Democrats have strained to make the case that January 6, 2021, was a violent “insurrection,” even resorting to false claims such as that police officers were murdered to make their case. But they have gone out of their way to avoid the one incident that would seemingly best make their point — the two purported pipe bombs outside the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee.
Now a Republican lawmaker who pored over thousands of hours of video footage and other evidence from January 6 alleges that the bombs may have been planted with the involvement of law enforcement. He believes Democrats have backed off from the incidents for fear that the truth would be discovered.
“This is an ongoing coverup at this point,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), a member of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, told The Daily Wire. “If there were indeed two operable pipe bombs, that would be the biggest threat that existed on January 6 … It doesn’t make any sense why they wouldn’t be promoting that threat to advance that narrative unless they had something to do with the pipe bombs and they’re trying to memory-hole the whole thing to avoid embarrassment.”
Video identified by Massie shows officers reacting nonchalantly after they were notified of the pipe bomb, milling slowly around the area and even letting children walk in front of it afterward. The soon-to-be vice president Kamala Harris was in the building at the time, a fact that the Department of Justice made misstatements about for months.
The video raises questions about how a Secret Service sweep before she entered did not detect a pipe bomb in plain sight some 30 feet from them.
“It’s the worst scandal of January 6, that’s for sure,” Massie said. “[A pipe bomb] is made to maim and kill… And the people who were protesting that day did not have weapons meant to maim and kill. So you would think they would be very focused on these pipe bombs, but they aren’t.”
The Democrat-run January 6 committee chaired by Rep. Bennie Thompson did not mention the pipe bombs — by far the most sensational aspect of the day — at all in the body of its nearly 900-page final report on the day, except for a brief mention in an appendix.
In 2022, Harris called January 6 a “deadly assault” and likened it to September 11 and Pearl Harbor, but went out of her way not to mention being the target of an apparent bomb, instead saying that she was safe from the Capitol because “I had left,” referring to her secret trip to the DNC.
Security cameras also captured a person apparently planting the bomb on the night of January 5, but former top FBI Washington official Steven D’Antuono testified that he was “flabbergasted” to find that video footage turned over by the DNC was of far lower quality than would be expected of modern cameras.
The bomb planter can be seen appearing to use a cell phone, but data from a cell phone company was “corrupted,” and the FBI wasn’t able to find any records for the suspect, D’Antuono testified.
“Every modern data system keeps backup. I don’t believe it could be corrupted without the ability to recover it,” Massie told The Daily Wire.
The FBI also said the bombs were “viable.” But they were connected to a 60-minute kitchen timer, making it impossible to trigger an explosion the next day, D’Antuono testified.
Massie, an engineer, said that a kitchen timer “doesn’t create an electrical impulse, you would need a battery to ignite.” The FBI told him details that made the bomb sound scary, such as its length and the fact that it had a timer, but said it was “not authorized” to tell him whether it had a battery. D’Antuono told ABC that “they would have exploded,” but acknowledged under oath that a 60-minute timer could not set off a device more than 17 hours later.
“We need to talk to the person who allegedly found the bomb,” Massie said, “and I’ve got a lot of questions for them. For instance: How hard did you look for the third bomb? Like, unless you know there are [only] two bombs, why would you quit looking after you found two? Wouldn’t you go into overdrive with a bunch of dogs and start trying to find bombs everywhere?”
“That doesn’t seem to have happened. It’s almost as if, ‘Okay, well, the first bomb has been discovered. Let’s go get that other one. And then we’ll be done with this part of the exercise,’” he added.
Revolver News was the first to report on the video, and has raised a slew of questions about law enforcement’s handling of a would-be terrorist attack. Last year it reported that the FBI released footage from a camera pointing directly at the DNC bench during a different time period, and that the same camera therefore should have captured a clearer shot of the suspect placing the bomb.
“We believe there are probably alternate videos of the January 5 suspect that they have not released to us,” Massie said.
Both bombs allegedly sat undetected for some 17 hours, until coincidentally being discovered within minutes of each other, virtually at the exact moment that tensions escalated at the Capitol.
D’Antuono, who said he ran the investigation for two years, testified that he did not know whether the FBI ever interviewed the person who found the DNC bomb. The Blaze reported this week that the person was an undercover police officer, citing congressional sources.
The FBI said the suspect walked some six blocks between the two locations, in one of the most heavily policed and monitored locations in the world, but it has not managed to identify even the suspect’s gender, despite offering a $500,000 reward for information.
Massie said he visited the alley between the RNC and the Capitol Hill Club, a Republican hangout, where the second purported bomb was found. “There’s all kinds of cameras back there, private individuals have cameras,” he said, adding that he’s been told by area residents that the FBI did not ask them if they had seen anything until nearly a year later.
“This looks really bad for the FBI, ATF, anyone involved, Secret Service” Massie said. “To defend the integrity of their organizations they need to provide answers.”