suggest an expanding scope of the president’s pardon. An acting U.S. attorney in Florida moved for dismissal of unrelated gun charges against a convicted Capitol rioter, arguing that it was only the January 6-related investigation into the man, Daniel Ball—who was pardoned last month for attacking police and throwing an explosive device at them—that led to charges for illegal possession of a gun and ammunition found during a search of his home in 2023.
In another case, federal prosecutors moved to dismiss the 2022 conviction of retired Army master sergeant Jeremy Brown for possessing an unregistered sawed-off shotgun, a short-barrel AR-style rifle, grenades, and a classified military document. They cite the discovery of those items during execution of a search warrant that was part of his January 6-related case.
Christopher Spata
The D.O.J. last week also requested dismissal of unrelated gun and drug charges in another January 6-related case, in Maryland, but separately, its prosecutors rejected a defense lawyer’s effort to use the presidential pardon to dismiss charges against a Tennessee man who allegedly plotted to kill local, state, and federal law-enforcement officers who investigated his Capitol riot case.
This increasingly expansive interpretation of the pardon comes from the top: An assistant U.S. attorney told the Florida court considering the Brown case, “Based on consultation with Department of Justice leadership, it is the position of the United States that the offenses of conviction in this case are intended to be covered by this Pardon.”
These prosecutorial decisions suggest that if the Capitol Hill pipe bombs—and the motive of the person or persons who placed them, as in the “diversion” narrative—are linked to January 6, any criminal charges could be swept away by the pardon as “an offense related to events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
There are reasons why that’s unlikely, based on a straightforward reading of the pardon language and its references only to past convictions and “pending indictments.” But in at least one scenario, where the bomber was at the Capitol on January 6 and later investigated and indicted for offenses committed that day, including misdemeanors like trespassing or disorderly conduct, some legal questions would be in uncharted territory.
One former federal prosecutor told me it’s unlikely the F.B.I. would continue its investigation if the U.S. attorney didn’t plan to eventually file charges, but also conceded that recent actions by Trump’s D.O.J. may put the applicability of a presidential pardon—along with other legal questions that were, until recently, considered settled—into uncharted territory.
That includes, the former prosecutor said, still-untested theories of how courts may interpret pre-emptive pardons like those issued by President Biden to former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney and others. Such open questions could become central to the defense strategy of anyone linked to the D.N.C. and R.N.C. pipe bombs.
When I asked the F.B.I.’s Washington field office if the pardon might apply to the pipe bomber, and if investigators had determined a motive, it replied with an e-mailed statement: “The F.B.I. cannot speculate on any intention or motivation as the investigation is still ongoing. We are committed to following all leads to investigate this fully and provide answers to the public. Questions regarding charging issues should be directed to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”
A spokesperson for Edward Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, declined to comment when presented with the F.B.I.’s statement, and didn’t respond to specific questions about the pardon and prosecution decisions.
Martin, a Trump loyalist and G.O.P. political operative who has never been a prosecutor, helped organize the January 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally in D.C. where the president urged his supporters to go to the Capitol. Last month he fired thirty prosecutors who worked on January 6-related cases, and last week he demoted seven of his office’s senior prosecutors for the same reason, reassigning them to work on misdemeanor cases—typically handled by entry-level prosecutors.
According to a report in The Washington Post, those seven prosecutors formerly worked on “overseeing or leading public corruption, fraud, major violent crimes and complex conspiracy cases.” Among them is the prosecutor who was, until a few weeks ago, in charge of overseeing Capitol-riot prosecutions.
Martin’s spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether any of the fired or demoted prosecutors were assigned to work with the F.B.I. on the pipe-bomb case.
Loudermilk, through his spokesperson, did not respond to specific questions about whether the presidential pardon could prevent the prosecution of those connected to the pipe bombs, including if a motive was, as he has suggested, a diversion on January 6.
The Justice Department also did not respond to a request for comment.
Under new leadership, what will the F.B.I. do next?
The career F.B.I. agent who led the Washington field office and oversaw the pipe-bomb investigation, David Sundberg, was forced out in late January. A few weeks earlier, in a National Public Radio interview about the investigation, he said, “This is not something that the F.B.I. is going to let go of. We simply can’t have a case that we stop working that involves someone placing explosive devices inside a neighborhood in any American town or city.”
But with Patel and Bongino now leading the F.B.I., developments in this January 6-related story may soon bring into stark relief an unprecedented mix of facts, conspiracy theories, the scope and interpretation of presidential pardons, and the impact of turning over formerly independent federal law-enforcement agencies—and their investigatory and prosecutorial powers—to political partisans.
Heavily invested in their conspiratorial theory of the case, it’s unclear what Patel and Bongino will do next. They have full access to the F.B.I.’s case files, which include nonpublic information and evidence from an ongoing investigation that the bureau previously resisted turning over to Loudermilk and others in Congress. If they can no longer defend their “inside job” accusation—or learn that the bomber has other ties to January 6—will they abandon the investigation altogether, or perhaps issue misleading statements that align with their storyline, now carrying the imprimatur of the F.B.I.?
Also still unknown is whether Martin’s office and the Department of Justice, under Pam Bondi—the Trump ally recently confirmed as attorney general—would decline to bring indictments in a new January 6-related case, pointing to their broad interpretation of the pardon.
That might not go over well: According to a Washington Post/Ipsos poll last month, only fourteen percent of Americans favored including violent offenders among those pardoned, while fully eighty-three percent opposed some or all of the pardons.
But it’s possible that a pipe bomber, who could have killed pedestrians, law-enforcement officers, and even the incoming vice president of the United States—on the same day that Capitol rioters sought to find and kill the outgoing one—may also walk away without consequences.
∎ ∎ ∎
Support in-depth, independent, nonprofit news about the Berkshires and beyond: Become a contributing member.
Have thoughts? Submit a letter to the editor.
