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We have long maintained that the two smoking guns of the January 6 Fedsurrection are the curious case of Ray Epps, on the one hand, and the RNC/DNC pipe bomb hoax, on the other. Our extensive reporting on the case of Epps enjoyed a natural assist from the fact that the now-iconic video of Epps urging the crowd to go “into the Capitol” and the subsequent chants from the crowd of “Fed, Fed, Fed” were seemingly tailor-made to go viral. While our ground-breaking reporting on January 6 had been no less comprehensive and no less damning, for the longest time it lacked a corresponding video clip to help carry this historic scandal into mainstream attention.

All of this changed when we drew attention to a certain explosive (no pun intended) surveillance video that had quietly and with great reluctance been released by the Capitol Police thanks to the persistent efforts of Thomas Massie, who has valiantly used his Congressional perch to advance our body of research on the January 6 pipe bomb. We strongly encourage readers to stop here and read our comprehensive piece on this bombshell video and how it fits into the comprehensive universe of reporting we’ve built on this subject. The video in question depicts the discovery of the so-called “DNC pipe bomb” that was discovered outside of the DNC headquarters on January 6. Right off the bat, things simply don’t add up.

In the video, we can see a plainclothes Capitol Police officer inform Secret Service agents stationed outside the DNC building of the presence of the bomb just feet away, whereupon the agents in question react with an utter lack of concern, not even bothering to exit their vehicle for over a minute. The Secret Service agents’ nonchalant attitude toward the bomb reaches a crescendo in the most arresting part of the video, in which the agents and Capitol Police officers casually allow a group of schoolchildren to cross the street in the direction of the pipe bomb and walk within feet of the explosives! Could it be that the Secret Service agents were simply unconcerned for their own lives, the lives of their protectee (then-VP-elect Kamala Harris), or the lives of the aforementioned schoolchildren? There is perhaps a remote possibility.

The video and the context overwhelmingly suggest, however, that somehow the Secret Service agents in question knew the bomb posed no threat. But how on earth would they have known that in advance? This is especially bizarre and troubling given the fact that the Secret Service agents were protecting Kamala Harris, who has strangely covered up the fact that she was present in the DNC as the pipe bomb was found. To this day, Harris refuses to acknowledge her presence in the DNC building, against all evident political interest. After all, think of how much she could have milked politically from the fact that she came within a hair’s width of the deadly MAGA pipe bomb. The regime has been so desperate to find stories to fit their “domestic terrorism” narrative of January 6 that they’ve resorted to outright lies—to take one, the lies regarding the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick. This is the one case in which no lies would seem to be necessary, as the Vice President really was at the building when the bombs were discovered.

Yet for whatever reason, what seems like it should be the biggest regime talking point of January 6 is instead its most carefully guarded secret.

The fact that Kamala’s Secret Service detail clearly knew in advance that somehow the pipe bomb posed no threat only serves to compound our suspicions further. And of course, this just scratches the surface of the numerous glaring discrepancies and infinitesimally implausible coincidences that have haunted the regime’s official version of events ever since we began exposing the pipe bomb hoax over three years ago. Again, for readers who need to get up to speed, here is a great place to start.

Secret Service Foreknowledge or Criminal Negligence? Damning New Evidence Surfaces In FBI’s January 6 “Pipe Bomb” Story

What possible explanation could the authorities have for the flagrantly negligent—and indeed, inexplicable—behavior caught on video whereby the Secret Service is so unconcerned about the presence of a pipe bomb that they would not only stand within feet of it themselves, but without a care in the world, allow a group of schoolchildren to walk within the certain-death zone of its blast radius?

As it so happens, Capitol Police authorities have offered an explanation for the glaring questions raised above, though the answers only serve to elevate our confidence in a cover-up from strong suspicion to near certainty. In our previous piece, we revealed a closed-door meeting between Congressman Massie and certain Congressional officials that included one Capitol Police officer who was present on the scene as the DNC pipe bomb was discovered—this officer in fact happens to be the partner of the plainclothes officer who discovered the DNC bomb and went on to inform the Secret Service as depicted in the surveillance footage.

