The man accused of planting pipe bombs in Washington, D.C. ahead of the January 6, 2021 Capitol protest reportedly confessed to the crime and told the FBI that he believed President Donald Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election — though his family’s company had lost a lawsuit they filed against the Trump administration just weeks before the bombs were placed.
Brian Cole Jr., 30, was arrested by FBI officials at his family home in Northern Virginia on Thursday before confessing to placing the devices, which did not explode, outside the Republican and Democrat national party headquarters near the U.S. Capitol on January 5, 2021, sources told MS NOW.
The two people familiar with Cole Jr.’s FBI interview also told the outlet that the suspect said he was a Trump supporter who thought he had actually beat then-President-elect Joe Biden, though his social media posts appearing to “express anarchist leanings” have made determining a motive complicated for investigators, the outlet reported.
“It’s not yet clear what the drivers were,” an anonymous law enforcement official said.
Investigators have not found any evidence that the Virginia man colluded with any militant groups or other Trump supporters who breached the Capitol building the day after the bombs were planted, the sources added.
While Cole Jr. reportedly claimed he supported Trump, the bail bonds company that he worked for and is owned by his father, Brian Cole Sr., sued the Trump administration over policies regarding illegal immigrants.
The father and son worked as bail bondsmen under multiple different company names, including StateWide Bonding, Inc., which was aimed at helping illegal immigrants avoid jail, according to records obtained by the Daily Wire.
One of “several” of StateWide’s lawsuits was filed in 2018 against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and administration officials including then-acting ICE Director Tom Homan. The company complained that it was being treated unfairly when its clients failed to show up to required court dates.
“Hundreds of Plaintiffs’ clients fail to appear because Defendants fail to (1) provide said person with a specified date, time, and location to appear in court,” the complaint stated. “Then, only after the subject immigrant fails to appear, these Defendants expect Plaintiffs to find the person in less than 10 days (many times less than 48 hours), or suffer the penalty of paying the sum total of millions of dollars.”
On November 10, 2020 — less than two months before Cole Jr. allegedly planted the pipe bombs — the U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C. sided with the Trump administration.
In November 2021, Cole Sr. teamed up with left-wing attorney Ben Crump in an attempt to “sic the Biden Department of Justice (DOJ)” on a Tennessee prosecutor who had raised ethical concerns over his bail bonds company’s practices, the Daily Wire reported.
Crump, who has represented the families of George Floyd and Trayvon Martin, held a press conference with Cole Sr., to accuse Assistant District Attorney John Zimmerman of racial discrimination.
Cole Sr., who is black, said Zimmerman spread rumors about him to hurt another one of his businesses, called Free At Last Bail Bonding Company.
“He’s defamed me, he’s called my insurance company,” he said at the press conference, according to a local news report. “We hope that the Department of Justice can come in and do a brief investigation, because what we see and what we’ve seen is a lot of questionable acts that Mr. Zimmerman has demonstrated towards minority-owned companies.”
“The Department of Justice exists to make sure that no citizen is discriminated against, even corporate citizens,” said Crump. “They want to make sure that their business is not infringed upon because it is a minority-owned business.”
In April of this year, a Tennessee appeals court found that sanctions against the bonds company were appropriate due to “repeated misconduct,” the Daily Wire reported.
The court affirmed that Cole Sr. had “lied about having never filed for bankruptcy or having other financial problems, when he in fact had filed for bankruptcy twice and had tax liens against him,” the publication noted.
Court documents obtained by the outlet also state that the younger Cole started buying parts to make bombs in May 2019, well before the fallout from the 2020 election results.
Cole Jr. has retained attorney John Shoreman to represent him, according to court documents seen by MS NOW.
The suspect is set to appear for a detention hearing on December 15, the outlet noted.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
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