The Northern Virginia man charged with planting pipe bombs outside the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican national committees in Washington on Jan. 5, 2021, signaled in a federal court filing this week that he might rely on a debunked conspiracy theory — that a Capitol Police officer planted the explosives — as his trial defense.
Brian Cole Jr. gave a detailed videotaped confession after waiving his right to remain silent, telling FBI agents upon his arrest in December that “I really don’t like either party at this point” and “something just snapped,” according to prosecutors. Cole later pleaded not guilty to an indictment charging him with transporting explosives across state lines and maliciously attempting to detonate them.
The case took an unusual turn Wednesday, when Cole’s defense attorneys submitted a court filing requesting permission to subpoena three people, including a Capitol Police officer who was on duty during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and was identified as the possible pipe bomber last year by the Blaze, a right-wing website, based on a “gait analysis” of her walking patterns.
The Blaze deleted that report after Cole’s arrest and replaced it with an editor’s note retracting the claim about the officer, Shauni Kerkhoff. But the underlying claims have continued to fuel conspiracy theories that the pipe bombs were an inside job by sinister government actors. Cole’s defense attorneys said they might present those claims to a jury.
“Mr. Cole maintains his innocence and preserves the right to present at trial that Ms. Kerkhoff — not Mr. Cole — placed the pipe bombs,” attorneys Alex Little, Mario Williams and John Shoreman wrote.
The bombs were planted the night before the insurrection. They were discovered in an alley behind the RNC’s offices and underneath a park bench near the DNC headquarters the next day, just as a mob of Trump’s supporters marched on the Capitol, several blocks away, in an attempt to impede Congress’s effort to certify Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election.
In their court filing, Cole’s attorneys included Kerkhoff’s home address and other details about her personal life, prompting a rebuke from the office of U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro. Prosecutors called it a brazen violation of a protective order from U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali, who is presiding over the case. The court filing was later sealed.
The protective order, which is standard in criminal cases, bars sensitive evidence from public view during pretrial proceedings, including “unique identifying information” and “information that may jeopardize witness security.”
Minutes after Cole’s filing was posted on the court’s public docket Wednesday, Kerkhoff’s lawyers received an email with the subject line “I’m armed and dangerous,” federal prosecutors said. The author of the note threatened to “shoot your client in [their] corrupt [expletive] face,” they said.
Assistant U.S. attorneys Jocelyn Ballantine and Charles R. Jones asked Ali to hold Cole’s attorneys in contempt. The prosecutors said they had “rarely encountered as brazen a violation of a protective order as occurred today, nor one so clearly intended to publicly harass and intimidate a witness.”
Kerkhoff was ruled out as a suspect after being investigated and interviewed by law enforcement officials, Ballantine and Jones said in a court filing. Kerkhoff, who now works as a security guard for the CIA, has retained one of the country’s leading defamation lawyers, Tom Clare. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Another attorney for Kerkhoff, Steve Bunnell, declined to comment. He previously told The Washington Post: “These shameful allegations are recklessly false, absurd, and defamatory. Ms. Kerkhoff categorically denies them.”
Cole’s attorneys conceded in a subsequent filing Thursday that Kerkhoff’s home address — and those of the two other witnesses included in their subpoena requests — should not appear in public court filings. But they argued that the other personal details about Kerkhoff were not covered by the protective order. Cole’s attorneys did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
The attorneys also have argued that Cole is covered by Trump’s blanket pardon for offenses related to the Capitol insurrection, even though he is accused of planting the explosives the day before and the pardon’s text says it applies to people who were prosecuted for actions taken “on January 6, 2021.”
“The Presidential Pardon at issue expressly commuted [Kenneth] Harrelson (a white male) for felonious conduct of which he engaged in on January 5, 2021 because that conduct was related to the events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021,” Cole’s attorneys argued, misspelling Kenneth Harrelson’s first name.
Harrelson, a member of the Oath Keepers, was not covered by the blanket pardon. His four-year sentence was commuted under a different section of Trump’s clemency grant that specifically named him and 13 other members of the Oath Keepers.
During the first two hours of his FBI interview in December, the 30-year-old Cole denied placing the pipe bombs and said he was a Trump supporter. After being told that lying to federal agents could be charged as an additional crime, Cole admitted that he planted the bombs out of frustration with both parties and “denied that his actions were directed toward Congress or related to the proceedings scheduled to take place on January 6,” prosecutors said.
In a statement to The Post on Thursday, Pirro said: “It is absurd to suggest that this exhaustive, deep-dive investigation conducted by the FBI and my office was done under the assumption that any pardon would apply. We do not deal in conspiracies — we deal in facts and evidence, and this case is the direct result of a meticulous and comprehensive investigation conducted by my office.”
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