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This week, the FBI released video footage of their key suspect in the vaunted “pipe bombs planted at DNC and GOP offices” plot from the MAGA Capitol protests of 1/6. Much is riding on this “pipe bomb” plot being legit, because the “armed insurrection” narrative is falling apart without it. 

Just last week, the FBI confessed to Congress – and not without prodding from Senator Ron Johnson – that no guns had actually been recovered or confiscated on Capitol grounds. That admission corroborates the thorough review by AmGreatness’s Julie Kelly of more than 200 DOJ charging documents, and whose conclusion went completely unmentioned by either FBI Director Chris Wray or incoming Attorney General Merrick Garland in their fire-and-brimstone assessments of the deadly threat MAGA protesters posed that day.

With the “Guns at Capitol” meme down, only two serious, terroristic plots implicating MAGA on 1/6 remain. One is the “guns & bombs stashed in cars and outside the city” plots, principally related to the Oath Keepers, which has been the subject of an exhaustive forthcoming Revolver News investigation; the other is this eagerly-hyped “pipe bomb” plot.

So this “pipe bomb” plot better be real, and it better be the authentic act of a genuine Trump supporter, or basically all they have left is the strange case of the “Oath Keepers” – and we will tell you in advance that is not looking pretty for The Narrative or the FBI. 

The Tale of The Tape

Let’s take a deeper look at this week’s FBI roadshow. More than two full months after the event in question, after circulating hundreds of high-resolution close-ups of MAGA Moms and teenage girls, the public finally gets two minutes of grainy, low-res source footage that the FBI surely had access to within days – or at most weeks – of 1/6:

The video release came with tremendous FBI fanfare. A full-length Twitter thread, a formal press release plus distributions on YouTube and Facebook, and even personal, heartfelt entreaties in an almost selfie-style video from FBI Washington Field Office Assistant Director in Charge Steven D’Antuono to the public to please, please help us.

If the name Steven D’Antuono sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Readers might recall a must-read Revolver Exclusive from months ago detailing how D’Antuono appears to have helped frame the MAGA movement from his own local Detroit FBI Field Office, overseeing his Federal agents’ Infiltration-Incitement-Indictment sting operation of loners and losers during the so-called “Gretchen Witmer Kidnapping” plot. Then, with only a year of leadership in Detroit, D’Antuono was strangely and immediately promoted to the FBI Washington Field Office right before the election.

In the Whitmer Plot, once you get past the screaming headlines implying MAGA crazies plotted to storm the Michigan Capitol building and kidnap the Governor, you find that more than 25% of the plot’s participants were all FBI operatives (at least two undercover informants, and at least two undercover agents) who assumed key leadership roles in inciting a bunch of mentally unstable people in a Facebook chat group to do something stupid.

Just this week, it leaked out from court filings that the FBI has now indicted one of their own Federal informants – a third one, apparently – who the FBI originally paid to infiltrate the group in the first place.

If we find out months from now that one or more of the violent “terror” plots associated with 1/6 were actually an Infiltration-Incitement-Indictment story like the Whitmer Plot, will history be rewritten to reflect the Big Reveal?

Or will The Narrative become sacred before it can be challenged?

That is why we must demand these answers now, and let the chips fall where they may.

The point is, straight after FBI agents stirred up a “domestic terror” plot to blame on MAGA in October 2020, the same local FBI director who ran that FBI operation in Detroit is immediately moved to local Washington, DC and placed in charge of the “domestic terror” events of the MAGA Insurrection. Don’t worry, a whole lot more on this is coming in the next Revolver installments.

Let’s get back to Director D’Antuono’s personal plea this week:

They’re stumped, you see. The God-tier surveillance state Orwellian Panopticon powers the FBI harnessed to swiftly identify more than 300 Capitol trespass suspects have suddenly failed them. They’re at their wits end now, and it’s down to the old-fashioned way: Uncle Sam needs you, American Citizen, to identify The Single Most Lethal Terrorist From The Entire “New 9/11” MAGA Insurrection based on…

…the suspect’s “gait, body language and mannerisms”?