When asked about the flagrant and explicable lack of concern in relation to the pipe bomb, a more senior Capitol Police official who spoke for the group offered the following shocking response: the nonchalant response of the Secret Service and Capitol Police to the pipe bomb was deliberately designed so as not to cause panic among the public. Think of that: we’re supposed to believe that Secret Service agents and Capitol Police stood lackadaisically within feet of what could have been a live explosive device and allowed a group of children to walk within feet of said device in order to not cause panic. This answer alone suggests that not only are they clearly covering up the real story, they possess such confidence that they didn’t even have to bother to come up with a more plausible cover story. If you believe that, we’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn or a Fedsurrection in D.C. to sell you, folks!

Revolver:

As it so happens, Congressman Massie and a number of other Judiciary officials had the opportunity to meet with relevant Capitol Police officials, including at least one Capitol Police officer who was present during the discovery of the DNC bomb depicted in the video above. When asked the obvious and burning question as to why Secret Service officials, as well as the Capitol Police officers on scene, were so utterly unconcerned with the recently discovered bomb just feet within their proximity, the Capitol Police responded that they and the Secret Service officials on scene reacted with such utter indifference in order not to cause panic.

Think about this. The Secret Service was notified of the presence of an explosive device within feet of themselves, the Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, whom they’re supposed to protect, and children and other passersby, and we are supposed to believe that the officials did nothing because they didn’t want to cause panic!

The Plot Thickens: Damning New Details Emerge in Jan 6 Pipe Bomb Cover Up

We are now in a position to expose the identity of the most senior Capitol Police official in that meeting and the man who reportedly presented congressional officials and staffers with the absurd excuse that the Capitol Police and Secret Service allowed a group of children to walk in front of the bomb so as not to cause panic—a baffling explanation for such a flagrant breach of protocol as to be unbelievable to the point of offense. That Capitol Police official is Ashan Benedict, currently Assistant Chief of Police of the Capitol Police in charge of Protective and Intelligence Operations. Yes, you read that right. A man who would excuse the flagrant violation of security protocol as depicted in the footage of the DNC bomb discovery is the head of Protective Operations at the Capitol Police. This alone should be sufficient to cause a national scandal, but it gets far worse. Ashan Benedict’s conduct and statements in the meeting described above, together with new (yet entirely overlooked) information that has come out as a result of a recent Judicial Watch FOIA request, lead us to believe with a high degree of conviction that Ashan M. Benedict is one of the key cover-up men of the entire January 6 pipe bomb hoax.

Ashan M. Benedict, Assistant Chief of Police in Charge of Protective and Intelligence Operations, US Capitol Police

Up until this point, Benedict remained, for the most part, an unknown figure to the public. In fact, the only public exposure of Benedict of any note occurred quite recently in the context of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) documents released as a result of Judicial Watch’s FOIA requests. The headline that emerged from this story is the exposure of CIA involvement on January 6. As we shall soon see, however, the documents FOIAd by Judicial Watch inadvertently expose information that serves to dramatically reinforce our belief that Benedict is a key coverup man for the January 6 pipe bomb hoax.

The ATF documents obtained by Judicial Watch run 88 pages, which includes a number of screenshots from a text group chat of various ATF officials on January 6 called the “January 7 Intel Chain.” The first thing we notice about the group chat in question is how nearly every single name is redacted—not an uncommon feature, to be sure—in FOIAd documents from three-letter agencies. Ashan Benedict’s name, interestingly, is one of the very few that is not redacted. Note that on January 6, 2021, Benedict was a senior ATF official as the Special Agent in Charge for all of Washington, D.C. (hence his presence in the FOIA documents).

Interestingly, the text chain in the FOIA docs begins right at the decisive time of 12:47 p.m. on January 6, a mere 7 minutes after Karlin Younger claims she stumbled upon the first “RNC pipe bomb” in a back alley by the Capitol Hill Club and a mere 5 minutes before the first “Ray Epps” breach of the West Perimeter of the Capitol near the peace monument—a breach whose fed-saturated and questionable elements we chronicle in exhaustive detail in our now classic Ray Epps series.

Take a look at the following screenshot:

The text addresses the response to the first pipe bomb discovered, as we can see with Lisa Reed’s reference to the address of the Capitol Hill Club where it was found.  The first potentially noteworthy thing about this text change is the address provided immediately after as the “new incident command post” at New Jersey and D.

