The Dog That Hasn’t Barked in the D.C. Pipe Bomber Case

INSIDE: Tina Peters ... James Boasberg ... Rob Reiner

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A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Alleged Pipe Bomber Reportedly a Trump Supporter

It’s been a reasonable inference for more than five years now that whoever planted the pipe bombs at both national party headquarters on the eve of Congress’ certification of the 2020 presidential election was probably not someone who was excited that Joe Biden had won.

As the case languished, however, it bizarrely became the subject of a host of right-wing cover-up conspiracies — some touted by people who became top FBI officials in the Trump II presidency. So it was more than a little awkward when the Trump Justice Department finally announced an arrest in the case.

That may explain in part why after initially hailing the arrest, things have been rather muted from the White House and Justice Department. But it’s becoming increasingly hard not to think that the alleged pipe bomber’s affinities — for Trump and the 2020 Big Lie — may be playing a part in the Trump administration acting very much out of character by being … subdued about the case.

After the arrest of Brian Cole Jr. in connection with the pipe bombs, initial reports said he subscribed to the Big Lie that the election was stolen. Now the WSJ reports, citing unnamed sources, that Cole told investigators he supported Trump:

In a four-hour interview with investigators, Cole acknowledged placing the bombs, people familiar with the probe said. He expressed support for Trump and said he had embraced conspiracy theories regarding Trump’s 2020 election loss, the people said. … Cole hasn’t entered a plea, and his lawyer didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The other significant scoop in the WSJ story is about how the FBI finally broke the case open and ultimately arrested Cole — which indirectly offers another tell:

For four years, a tranche of cellphone data provided to the FBI by T-Mobile US sat on a digital shelf because investigators couldn’t figure out how to read it, people familiar with the matter said. The data turned out to be essential to cracking the case, the people said, a breakthrough that happened only recently when a tech-savvy law-enforcement officer wrote a new computer program that finally deciphered the information. That move led to the arrest of 30-year-old Brian Cole Jr. at his home in Northern Virginia, where he had been quietly living with his mother and other relatives.

The tell is that this is the kind of thing you’d expect any administration to tout loudly and proudly — unless, say, the alleged pipe bomber was a gung-ho supporter trying to do your bidding to halt the certification of your opponent’s victory over you. Normally in the early stages of the prosecution of a major case like this, most of the characterizations of the accused and his alleged crimes and the purported evidence come from leaks from the government, directly or indirectly.

But in this case, even the original charging documents were pretty thin given the significance of the case. They offered nothing on Cole’s motive, and the steady flow of damaging-to-the-defendant leaks you would expect — especially from this administration – has been virtually nonexistent. It’s the dog that hasn’t really barked.

Colorado Scoffs at Tina Peters Pardon

While Colorado swatted away President Trump’s purported pardon of former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters for her conviction on state charges, her attorney is taking an astonishingly broad view of the presidential pardon power.

Peter Ticktin, a former classmate of Trump’s at New York Military Academy, is pushing Trump toward a similiarly expansive view, the NYT reports:

Mr. Ticktin argued that Mr. Trump has the power to free Ms. Peters under an untested legal theory that the Constitution’s language allowing the president to pardon people for offenses “against the United States” applied not just to federal crimes but also to state-level charges.

“The President of the United States has the power to grant a pardon in any of the states of the United States,” Mr. Ticktin wrote in a letter to Mr. Trump last week that portrayed Ms. Peters as a political prisoner who could be a witness to investigations into the false claims that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump.

Never forget that this is really about Trump writing a revisionist history of Jan. 6 and his broader effort to subvert the 2020 election.

Jan. 6 Lives On and On and On …

Two other ongoing developments related to 2020 Big Lie revisionism:

• The DOJ Civil Rights Division sued Fulton County, Georgia, to obtain “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files from the 2020 General Election.” The county has so far resisted entreaties from the Trump DOJ for the 2020 ballots.

• The DOJ Civil Rights Division sued four Democratic-controlled states — Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Nevada — for not turning over their statewide voter registration lists.

