Bulwark Takes - Inside The Blaze’s Pipe-Bomb Face-Plant

Episode Date: December 6, 2025

Sam Stein and Will Sommer take on The Blaze’s spectacular pipe-bomb fiasco—from the bogus gait analysis to the wrongly accused Capitol Police officer and the scramble to retract the story once the real suspect was arrested. They discuss how the piece got published, why it collapsed so fast,  and whether a brutal defamation fight is about to hit The Blaze hard.

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of all defamation suits at any moment. We're just kind of looking at Pacer. I'm sure you're fiercely refreshing. It has to do with the pipe bomb that was put down, or pipe bombs, I should say, on January 6th. Big breakthrough in the case came yesterday when it was announced that we caught the guy. It's been five years. We're going to talk about it in the second. But the reason we talked about defamation is because if people remember, Will wrote about this was a couple weeks ago. Yeah, a few weeks ago. Yeah, the Blaze had done incredibly scientific gate analysis and pinpointed the wrong person. The wrong fucking person, they pinpointed for the pipe bombs. Now it's a huge embarrassment. So I've been following this a little bit from afar because I've been doing

some other stuff. But Will, catch us up. What is going on here? So the pipe bomb is important. Let's just lay the groundwork. The pipe bomb is important to the right because they think it was basically like the spark that made January 6th happen. I mean, Dan Bongino said that this was a false flag operation. The FBI was covering it up. And so the blaze last month came out and said, well, it's probably this former Capitol police officer who works for the CIA. But now they are facing journalistic disaster because the FBI has arrested an actual suspect. It's number one, it's not a woman like the blaze said and it's not the same woman it's a totally different person it's a guy named brian cole and so now the blaze is facing a massive potential defamation suit

um because you know you can't just really in journalism did you go to j school sam i did actually yeah oh did they teach you that typically you shouldn't write articles saying someone's probably a terrorist if you don't really have evidence of that i missed that i missed that class probably but it It seems to make sense, yeah. This is like with the Boston bombing suspects, right? Like the New York Post put them splattered the wrong person on the front page. Exactly, exactly. So it's, this is a, it was kind of a crazy limb for them to get out on.

I mean, they, like you said, I wrote about this in False Flag. They, I really get into like what their supposed evidence was. I mean, they already had kind of a beef with this Capitol Police officer because I think she had fired pepper balls at the rioters. So they felt she was really unfair to the rioters. They had analyzed, I think, footage of her walking when she was playing in a college soccer game with footage of the bomber walking. And they said, well, you know, the gate analysis suggests she's a 96% match for the bomber. And to be clear, I mean, they were really not like discreet about this at all.

They didn't protect this person's identity because she hadn't been charged with anything. I mean, they splashed it out. They had her face. I mean, people were really going through her background. And the other thing I should say is, I mean, people, members of Congress, Annapolina Luna, Thomas Massey, got in. to this. They promoted the story. Ed Martin at DOJ. He said, pipe? Kind of like, maybe they call it. Yeah, but he erased, he erased the last P&E. Yes. Remember that? He took down his half the tweet, the tweet thread. Look, I would just say this. Like, I'm not trying to say,

you know, I don't know how the blaze operates. Let's put it that way. But normally, what you would do is you would, first of all, you wouldn't go on whatever the hell gate analysis is. Okay. And you would go to the FBI and you go to the DOJ and you'd say, hey, what do you think of this? Or like, can you comment on this? And maybe they would say we can't comment on ongoing investigations. But I would imagine one of them would have been like, or someone there would have been like, you know, you shouldn't do this. This is, this is not, you're going to look silly. Like, don't do this. The other thing is you would obviously go to the person you're accusing of being a terrorist. And you would try to get and touch them and be like, you know, we're going

to do this. And I'm assuming maybe they tried and couldn't get. in touch of this person, but I'm assuming they should have made a good, good faith to effort. That person likely would have said, you're wrong. And she came up with, was it a good, it was an alibi, right? She had actually an alibi by where she was. CBS News reported that she had video of her playing with puppies, which is kind of the perfect alibi. But somehow she was playing with puppies at the moment the bomb was planted the night before.