New Jersey and D is not, however, the address of the Capitol Hill Club where the first pipe bomb was discovered. In fact, looking at the map, New Jersey and D is about midway from the Capitol Hill Club to the location where the second pipe bomb was discovered on the canal street side of the DNC building. This is not an obviously convenient location for a command post to address the first pipe bomb, and it is a somewhat bizarrely convenient command post in terms of its relative proximity to where the second pipe bomb was found at the DNC—only this second pipe bomb had not been found at the time this command post was set up.

Without any additional information, it seems at least strange that the authorities would set up an incident command to address the first pipe bomb so close to where the second pipe bomb was found. We don’t want to make too much of this interesting detail yet, however, as there are innocent plausible explanations related to logistics and road closures on January 6 that might account for the location of the new incident command post.

The location of the command center notwithstanding, one of the several damning and unanswered questions pertaining to the discovery of the DNC pipe bomb has always been how quickly it was discovered after the first pipe bomb at the Capitol Hill Club had been discovered. We learn from the surveillance footage of the discovery of the DNC bomb that this took place a mere 15 minutes after the discovery of the first bomb.

To appreciate the implausibility of this 15-minute window, consider that both the DNC and RNC had been sitting in their respective locations for nearly 17 hours, only to be independently discovered within 15 minutes of each other—a 15-minute period that, critically, overlaps in perfect synchronicity with the unfolding Ray Epps breach of the western perimeter of the Capitol. The 15-minute window would be less strange if there were some natural, intuitive connection between the location of the first and second bombs, but when you think about it, it is not intuitive at all if you find a bomb at the RNC to somehow assume that another bomb must be at the DNC by the logic of bipartisanship. This possible intuition collapses even further when we remind ourselves that the DNC-RNC parallelism is a retroactive fiction and that the first bomb was actually discovered at the Capitol Hill Club. It was only after the DNC bomb was discovered that the first pipe bomb came to be called the RNC bomb.

So what are the chances that some Nostradamus-like figure working for the Capitol Police or ATF would somehow, after the discovery of the first pipe bomb at the Capitol Hill Club, magically intuit that there must be another bomb at the DNC and go on to discover this DNC bomb (which had been undiscovered for over 17 hours) a mere 15 minutes later?

As it so happens, this very question came up in the closed-door meeting between certain members of Congress, their staff, and Congressional officials (including Benedict as the senior officer) and was posed to one of the Capitol Police officers on the scene when the DNC bomb was discovered—in fact, he’s the partner of the plainclothes Capitol Police Officer who discovered the bomb. The answer Benedict and the Capitol Police officer provided was just as offensively implausible as the claim they didn’t attempt to warn schoolchildren of the bomb in order to avoid panic. The Capitol Police officer who was on the scene at the discovery of the DNC bomb claimed that they were at the location of the first bomb and simply had a hunch there might be something at the DNC, and sure enough, 15 minutes later they found it. Remarkable!

The impossible coincidences and absurd explanations for them don’t stop there, however. Just as the notion that the Capitol Police officers just managed to have a hunch that a second bomb would be at the DNC doesn’t add up, it is equally, if not more puzzling, as to how the same officers in question would have had the clairvoyance to know there wouldn’t be a third bomb. After all, if two bombs are discovered in relatively close proximity to the Capitol and in quick succession, wouldn’t the natural assumption be that there would be a third and possibly additional devices? And yet the same officers with sufficient clairvoyance to think to search for and discover a second bomb at the DNC, and to do so an astonishing 15 minutes after the first bomb was discovered—the same officers with sufficient clairvoyance to somehow know that the DNC bomb posed no threat to themselves or the schoolchildren passing by—are, astonishingly enough, the very same officers with the clairvoyance to know that there would be no third bomb in addition to the RNC and DNC bombs, or at least it was not worth looking at or fretting over.

