Federal prosecutors dismantled an accused pipe bomber's effort to blame his January 5, 2021, attack on a Capitol Police officer who has already been cleared of any involvement.

The devices at the center of the case — pipe bombs placed outside the Democratic and Republican national committee headquarters near the U.S. Capitol the night before the January 6 riot — went unexplained for more than four years, making the investigation one of the FBI's most closely watched unsolved cases before Cole was charged in April 2025.

On Friday, the Department of Justice filed an opposition in D.C. federal court urging the judge to reject a renewed motion by Brian Cole. The filing delivered a fresh embarrassment to MAGA figures who spent months promoting the debunked theory that former Capitol Police officer Shauni Kerkhoff was the real bomber (court filing).

Chief among them is Ed Martin, the "Stop the Steal" organizer who until this month served as the DOJ's pardon attorney. Hours after the filing posted, Lawfare senior editor Anna Bower dared him to publicize the exoneration as loudly as he once amplified the accusation. "Hey Ed, are you going to tweet this one out too?" she wrote (X post), linking the document and quoting its finding that the FBI turned up "zero evidence connecting Kerkhoff in any way" to the bombs.

Cole's motion demanded subpoenas for Kerkhoff, whom online conspiracy theorists have baselessly branded "the real pipe bomber," according to the court document.

The FBI pursued 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 argued the subpoenas "fail the Nixon test at every turn," referring to the Supreme Court's three-part standard in United States v. Nixon requiring subpoenaed evidence to be relevant, admissible and specific. The requested subpoenas "utterly fail" that test and amount to a "classic fishing expedition," they wrote.

Cole, by contrast, "confessed to the crimes during a videorecorded interview" and kept bomb components along with searches including "how to make a pipe bomb." Kerkhoff, prosecutors noted, was "exonerated" — she was at home in Falls Church with her boyfriend and their dog when Cole planted the devices.

Prosecutors said Cole never offered any "nexus" linking Kerkhoff to the crime, the threshold required for blaming a third party, and that the FBI investigated Kerkhoff only because of a now-retracted story by The Blaze.

Bower's jab pointed back to Martin's role in boosting the story. As The Blaze's gait-analysis claim went viral in November 2025, Martin posted and quickly deleted a cryptic "P-I-P-E" thread and told an interviewer he had spoken with FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino about the case. At the time, however, Martin stopped short of naming Kerkhoff and said the DOJ had "not identified" her as the suspect.

The defense had leaned on a polygraph test they said Kerkhoff failed. Prosecutors countered that the defense relied on a "misleading and context-free assertion" from an exam that ended after midnight — and polygraph results are generally inadmissible in court under long-standing evidentiary rules.

The filing also flagged as "unsettling" the 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."