Yes, “gait, body language or mannerisms.” The FBI press release further stresses they are “asking the public to come forward” with “any odd or out-of-character behavior you noticed in a family member, friend, or coworker” similar to the mannerisms of the person in the video. 

Got that? Look upon your friends, your partners, and loved ones. Squint in their souls and ask yourself: “Do they loiter and perambulate like the grainy ghost in that sequence of four consecutive 360p SD videos the FBI just posted? Is my next door neighbor secretly the MAGA Mystery Unabomber?”

These MAGA terrorists are everywhere!

I Spy, With My Little Eye, A Few Easy Questions For The FBI

Let’s break down this half-baked, assault-on-common sense video in surgical detail.

First, the FBI has access to every single video camera in every residence, business, and public property on Capitol Hill. The sum total of what they released is so grainy and so useless that in 131 seconds of footage, you can’t even conclusively make out the suspect’s race. More on that below.

Hundreds of replies to the FBI are either unable to conclusively make out a gender or are confident it’s actually a woman:

Despite the FBI knowing the precise date, times and locations of the suspect in question, evidently they have no cell phone tracking data from pings in the area that night. Nearly all of the 300+ prosecutions for 1/6 have been of out-of-towners, so unless this MAGA Mystery Unabomber traveled back to 1996 and printed out, then dutifully followed Mapquest instructions, he probably navigated his multi-hour jaunt around key sites of the nation’s capital by cell phone.

If he/she/zir wasn’t a “Unabomber” and was making cell phone calls to co-conspirators on this multi-hour jaunt, the FBI should be able to trace all calls made from and around the areas of the exact locations and times they identified on video. FBI, has that been done? 

We evidently have no fingerprint evidence gleaned from component parts of the homemade pipe bombs. We know these components included 1×8 inch galvanized pipes, a kitchen timer and homemade black powder. 

Was the MAGA Mystery Unabomber’s OpSec so tight that he was wearing gloves at home the whole time he/she/zir was cooking up these pipe bombs, so no trace was left anywhere on the equipment? Remember, thin gloves still leave fingerprints. So this guy/girl/zir would have to be wearing thick gloves, at home, the entire time he/she/zir was manipulating extremely thin one-inch wide pipes, packing fine powder, and precisely programming the tiny kitchen timer.

Good criminals recommend thick gloves all the way up to the elbow just to make sure no DNA residue from any part of the body ever gets on any materials you’re working with. What’s the likelihood of such strict OpSec procedures being followed by a total amateur for a “pipe bomb” built so poorly it never went off?

Anyway, what were the results of the forensics? Full fingerprint matching to the entire US database of criminals can be done from start to finish in just 10 minutes. FBI, when you ran the forensics on the pipe bomb and the component parts, did it match with any of the 70 million individuals in the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) criminal master file, or the additional 30 million individuals in the IAFIS civil master file?

And what is the likelihood that the act of building and planting a full-on homemade pipe bomb to blow up the entire GOP and DNC is the suspect’s very first crime, in a country where more people have criminal records than college diplomas?

FBI, do you think that before you told 330 million Americans to scan our spouses, siblings, sons, daughter, friends and co-workers for whether their “gait, body language and mannerisms” match The Most Wanted Terrorist In The Country, you could have also told us whether to limit our search for people who either do or do not have already have a criminal record?

Not to beat a dead horse, but you can glean gender and race from the forensics, so you could narrow your search pool by at least 200 million people if you ran those basic every-investigation tests on the most important one in the country.

FBI, any leads on that? More than two months later, have they even been done?

Then we get all the jaw-dropping problems with the video footage itself. 

What The Hell Is Going On Here

We know the FBI – who is begging for our assistance – is not giving us the full tapes. 

