The Virginia man arrested this month on charges of placing two pipe bombs in Washington on the night before a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has given a detailed confession, according to court papers released on Sunday night.
In the public first hint at a motive in the case, the documents said that the man, Brian J. Cole Jr., felt he needed to “speak up” after he began to suspect that the 2020 election, in which President Trump was defeated, had been “tampered with.”
The papers, filed by the Justice Department in Federal District Court in Washington, gave an extensive description of Mr. Cole’s initial interview with the F.B.I. after his arrest.
At first, the government’s filing said, Mr. Cole denied planting the bombs outside the Republican and Democratic Party headquarters on the eve of the Capitol attack. But the filing said he admitted to doing so after agents displayed an image captured from surveillance cameras that they said showed him in a hooded sweatshirt carrying a backpack on the same route the bomber took that night.
“The interviewing agents reminded the defendant that lying to them was an additional criminal offense and asked the defendant again whether he was the individual on the surveillance video,” prosecutors said in the filing. “This time, the defendant paused for approximately 15 seconds, placed his head face down on the table, and answered, ‘yes.’”
The government’s assertion that Mr. Cole confessed to planting the bombs came just two days before he was scheduled to appear in court for a hearing to determine his bail. In their papers, federal prosecutors asked that Mr. Cole remain in custody as he awaits trial. His lawyers, who say he has severe autism, have not yet filed their own court papers laying out their views on their client’s pretrial detention.
The question of who planted the pipe bombs on the night before the Capitol was attacked has long stood as a kind of Rorschach test for wider views about the events of Jan. 6.
For years, conspiracy theorists have seized on the pipe bomb case, alleging that shadowy government forces had planted the explosives as a distraction to make it easier for the Capitol to be stormed, in an effort to ultimately blame the breach on Mr. Trump and his supporters.
The arrest of Mr. Cole, who has no apparent connections to the government, clearly contradicted those conspiracy theories, even though they had long been promoted by some of the very same F.B.I. officials unveiling a breakthrough in the case this month. Chief among those officials was Dan Bongino, the bureau’s deputy director, who accused the F.B.I. of covering up the pipe bomb case when he was working as a podcaster. Mr. Bongino recently announced that he was resigning from his post as the bureau’s No. 2 official.
In his interview with federal agents, Mr. Cole insisted that he had never been “an openly political person,” the court papers released on Sunday said. But he also told investigators that as he began to follow the 2020 presidential race, he started to feel that if “something as important as voting in the federal election is being tampered with,” then “someone needs to speak up.” Mr. Trump repeatedly claimed without evidence that there was fraud in the results.
The papers said that Mr. Cole had told the F.B.I. that “the people up top,” including “people on both sides,” should not ignore the grievances of ordinary citizens or call them “conspiracy theorists,” “bad people,” “Nazis” or “fascists.”
On a motive behind his actions, he said “something just snapped” after “watching everything, just everything getting worse,” according to the documents. He added that he wanted to do something “to the parties” because “they were in charge.”
During his interview, Mr. Cole said “he was not really thinking about how people would react when the bombs detonated, although he hoped there would be news about it.” He claimed that he was “pretty relieved” when, in fact, the devices did not explode, asserting that he had specifically planted them at night because he did not want to see people get killed.
Before the arrest of Mr. Cole, the pipe bomb case had bedeviled the F.B.I. for years as agents chased a panoply of suspects and false leads. Investigators were finally able to crack the case after a bureau technician successfully gained access to cellphone data that implicated Mr. Cole and was previously thought to be corrupted.
Once he confessed to planting the bombs, the court papers said, Mr. Cole explained to investigators how he did it. According to the papers, he said that he had made the explosive powder in the devices using “charcoal, Lilly Miller sulfur dust and potassium nitrate that he purchased from Lowe’s.”
He mixed these ingredients in a Pyrex bowel, the papers said, and used “a spoon or measuring cup” to pour the powder into the bombs. Mr. Cole told the F.B.I. that he had learned to make the powder from a video game that listed the ingredients and had also “viewed various science-related videos on YouTube to assist him.”
In an affidavit filed when Mr. Cole was arrested, F.B.I. agents also said that they were able to use his cellphone to track his location on the night the bombs were set, then compare it with surveillance footage of the path the bomb planter took on the evening of Jan. 5.
Agents also viewed bank accounts and credit card records to track purchases from local stores, including Home Depot, where he picked up components of the weapons, including galvanized piping, nine-volt batteries, electrical wire, steel wool and white kitchen timers.
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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