"Intentional Negligence"? FBI Had J6 Bomber's Cell Phone Putting Him at the Scene of the Crime... Five Years Ago

If the FBI had cell phone records of 10,000 people's cell phones sending signals from near the RNC and DNC on the night the bombs were planted, I could understand not finding the suspect. With a suspect list of 10,000 people, I guess I could understand the claim, "We just didn't have the manpower to run down every phone."

Guess how many cell phones they actually had records of in the vicinity of the RNC and DNC at the time when the bombs were being planted?

Fewer than 200.

No, i do not believe the FBI "just didn't have the resources" to look into 186 suspects -- not when they showed they could mobilize every agent to track down every grandma within ten blocks of the Capitol on January 6th.

So was this a case of "intentional negligence"?

Miranda Divine:

Surely there's more to it than that. Director Kash Patel hinted Friday at a reason the FBI under Biden administration Director Christopher Wray may not have wanted to solve the case: "intentional negligence."

'Corrupted' cell data

This, after all, was the FBI that managed to round up and charge 1,500 supporters of President Trump who set foot anywhere vaguely near the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, tracking them down through cellphone pings and video footage.

Yet with all its technical ability, Wray's FBI somehow missed the phone used by the suspect in the vicinity of the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee headquarters on the evening of Jan. 5 when the pipe bombs were planted. Surveillance footage shows the suspect, wearing a gray hoodie and COVID-style white mask, seemingly talking on the phone while walking around that night less than half a mile from the Capitol.

According to an FBI document presented to the DC District Court during his arraignment Friday, Cole's cellphone "engaged in approximately seven data session transactions with [his cellphone provider's] towers between 7:39 p.m. and 8:24 p.m. ... in the area of the RNC and DNC on January 5, 2021," locating him in the right place at the right time.

That information was obtained by the FBI within weeks of the discovery of the pipe bombs the next day. Investigators found 186 cellphone numbers "of interest" and 130 "devices of interest," according to the congressional report released this January by the chairmen of the House Oversight and Judiciary subcommittees, Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.).

By early February 2021, according to the subcommittees, FBI agents had been assigned to interview people associated with 36 of the 186 phone numbers; 98 still "required additional investigative steps." A further 51 phone numbers were identified as "not needing further action" because, curiously enough, the phones "belong[ed] to law enforcement officers or persons on the exclusion list."

The FBI never told Congress what came of those leads.

They only bothered looking into 36 of the 186 phone numbers?

Let me guess - the 36 they looked into were Trump supporting Republicans, right?

Then there is the curious tale of the "corrupted" cellphone data that turned out not to be corrupted at all.

The story came from Steve D'Antuono, head of the FBI's Washington field office until his retirement in December 2022, who was in charge of the crucial first year of the pipe bomb case as well as the Capitol riot investigation, which has been described as the biggest in FBI history.

He was assigned to Washington one month before the 2020 election from his previous role in Detroit, when he ran the disastrous Gretchen Whitmer "fednapping" case that resulted in multiple mistrials and acquittals, amid claims of FBI entrapment of ­patsies.

D'Antuono, who has since found a job at KPMG, also led the controversial FBI raid on Trump's home, Mar-a-Lago, in August 2022. He claims he opposed the raid but was overruled by then-Deputy FBI Director Paul Abbate.

In any case, in June 2023, D'Antuono testified before Congress, claiming that the FBI had received "corrupted data" in the pipe bomb case from one of the three major cellphone carriers and that may have been the reason it couldn't find the culprit.

"We did a complete geofence. [But] there's some data that was corrupted by one of the providers, not purposely by them," he said.

"It just [was an] unusual circumstance 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. So could it have been that provider? Yeah, with our luck, you know, with this investigation it probably was, right."

Yet all three of the cellphone carriers contacted by Loudermilk's subcommittee confirmed that they "did not provide corrupted data to the FBI and that the FBI never notified them of any issues with accessing the cellular data."

It gets worse. The FBI didn't release any pictures of the suspect that could identify him -- and one investigator claims that the FBI deliberately blurred out the one part of his face that was clearly visible in the surveillance footage, his eyes.

Why would they do that, if not to conceal his identity?

I don't know if I'm ready to believe that. It's a claim made by someone looking at the video and determining that he sees "pixelation" added to the video to obscure Brian Cole, Jr.'s eyes. I remember other claims about "chromatic aberrations" not turning out to be true.

But I would like this investigated further.

...

But by the end of February 2021, according to Loudermilk and Massie's report, the bureau actively began diverting resources away from the pipe bomb investigation. At the same time, Wray and Abbate were ramping up resources to track down and aggressively prosecute trespassing J6 grandmothers.

Miranda Divine concludes that the political operators of the FBI didn't want to taint their Trump Did the J6 Insurrection narrative with any information that might undermine it, and started winding down the investigation when it looked like the main suspect was not a MAGA grandma.

posted by Ace at 04:25 PM

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