Consider the first sequence of the video, from 0:19 to 1:14. It looks like the tape starts when the suspect walks into frame at 0:19:

This makes sense. Although the FBI provides no confirming details whatsoever, we are led to believe the source footage is a stationary camera planted and constantly running at all times at a building on the opposite side of the street, such as a private security camera. For our convenience, the FBI starts the clip as soon as MAGA Mystery Unabomber walks into frame. Totally reasonable.

But then the tape the FBI provides the public stops abruptly at 1:14, while the suspect is still in the middle of the frame, and is clearly still loitering right in front of the camera:

Why did the video cut? He’s still hanging out right there fidgeting, and every frame gives hundreds of millions of Americans more chances to see if that “gait, body language and mannerisms” reminds you of your wife.

Did the constantly running static security system pick the single worst time in history to suddenly short-circuit or run out of batteries, or did the FBI simply decide “the public had seen enough” and stopped the tape?

Well, how long was the suspect out there for? 10 more seconds? 10 more minutes? You know, wearing a mask for hours on end really sucks. Most people, when they’re wearing a mask – but especially when they’re outside, will occasionally pull it down for a few seconds every few minutes just to catch a good clean breath. 

But then it gets worse. Between 0:58–1:05, a man walking his dog wanders clean into the shot:

First, you can see at 1:03 how the suspect moves to put his mask all the way up past his nose as the dog-walker approaches. Presumably, now that he believes someone is seeing him and could identify him, he is much more attentive to the mask’s position in covering his face.

It follows that if he’s still loitering there for a few more minutes, it’s quite plausible that he might let his guard down for a few frames and catch his breath. Then we might get more facial details than, say, this:

Also, did the FBI track down and talk to the clearly visible dog-walker who almost surely lives around that very block and got within two feet of the suspect? Could probably confirm basic things like, say, gender, pretty clearly. That cuts down the suspect pool by about 165 million people.

Also, in this first clip alone, the suspect walks by approximately four buildings on the far side of the street, plus whatever number of buildings are on the near side. Are there any cameras from those buildings too? How about on the block he walked into the frame from, and whatever block he walked out to? Capitol Hill is an extremely wealthy neighborhood, seems unlikely this is all we got.

It’s standard practice for the FBI to sweep or seize every privately owned and publicly operated recording device in an area under active investigation to acquire a complete video record of the event in question. Without alleging malicious intent, foul play, or foreclosing benign explanations in any particular case, it may worth noting the FBI has, shall we say, a less-than-stellar record of holding on to the video footage it seizes. Even when simply not losing everything is all that’s required.

Which raises the question: is there other footage the FBI has acquired but simply has not disclosed? If so, why not turn it over to the public to help with our search?

But even in these disclosures, the FBI seems comically over-eager to convey how Super Serious Every Exact Detail Is. In this clip alone, we get a bottom-left watermark of every shot and a 0:17 lead-in: “7:40:33.” 

Yes, we get the millisecond of… the start time of the recording? Okay, well when did the tape stop recording? When did you lose track of the guy and which way did he go? Was Zir loitering there because Ze was waiting for a friend? Did anyone else like Dog-Walker happen to walk into frame? We would literally know that exact answer to all these questions if they just kept the tape rolling.

It’s the same thing BUT WORSE in the 1:16–1:46 sequence. This sequence is supposed to convey the actual park bench outside DNC headquarters where the MAGA Mystery Unabomber left the pipe bomb. But the surveillance footage shared with the public starts, precisely at 7:52pm!, with the suspect already in the middle of the frame at the park bench. 

So when the hell did Zir get there and how long was the tape rolling before we get to see the first frame? It seems likely that if this is the very place you’re planting the bomb, you’re probably snooping around that bench for a good chunk of time before you just drop the bombs and leave. Or else you or a co-conspirator cased the place in the days or weeks ahead of 1/5, so the historical surveillance tapes from the same camera should reveal some suspicious snoopers the FBI can serve up as leads.

