The man charged with leaving pipe bombs outside the offices of the Democratic and Republican national committees in Washington has admitted to planting the explosives in 2021 and said he did so because he was frustrated by the U.S. political system, federal authorities said in a court filing Sunday.
Brian J. Cole, 30, told investigators that “something just snapped” in him “because he was unhappy with the response of political leaders on both sides of the political aisle to questions raised about the results of the 2020 election,” according to the filing, which asks a judge in U.S. District Court in Washington to keep Cole in jail pending his trial.
In the filing, called a detention memo, U.S. officials said Cole decided to plant the pipe bombs after learning about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a violent, three-decade conflict over British rule during which officials and political leaders were killed with improvised explosives.
“I really don’t like either party at this point,” Cole told investigators, according to the filing.
Cole, who lived at his mother’s home and worked for his father’s bail bondsman company in Northern Virginia, gave a detailed account of how he assembled the pipe bombs — making black powder from a list of ingredients in a video game, watching YouTube science videos, and hiding the materials in a closet to avoid detection — during an interview with the FBI that lasted more than an hour after his arrest Dec. 4, according to the filing.
Cole initially denied planting the explosives, then admitted to it after agents told him that lying to the FBI could be punishable as an additional crime, according to a prosecutor in U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office in Washington. Cole signed a written waiver of his right to remain silent, the filing says.
Attorneys for Cole did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. In a court filing Monday, the defense attorneys asked for copies of any self-incriminating statements Cole made to authorities. A court hearing on whether to detain or release Cole pending trial is set for Tuesday.
The pipe bombs were planted Jan. 5, 2021, a day before a riotous mob of supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol, forcing a delay in Congress’s certification of electoral votes from the 2020 election.
One device was found outside Democratic National Committee headquarters on South Capitol Street SE, the other outside Republican National Committee headquarters, a few blocks away. Both are on Capitol Hill.
The incident led to a protracted investigation during which conspiracy theories spread widely. Video of an unidentified individual near the scene played repeatedly in the news media. Pirro said after Cole’s arrest that agents painstakingly combed through hundreds of thousands of retail transactions until finally matching the parts found in the undetonated pipe bombs to Cole’s bank and credit card accounts.
Cole, of Woodbridge, Virginia, is charged with transporting and planting improvised explosive devices.
The memo describes the purchase of materials at local stores, including Lowe’s, Walmart and Home Depot that were used to make the bombs. A pound of sulfur was bought from Amazon in 2018, the memo says.
The memo quotes Cole as saying he was “pretty relieved” when he learned that the bombs did not explode, and added that he placed the devices at night because he did not wish to kill people. He told agents he never told anyone about the pipe bombs. After seeing himself on newscasts, the filing says, Cole discarded the additional bombmaking materials he had and began regularly wiping his smartphone of all data.
But investigators said Cole then resumed purchases of bomb components and began studying how to create potassium chlorate, which is commonly used in explosives.
Had they detonated, the bombs were capable of causing injury, the FBI said.
Cole’s actions “risked the lives not only of innocent pedestrians and office workers but also of law enforcement, first responders, and national political leaders who were inside of the respective party headquarters or drove by them on January 6, 2021, including the Vice President-elect [Kamala Harris] and Speaker of the House [Nancy Pelosi],” the filing says.
“In this sense, the defendant’s invocation of the Troubles in Northern Ireland is telling; bombings were used frequently throughout that period to kill officials and civilians for political purposes.”
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