Within hours of being arrested in December, the young Virginia man accused of planting two pipe bombs in Washington on the night before a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, gave a detailed confession to investigators.
Speaking to the F.B.I., the man, Brian J. Cole Jr., said that even though he was not a political person, he felt the need to “speak up” after he began to suspect that the 2020 election, in which President Trump was defeated, had been “tampered with.”
But despite that admission of guilt, Mr. Cole’s lawyers signaled on Wednesday that they would take his defense in a strange and unexpected new direction. They said in court papers that they might seek to blame the bombs on a former Capitol Police officer whose name first surfaced in a right-wing media account and who was briefly investigated by the F.B.I. before the case against her was closed.
The suggestion by the lawyers that they would adopt a counternarrative about the pipe bomb case and intended to pin the incident on the former officer, Shauni Kerkhoff, was the latest twist in an investigation that has been plagued from the start by misfires, missed opportunities and multiple conspiracy theories.
The belief that the pipe bombs were part of an inside job has long endured among fervent Trump loyalists. Many have claimed that the riot at the Capitol was not what it appeared to be — a violent effort to disrupt Mr. Trump’s electoral defeat — but rather a shadowy conspiracy by government operatives to discredit the Trumpist movement.
The case against Ms. Kerkhoff was especially tantalizing to Mr. Trump’s supporters given that after she left the Capitol Police, she went to work as a security guard for the C.I.A., drawing a flavor of intelligence agency intrigue into the story. The account about her involvement with the bombs first appeared in November in an article in The Blaze, a right-wing outlet run by the conservative pundit Glenn Beck. Its author, Steve Baker, claimed to have identified her as the bomber by using a computer analysis of her walking patterns.
But within days of the article’s publication, the account was rebutted not only by top F.B.I. officials, but also by Ms. Kerkhoff’s lawyer, who claimed there was video of her at home with her dog when the bombs were being planted. The Blaze ultimately retracted the article, although Mr. Baker, an independent journalist who was prosecuted — and pardoned by Mr. Trump — after entering the Capitol on Jan. 6, has never given up on his account.
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Despite such obstacles, however, Mr. Cole’s lawyers suggested in their court papers that they might use this alternate theory of the case in an effort to fight the charges.
“Mr. Cole maintains his innocence,” they wrote, “and preserves the right to present at trial that Ms. Kerkhoff — not Mr. Cole — placed the pipe bombs.”
In their papers, which were taken down from a public court database and refiled under seal shortly after being submitted in Federal District Court in Washington, the lawyers revealed new details about the F.B.I.’s short-lived investigation of Ms. Kerkhoff, which began around the time that Mr. Baker’s article was published.
The papers said investigators interviewed not only Ms. Kerkhoff, but also her boyfriend and her dog walker. They claimed that the F.B.I. sent surveillance footage of Ms. Kerkhoff walking to a podiatrist — “likely for a gait analysis” — and reviewed the video footage of her with her dog purportedly taken the night before the Capitol attack.
Moreover, the lawyers said that Ms. Kerkhoff failed a polygraph examination in which she was asked if she had placed the pipe bombs. The polygraph examiner, the papers said, took note of Ms. Kerkhoff’s “very controlled reaction to the news of her failing the polygraph and seemingly rehearsed responses to examiner’s questions.”
The F.B.I. formally closed its inquiry into Ms. Kerkhoff on Jan. 6, the papers said, about a month after Mr. Cole had been charged. Her lawyer, Steve Bunnell, declined to comment.
The claims about Ms. Kerkhoff are not the first defense theory that Mr. Cole’s lawyers have offered on behalf of their client. Last month, they filed a motion to dismiss the charges against Mr. Cole, arguing that he should be covered by Mr. Trump’s sweeping grant of clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people who took part in the Capitol attack.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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