And so basically, like, yeah. And so I guess they said, well, you know, here is, I don't know. how, you know, I don't know if it, like, paned two o'clock or something to really prove it. But basically, like, here I am, playing with puppies. It's January 5th, and it's 1130 p.m. They had this alibi, and this came up because the Office of Director of National Intelligence run by Tulsi Gabbard, it seems to have gotten wind that this Blaze story was coming. And they told the CIA, where this person is down employed, they said, hey, looks like she's the pipe bomber. And so there was already this kind of investigation, and she had been able to prove her

innocence. So it's, it's truly crazy. And the Blaze really dug in. I mean, even some of the kind of January 6th reporters on the right, people like Julie Kelly were saying, I don't know, this looks pretty fake to me. They stuck it out till the end, till this new arrest. So what's the reaction been from the site and from this person's, the wrongfully accused lawyer? Yeah. So first, in terms of the blaze, I mean, they were kind of throughout the day. I mean, look, at the point where another suspect gets arrested, it's over for you. It's done. But they were, there was a point where, where the FBI spokesman was even, he was, the reporter on this story, Steve Baker, who by the way, was himself a January 6 defendant who was pardoned. He was, he tweeted something about like a, like a song or

something, kind of like jab. And then the FBI spokesman was, you know, what song are you listening to now, buddy, you know? Oh, God. Big time to pay up. So the FBI turned on Steve Baker. Gotcha. Okay. Yes. Yes. And so, so the Blaze kind of throughout the day was, oh, well, we, we noted that this guy was arrested, but our sources still believe that it was this woman. And then by, then they retracted it, but they kept the story up. And then now by this morning, they've totally deleted the story from the internet. In terms of the woman's lawyer, I can't hold on. I got to pause for a second. I got to pause. Bullwark takes is sponsored by Zock Talk. I don't know about you guys, but my entire social feed is filled with different health trends like cottage cheese as a whole

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appointments and go to Zocdoc.com slash bulwarktakes to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C dot com slash bulwark ticks. Zocktok.com slash bulwarkticks. I cannot imagine like the internal editorial conversations around this one. I mean, like, I would be in a meeting and I would be like, you know, I'd have, you know, I'd have to have a bottle of bourbon or something. I would just be like, what do we do? Do we take it down? Do we like, do we write through it? I mean, they must have been flipping out, flipping out. It's crazy. Yeah. I mean, as you said, you know personally what that's something like that might be like. I mean, it's crazy. The, you know, I don't know. I don't know personally. I don't know personally. I don't know personally. Sorry. Just to be clear, I do not know personally what that would be like. I don't know why Will said that. That's defamation right there. From an editorial perspective, you can imagine.

No, I've never been in a situation like that. That's the kind of thing you're always doing, Sarah. We all know this. But because, you know, some of these things like we've had, you know, for example, when Infowars said Pizza Gate was real or that Fox News said, you know, Smartmatic or Dominion's told the election, there wasn't like a really definitive moment per se that that was disproven. I mean, it was, those things were fake. But you didn't have a situation as resound. as a different guy getting arrested and potentially now going to trial. Right. And so, I mean, they really... The closest, again, is the Boston Marathon Bombers. This is the closest proximity to this. Yeah.

So it's a disaster for them. And it looks like it'll probably only get worse. Her lawyer has been pretty tight-lipped. He issued a statement to the Washington Post saying, you know, it was totally fake. That really had the language suggested there's a defamation lawsuit coming. And then yesterday, I was on Jake Tapper's show on CNN. And I basically said, you know, it's payday time for this former capital police officer. There's going to be a big lawsuit.

And her lawyer said, you know, I don't have any comment, but I did appreciate your, your remarks on Jake Tapper. So I do suggest, I think that there is something. It's quite the hint. Yes. Maybe he just, maybe he just liked my analysis overall. That could be the other, the other. Your verbal analysis, now your gate analysis. This morning, about two hours before we taped, NBC reports, shout out to Ryan J. Riley, friend of the site, that the man who was charged with planting the bombs, this guy, Brian Cole, is cooperated with the FBI, but more significantly that he believed the conspiracy theories around the 2020 election, according to, this is Warren's going to people familiar with the matter.

This is, you know, I don't want to, I think this is kind of like a seismic type newsbreak in that for years, there's been a theory pushed by Dan Bongino, among others, on the right, that whoever put down the pipe bombs was, it was an inside job, that they were trying to frame the January 6th rioters as, you know, terrorists. And Bongino's been, like, beating that drum nonstop until he became a deputy director at the FBI. If this is true, if this guy Brian Cole is saying, in fact, he was someone who believed that the election was stolen from Trump, that's just an incredible development. And I'm sure Bongino will figure out something to say and others will too. But, boy, that seems like a big deal to me. Well, and, you know, Cash Patel just said after the arrest that the Biden administration,

the FBI was covering it up. And so now it's coming out potentially that this guy was a Trump conspiracy theorist. You know, it really unravels a lot of the ideas about what the motivations behind the bombing were. It's funny to look at it now and you say, well, maybe, yeah, the Occam's razor would be on the day that all the other crimes were committed by Trump supporters. Why would this one not also be committed by an election conspiracy theorist deporting Trump? And, you know, I'm sure we'll hopefully learn more about this guy's motivations. I think it's a bit interesting that at the press conference about this, they really revealed very little. about his motivations.

