The man accused of planting pipe bombs outside the Democratic and Republican national committee headquarters on Jan. 5, 2021, told investigators that he believed that the 2020 election had been tampered with and he felt “someone needs to speak up,” the Justice Department said in a court filing Sunday.
The Justice Department said that over the course of 90 minutes, Brian Cole, who was arrested in Virginia on Dec. 4, “walked the interviewing agents in detail through his construction, transportation, and planting of the pipe bombs.”
Cole, 30, has yet to enter a plea. He has been charged with transplanting and planting the two IEDs at the DNC and RNC headquarters, neither of which exploded.
Cole is due in court on Tuesday for a detention hearing.
According to the court documents, Cole told investigators that he wasn’t targeting the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. Supporters of President Trump stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, interrupting the counting of the electoral votes and delaying the official validation of the 2020 election results. Mr. Trump has falsely claimed that he won the 2020 election.
Cole allegedly told investigators that he disliked both political parties and didn’t consider himself a “political person.” But after the 2020 election, “when it first seemed like something was wrong” and “stuff started happening,” he began following the issue closely on YouTube and Reddit and felt “bewildered,” the court documents said.
“I didn’t agree with what people were doing, like just telling half the country that they — that their — that they just need to ignore it,” Cole told investigators, according to the court documents. “I didn’t think that was a good idea, so I went to the protest.”
Cole allegedly told investigators that “someone up top” needed to “speak up” if people “feel that, you know, something as important as voting in the federal election is being tampered with, is being, you know, being — you know, relegated null and void.” Cole said he felt the “people up top, public figures,” should not “ignore[e] people’s grievances” or call them “conspiracy theorists,” “bad people,” “Nazis,” or “fascists.” Instead, “if people feel that their votes are like just being thrown away, then . . . at the very least someone should address it,” the court documents said.
Prosecutors said Cole told them that he bought the bomb-making materials between 2018 and 2020. He told investigators the idea to use pipe bombs came from his interest in history, specifically The Troubles in Northern Ireland, in which pipe bombs were frequently used over a three-decade period of conflict between Protestants and Catholics.
According to the court documents, when asked about his motive, Cole said “something just snapped” after “watching everything, just everything getting worse.”
Investigators also say Cole told them he wasn’t thinking of the reaction if the devices detonated, although he hoped there would be news about it. He said he was “pretty relieved” that the bombs didn’t explode.
Cole’s attorneys on Monday asked that all evidence be turned over sooner rather than later, including any copies of an alleged confession. His attorneys on Sunday also asked for Tuesday’s hearing to be not just a detention hearing but also a probable cause hearing.
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