Dan Bongino, the No. 2 official at the F.B.I., spent much of Thursday basking in praise for his role in catching a man charged with planting two pipe bombs near Republican and Democratic party headquarters on the eve of Jan. 6, 2021.
Mr. Bongino began the day, his 51st birthday, with the triumphal announcement that the case had been cracked through force of will and re-examination of leads neglected by the Biden-era bureau. He ended with a stunning suggestion that his previous claim that the case was an “inside job” abetted by a federal cover-up had been fodder for his lucrative podcast.
“I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions, that’s clear, and one day I will be back in that space — but that’s not what I’m paid for now,” Mr. Bongino told Sean Hannity on Fox, after being asked about a November 2024 episode in which Mr. Bongino said he had “zero doubt” that placement of the devices was a setup.
“I’m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts,” he added.
That the case appeared to involve a set of facts utterly at odds with his prior narrative did not seem to bother Mr. Bongino. But others on the right were not nearly as willing to move on so quickly.
Investigators have found no evidence that the man charged in the case, Brian Cole Jr., 30, of Virginia, has any connection to the government, foreign countries or political groups, according to people familiar with the situation.
In fact, initial interviews with Mr. Cole indicate that he was receptive to claims put forward by President Trump’s supporters that the 2020 election was rigged in Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s favor, according to the people.
At a brief appearance in Federal District Court in Washington on Friday, prosecutors said that Mr. Cole spoke with law enforcement officers for more than four hours after his arrest. He is set to return to court on Dec. 15 to determine his bail.
The claim that the pipe bombs were part of an inside job is a crucial element of the debunked but enduring belief among fervent Trump loyalists: that the Capitol riot was not what it appeared to be — a violent effort to disrupt the lawful election of Mr. Biden — but a shadowy conspiracy by government and political operatives to sow chaos and discredit the Trumpist movement.
Mr. Trump has used the full powers of government and his pardon pen to rewrite the history of the Jan. 6 attack as an assault against — not by — himself and his supporters. The revelation, according to initial accounts, that Mr. Cole was not hostile to the president and may indeed have supported him does not appear to neatly fit that story line.
But the arrest, taking place nearly five years after the bombs were found and defused, raised questions about the quality of the investigation under Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and the F.B.I. director at the time, Christopher A. Wray, who devoted significant resources in a failed bid to find the culprit.
As Mr. Bongino attempted a tire-shredding U-turn, a vocal group of activists who are staying the course lashed out. It was a more modest, if equally vehement, reprise of the backlash over the effort by Trump appointees to quell the furor over the Jeffrey Epstein investigation this year.
Kyle Seraphin, a former F.B.I. agent who conducted surveillance on the pipe bomber case before leaving the bureau to become a popular right-wing podcaster, said he did not believe that Mr. Cole had planted the bombs near Capitol Hill.
Mr. Seraphin, a scorched-earth critic of the current F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, has long maintained that law enforcement officers are implicated in the placement of the bombs.
“I think this whole thing is completely fabricated — none of it rings true to me,” Mr. Seraphin said. “The F.B.I. has done this before. The model is Richard Jewell,” he added, referring to the man who was wrongly suspected of planting pipe bombs in a public park during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
Representative Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who has long maintained that the pipe bombing episode was an inside job by deep-state operatives, questioned whether the F.B.I. had indeed found the right man.
“Three things I’ll never believe about the January 5-6 pipe bomb story,” Mr. Massie wrote on social media on Thursday afternoon. “The bomber was a lone wolf. FBI was this incompetent for four years on a case this consequential. Perpetrators were pro-Trump.”
Julie Kelly, a right-wing journalist who has long believed that the events of Jan. 6 were instigated by federal agents, told the podcaster Benny Johnson on Thursday that questions remained to be answered about why the F.B.I. under Mr. Wray had not been able to solve the case.
“This is not a crime that has been solved, even with this person in custody right now,” Ms. Kelly said. “There are still going to have to be a lot of threads pulled, as you said, tying them together and then also exposing why the Chris Wray F.B.I. memory-holed this whole thing and buried it from the American people once again to protect Democrats and try to sabotage Donald Trump.”
Mr. Seraphin and others who share his view believed there was more merit in a recent article by Steve Baker in the far-right news outlet The Blaze, which pinned the entire affair on a former Capitol Police officer based on a purported computer analysis of the person’s walking patterns.
Mr. Baker declined to discuss the arrest of Mr. Cole, saying that The Blaze, which recently retracted his article, had asked him not to speak about the case. But other conservative skeptics have pointed out what they describe as holes in the case.
Mr. Bongino blasted the Blaze article shortly after it published and presented the arrest as conclusive proof that Mr. Baker’s inside-job account was false.
And while senior federal and local law enforcement officials described their involvement in the case, there was little doubt that Mr. Bongino, who has told people in his orbit that he is unlikely to remain as deputy director much longer, was at center stage.
Over the summer, he clashed with Attorney General Pam Bondi and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, over Ms. Bondi’s handling of the Epstein files.
Soon after, the White House tapped Andrew Bailey, the former attorney general of Missouri, as co-deputy director of the bureau. The move was seen internally as a vote of no-confidence in Mr. Bongino, who has alienated some inside the White House with his confrontational, self-promotional approach.
Mr. Bailey is also viewed as a potential replacement for Mr. Patel, whose frequent public missteps have earned the scorn of some top Trump advisers.
Regardless of Mr. Bongino’s future, the pipe bomb arrest may elevate his standing. He personally spearheaded the effort to review investigative files, and recruited a new team of investigators to pursue unexplored leads and missed clues.
His appearance at the Justice Department on Thursday had a valedictory, sentimental quality, as the intense and intensely online former Secret Service agent blushed through backslaps and birthday greetings in front of the cameras.
At the end of the news conference, Mr. Bongino, who only a year ago suggested the bureau was complicit in a cover-up, deflected credit from himself to his agents and other federal law enforcement officials who helped locate and arrest Mr. Cole.
“We had a great team,” he said.
Adam Sella contributed reporting.
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
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