Apparently they’re blaming the January 6 insurrection on a police officer, later turned CIA who planted pipe bombs to rile up the crowd and make them seem more dangerous? Identity “revealed” by the blaze calling it “the biggest scandal and conspiracy in American history.”
www.thebulwark.com
The Blaze’s Pipe-Bomb Bombshell Appears to Bomb
The right-wing outlet claimed to solve the Jan. 6th pipe-bomb mystery. Things quickly looked less certain.
EARLY SATURDAY MORNING, the Blaze published the most hyped investigation from a right-wing media outlet in recent memory—an exposé on what it claimed was the likely identity of the January 6th pipe bomber.
In the Blaze’s telling, a female former Capitol Police officer who joined the CIA shortly after January 6th was “a forensic match” for the individual caught on camera footage the night before. The article, which included the woman’s name and several pictures of her, purported to be buttressed by “gait analysis” comparing the ex-officer to videos of the bomber.
The article’s claims seemed like the first major development in a mystery that has befuddled Washington for years. They were quickly picked up by leading Republicans, including Trump appointee Kari Lake and several Republican members of Congress. Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), the chair of the House’s new January 6th subcommittee, promoted the story on social media, as did Rep. Thomas Massie(R-Ky.). Rep. Anna Paulina Luna declared on X that “a capitol police officer placed a pipe bomb at the RNC on J6,” adding that the Blaze story was proof that Republicans would “all be in the gulag” if not for Trump.
The mystery has loomed especially large for conservatives, who see the FBI’s failure to catch the perpetrator as proof that the laying of the bombs—and perhaps the Capitol riot itself—was an inside job orchestrated by federal law enforcement to entrap Trump supporters. In the most common version of this theory, the devices were a ruse meant to distract Capitol Police and ratchet up tensions between law enforcement and pro-Trump protesters right before the riot began. In the most nefarious version, the bombs were meant to further portray the protesters as violent, reckless, and criminal.
The Blaze story is unique for two reasons. For one, Baker was himself a January 6th defendant; he pleaded guilty to his role in the riot late last year. Before his March sentencing could take place, Trump ordered the mass-pardon of January 6th participants, which included Baker.
But the actual reporting was not exactly definitive. To make their case against the former Capitol Police officer, Baker and coauthor Joseph M. Hanneman focused on a comparison between the officer’s gait, some of which was apparently captured in years-old footage of her playing soccer, and footage of the pipe-bomb suspect from the night of January 5, 2021. Instead of using suspect footage released by the FBI, however, the Blaze claims it used footage “from another source” the article doesn’t name.
Critically, the Blaze didn’t release an actual video comparison or significant details of the gait analysis. Instead, it draws on the work of a man the Blaze called a “video sleuth,” a little-known X user named Armitas whose online profile image is a picture from the 1998 role-playing video game Xenogears.
The story is bolstered by claims that the FBI tied the woman’s neighbor to a vehicle and subway card connected to the setting of the bomb. Former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin, who has become a right-wing media personality in his own right after leaving the bureau, is quoted in the article as saying he worked on a surveillance detail monitoring the woman’s neighbor in the aftermath of January 6th.