Delaware USA Concedes Defeat

Julianne Murray, the purported interim U.S. attorney in Delaware, relinquished her claims to office in the wake of a Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision that Alina Habba was invalidly appointed as the U.S. attorney for New Jersey.

Murray, who was the chair of the Delaware Republican Party and had no prosecutorial experience when she was appointed U.S. attorney, had continued in the office past the November expiration of her 120-day term as interim U.S. attorney.

The federal judges in Delaware declined to extend her in the office but had not named a replacement. When they solicited applicants for her successor in September, it prompted an unusual public rebuke from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

9 DOJers Quit Over Trump Attack on UC System

A total of nine career DOJ attorneys resigned while under pressure from higher-ups to investigate alleged anti-semitism on the campuses of the University of California System, the LA Times reports. The newspapers findings echo a deeply reported piece by ProPublica and the Chronicle of Higher Education that zeros in on the Trump DOJ’s purported case against UCLA.

The Retribution: Jim Comey Edition

In an ancillary case to the effort to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly took the Trump DOJ to task for how it handled materials seized years ago from Columbia University law professor Daniel Richman. She ordered the seized materials returned to Richman.

The seized materials were key to the recently dismissed indictment of Comey and would be critical any effort to re-indict him. With that in mind, Kollar-Kotelly ordered the Justice Department to file one copy of the materials with the district court for the Eastern District of Virginia, which would potentially allow prosecutors to seek a new search warrant to access the materials.

Appeals Court Blocks Boasberg Contempt Inquiry

Ahead of live witness testimony set for today and tomorrow, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals late Friday issued an administrative stay that for the second time this year blocks the contempt of court inquiry by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in the original Alien Enemies Act case. The stay was granted by two Trump appointees, one of which was involved in the earlier decision to stymie Boasberg’s inquiry into who decided to defy his emergency orders blocking the AEA deportations in March.

The Undocumented Underground

TPM’s Hunter Walker: Underground Legal Clinics Offer a Lifeline to Migrants Facing Mass Deportation

Good Read

Greg Sargent: Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State

TSA Sharing Info With ICE

The NYT unearths how people like Babson College freshman Any Lucía López Belloza have ended up ensnared at airports before their flights:

Under the previously undisclosed program, the Transportation Security Administration provides a list multiple times a week to Immigration and Customs Enforcement of travelers who will be coming through airports. ICE can then match the list against its own database of people subject to deportation and send agents to the airport to detain those people.

TSA has not previously gotten involved in domestic criminal or immigration matters.

For Your Radar …

The federal trial of Wisconsin state Judge Hannah Dugan on charges of impeding an ICE arrest in her Milwaukee courthouse is set to begin today.

Trump Sued Over Vanity Ballroom Project

The National Trust for Historic Preservation filed a federal lawsuit in D.C. to block the construction of President Trump’s mammoth ballroom project until it goes through the proper approval process. The lawsuit comes too late to preserve the East Wing of the White House East Wing, which was demolished without public notice to make room for the gaudy event space that keeps mushrooming in size.

Worlds Apart

• Brown University: The initial person of interest in the Saturday night shooting that left two Brown students dead and nine others wounded was released last evening and the manhunt continues for the shooter.

• Bondi Beach: The father-son attackers who shot and killed 15 people at an open-air Hanukkah celebration were motivated by an ideology that is an “extreme perversion of Islam,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said.

Rob Reiner, 1947-2025

Michele Singer Reiner, Rob Reiner at SNL50: The Homecoming Concert at Radio City Music Hall on February 14, 2025 in New York, New York. (Photo by John Nacion/Variety via Getty Images)

The reported stabbing deaths of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer at their Brentwood home was a shocking end to an unspeakably violent weekend. The circumstances of their deaths will for a time (only for a short time, I hope) overshadow their civic and political work and his astonishing creative output:

Despite his remarkable body of work as a movie director, it was way into the 1990s before I could stop thinking of him solely for his TV acting. My first TPM post had an All in the Family reference, so it runs deep for me. He will always be Meathead.

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