But if this is all the FBI has, and it’s the tape’s fault, we now have an even stranger problem than the opening clip. This camera must have serendipitously switched on while the suspect was already in the middle of the frame at the bomb-planted bench, then tragically switched off 30 seconds later while the suspect was still right there. For reference, the final frame at 1:46 looks like this:

Such a shame, it’d be awfully nice to see the full scene of what actually happened at the bomb site since evidently there was a camera trained on Zem the whole time.

FBI, why not provide the full tapes? At least put the full tapes somewhere on the FBI website where all the other evidence on the guy is compiled. You literally already have that page set up. Throw it up there. Stop making us do this to you.

Point is, the FBI couldn’t have been more theatrical about their desperate plea, more than two months into their investigation, asking for the public’s help to identify this person. Why the hell would you withhold the full tapes if you’re genuinely looking for an answer?

Zooming Out

For some strange reason, all of the highest-profile cases from 1/6 seem to be completely stumping the FBI.  We are now on Week 10 of the What Actually Happened To Brian Sicknick story (which Revolver has covered here, here and here), and the FBI has still not released the “bombshell” video the New York Times claimed was in FBI possession depicting its “pinpointed” suspect two weeks ago. Why release this pipe bomb suspect video but not that Sicknick bear spray suspect video? 

Or do they have nothing good for The Narrative to release on the Sicknick case, and this pipe bomb release – with its perpetual unsolved mystery! – will Keep The Meme Alive for a Domestic War On MAGA Terror?

For now, we do not know the answer – and hopefully there is a benign explanation. But it’s bad enough that we even have to ask the question.

One Last Thing

There’s one more funny aspect of this case. Again, it may be nothing, or it may be a $300 elephant in the room. But it’s interesting.

It’s the Nike Air Max.

Remember, there’s a lot riding on this “pipe bomb” suspect being a Trump supporter. Time and again, we’ve been told these MAGA terrorists were White supremacists, or at the very least anti-government rural, exurban militias who probably also had sympathies with White Supremacists.

The FBI is asking us to believe the MAGA Mystery Unabomber was rocking Nike Air Max Speed Turfs. Specifically, black and grey with a yellow logo. It’s the one actual piece of accountable, distinctive forensic detail that the FBI seems to have totally confirmed about the case. They made a very big deal out of it, even putting Pepe Sylvia conspiracy theory meme multi-colored pointing arrows at these shoes. We know more about the suspect’s shoes – and the FBI gave us more detail on it – than we know about the suspect’s face or race.

This quite peculiar shoe has been amped up by the FBI since the initial January assessments, then passed on wholly uncritically as “key” to solving the mystery by mainstream media stenographers of FBI press releases.

We are talking about $300 top-of-the-line basketball-football shoes here. The model identified by the FBI is the Black Yellow Grey AV7895-0001 (they didn’t tell us this, we civilian researchers had to do the legwork – why does that keep happening?) . You can go to ebay right now and see what the market looks like:

S

How many disgruntled, lower-middle income, out-of-towner Trump supporters spend $300 on street shoes? It’s not impossible, but it’s interesting.

Then, you’ve got the fact that any student of sneakerhead culture or basketball culture or urban hip hop culture will tell you in five seconds if you live in the real world: the Nike Air Max is not exactly a typical Trump supporter shoe.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It’s worth noting that the traditional “colors” of the Proud Boys are black and yellow. But is it typical (or “on brand,” so to speak) for a Proud Boy to spend $300 on urban hip hop culture street shoes? Don’t know, maybe.

The MAGA Mystery Unabomber evidently took incredible pains not to give away a single fingerprint or DNA sample on the pipe bombs, and so successfully masked every identifiable detail on video during a multi-hour walking tour through the center of Capitol Hill that Zey stumped the FBI. Would Zey throw it all away by deliberately selecting outrageously expensive, unique and ostentatious shoes for that mission in zer own “gang colors”? Don’t know, maybe.

But it’s little questions like that which are only interesting, and only crop up, because the big questions have gone so thoroughly, and seemingly deliberately, unanswered. 

As a parting thought, some models of the Nike Air Max “glow in the dark.”

Isn’t that interesting.

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