Oh, no, they refused to answer questions, right? They were like, they just didn't answer, yeah. So I think there's, hopefully there's more to come in court or if he's cooperating, I guess I'll have a guilty plea. But as you said, I think it's seismic. I mean, this has been one of the main narratives of right wing media since January 6th. And really very exculpatory towards the actual rioters themselves because they're saying, this distracted capital police, this made them so mad at the rioters.

And if it weren't for the pipe bomb, maybe this would have never happened. And so in that way, I mean, if this guy is himself an election fraud conspiracy theorist, it really, you know, it undermines a lot of that. Well, I just want to, you know, I always criticize other people for jumping the gun on these things. Like, you don't know what you don't know. The first impressions can often be wrong. So I'm not, I want to just urge caution when going off of reports about motivations and things like that. Ryan's a really, you know, good reporter. So I trust what he says.

But let's wait and see, you know, this has been so central to the, to. pushback on all the January 6th prosecutions that, of course, the Occam's razor explanation was always that this person was actually a participant, not someone trying to, you know, frame them. So, but we'll see. All right. So where do we go from here? What's the, put a flag down. What's the future for the blaze here?

Well, for the blaze, I think they may be cooked. I mean, they're not exactly, it's not like a Fox News situation where they can really kind of check for $780 million or whatever the Dominion settlement was. and walk away relatively unscathed. I mean, I think, you know, Glenn Beck was already distancing himself from the site beforehand. He's building an AI, George Washington. You know, I think they've been trying to do a reinvention there. But, I mean, even they got, they got that little Nick Fuentes clone, right?

Right. They have the Nick Fuentes clone, who I wrote about as well. People can read about that. I think the challenge for the blazes, I mean, even a settlement or a judgment of a couple million dollars, which I think this would definitely clear, is, you know, life-threatening to them. I mean, they're still a pretty big voice in. conservative media. I think in terms of the pipe bomber, though, I do want to raise one possibility, which is that the January 6th pardon would also clear him. Yeah. So that was, we were talking about

that on Slack today. It's an interesting theory. I'm a little bit skeptical of it, but explain the theory and then I'll say why I'm skeptical. Sure. So the pardon that Trump issued for the rioters applies to all crimes committed on or around the Capitol on January 6th. And maybe January 5th, I think just January 6th. And so, you know, arguably, I mean, the RNC and the DNC where the bombs were planted, I mean, that's near the Capitol. Here's why I'm skeptical. Unless Trump's a total political nihilist, the idea that you would just say, yeah, you're

right, the pardon applies to this guy, too. Now, they'll put out some clarifying language and say, the DOJ is going to be like, no, absolutely not. This was just related to, you know, what happened on January 6th. So they'll find some legal way to sort of get around it. It's an interesting theory, but there's no universe in practice where they're just going to let it fly, right? I don't know. I think once the pardon's out there, you know, I think this administration's going to say, you know what, you're right. Like the pipe bomber also deserves the part of it. Well, it is a little unfair to the pipe bomber, right? Because why is it that all the other, well, all the other crimes we saw in January 6th, the fighting with cops, the things we talked about for so many years afterwards, that all that stuff was fine. And in fact, Trump, you know, issue.

a clarifying pardon to help one January 6th guy out on his specific related charge that apparently wasn't covered. But this, the pipe bombs that didn't go off. This is the bridge too far. You know, because it's a fucking bomb. Well, the pipe bombs cause less violent damage than a lot of the other actions on January 6th. You're crazy, dude. I'm willing to put money on this one.

I mean, no doubt his lawyers, Brian Cole's lawyers are going to try to use this. All right. I'll see you on Polly Barcett. We'll put on the. Yeah. Put your money where the mouth is. Bet on Paul. I'm sure Polly Market has some mods here. Okay. Well, we'll revisit this one. And I know you're, well, I want to, actually, I'm going to hold you to it. You're writing about this for Monday. Sorry, you just are. This is a seismic moment. I can't miss it. He can't miss it. So everyone sign up for false flags. You can get Will's written analysis in addition to this video analysis. Will, thanks so much, buddy. Appreciate it.

What if this was someone in your family that had a chronic illness that they could not get away from? Millions of Americans live with a disease that has no cure. I was diagnosed with a rare form of sarcoma. The most immediate findings indicated that I should lose my leg. But it ended up taking four clinical trials in 25 years to get me to this point. Cures are within reach. If we invest in funding for life-saving medical. research that's needed to find them.

Even if they're unsuccessful in my treatment that they will have learned from my treatment that will be able to allow others to stand on my shoulders to be able to be helped. Join the fight for Cures. Tell your elected representatives to support American medical research. Visit United For Cures.org slash action to send a letter today, paid for by United For Cures Action.