Federal prosecutors tore apart an accused pipe bomber’s bid to pin his attack on January 5, 2021, on a cleared Capitol Police officer.
On Friday, the Department of Justice filed an opposition in D.C. federal court that urged the judge to reject a renewed motion by Brian Cole. The motion from Cole demanded subpoenas for former officer Shauni Kerkhoff, whom online conspiracy theorists have baselessly branded “the real pipe bomber,” the court document reads.
The FBI ran down the claim “as it did many others, and found it to be baseless,” prosecutors wrote. Its investigation “yielded zero evidence connecting Kerkhoff in any way” to the bombs.
Prosecutors said the subpoenas “fail the Nixon test at every turn,” referring to the Supreme Court’s three-part test requiring subpoenaed evidence to be relevant, admissible and specific. The requested subpoenas “utterly fail” that test and amount to a “classic fishing expedition,” prosecutors wrote.
Cole, by contrast, “confessed to the crimes during a videorecorded interview” and kept bomb components plus searches including “how to make a pipe bomb.” Kerkhoff was “exonerated,” home in Falls Church with her boyfriend and their dog as Cole planted the devices.
Prosecutors said Cole never offered any “nexus” linking Kerkhoff to the crime, which was the threshold for blaming a third party, and that the FBI investigated Kerkhoff only because of a now-retracted story by The Blaze.
The defense leaned on a polygraph test that they said Kerkhoff failed. Prosecutors said the defense was relying on a “misleading and context-free assertion” from an exam that ended after midnight. The filing also flagged the “unsettling” fact that three of Cole’s lawyers are now part of the legal defense for The Blaze journalists who spread the theory in a defamation suit Kerkhoff brought.
The subpoenas Cole sought were “not a good faith effort to obtain relevant and admissible evidence not otherwise procurable,” prosecutors warned. “They are a gambit by the defense to fuel baseless conspiracy theories targeting [Kerkhoff], an innocent person.”
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