As it so happens, the Capitol Police officer, whose partner was the plainclothes officer who discovered the DNC bomb and who was also on the scene at the discovery of the bomb, was asked by Congressional officials in this meeting whether they had searched for a third bomb upon discovering the second, and if not, why not? The answer, under the watchful and approving eye of Ashan Benedict (whom we now have revealed to be the senior Capitol Police official at this meeting), answered that they did not think there would be a third bomb and provided no explanation as to why. As we reported in our previous piece:

From the Capitol Police, we’re told that after the first bomb was discovered at the Capitol Hill Club, they just had a hunch, headed over to the DNC, and found the bomb scarcely 15 minutes later. Upon discovering the bomb, somehow they and the Secret Service knew it was not a threat despite reports that it was “viable,” and still more remarkable, they knew not to look for a third bomb. Indeed, think of that: they were not only clairvoyant enough to assume that there might be a bomb near the DNC after the Capitol Hill Club bomb was discovered, but instead of the obvious assumption that after two were found there might be more bombs, they also somehow knew that there were two and only two bombs. Give us a break!

That Ashan Benedict was present during and reportedly endorsed the Capitol Police’s answer regarding not worrying about a third bomb is especially interesting given what is revealed in the “Intel” group chat Benedict participated in during January 6. Indeed, the chat logs as FOIAd by Judicial Watch at best expose Benedict as misleading and complicit in this regard and at worst catch him in an outright lie. The chat logs in question show that there was indeed confusion and rumors of multiple additional bombs circulating among the ATF chat and the broader first responder community.

The following screenshot, for instance, shows one chat participant (name redacted) passing on rumors from the FBI that there could be three additional pipe bombs in addition to the two already discovered at the DNC and RNC, respectively.

Further down in the exchange, the rumor narrows it down to three possible pipe bombs, with one being at a power plant. A chat participant with the initials CA corrects the record and states that there are only two bombs, one at the RNC and one at the DNC.

Finally, we see someone incorrectly state that there are two devices at the DNC, only to be corrected that there is one near the RNC and one near the DNC:

The FOIA’d text chain above, combined with our knowledge of what transpired in a closed-door meeting in which congressional officials and staff questioned Ashan Benedict and a Capitol Police officer who was present on the scene at the discovery of the DNC bomb, paints a compelling picture of Ashan Benedict as a key figure in the January 6 pipe bomb cover-up.

It was Benedict who, with a straight face, attempted to explain away the behavior of the Capitol Police and Secret Service officers at the DNC pipe bomb site as being driven by a desire to not cause panic. There is simply no way that this is true or that Benedict believes it to be true. Prior to serving as Assistant Chief of Capitol Police, Benedict was the Executive Officer of the Metro PD in Washington, D.C., and before that, he served in the ATF as an agent for over 20 years, rising to the rank of Special Agent in Charge of the ATF for Washington, D.C. There is simply no way that someone of that background and pedigree could believe for a second that it is normal or acceptable for Secret Service agents or Capitol Police, upon being informed of a pipe bomb in close proximity, to stand around lackadaisically for minutes and allow schoolchildren to walk in front of the explosives. There is no way that someone with Benedict’s experience could think that such behavior could be explained by the authorities not wanting to cause panic.

The only reasonable conclusion from the DNC surveillance footage is that the authorities knew in advance or right away that the pipe bomb posed no threat—the only question is how they would know that. And the only reasonable conclusion from Benedict’s absurd explanation is that Benedict knows that they knew in advance that the pipe bomb posed no threat and is covering up this fact and the reasons behind it.

Incidentally, the FOIA’d ATF documents Judicial Watch obtained have at least one individual asking repeatedly whether the DNC and RNC pipe bombs were viable devices or not.

This is not from the Intel group chat but from a different text exchange covered in the FOIA requests. It is a text exchange between two unknown individuals, presumably ATF agents. At 2:13 p.m., we see one person ask if the pipe bombs were real, and the other person responds that this is yet to be determined. Much later in the evening on January 6, the same person follows up to see whether, in the end, the devices were real or not. It is especially interesting that the answer to this question is redacted. What could be so sensitive in this answer as to necessitate a redaction?

It is worth noting that the darker texts reflect those from the person whose phone the DOJ used to fulfill the FOIA requests. While we don’t want to distract from the focus of this piece, which is Ashan Benedict, it is worth noting for a moment how critical it is that we know the identity of the ATF agent whose phone was used to serve the FOIA requests for these conversations and chats. This is not only a person with sensitive, redaction-worthy information about the viability of the pipe bomb; the group chat screenshots reflect that this individual played a key role in coordinating the initial response to the pipe bombs. The group text also reveals that this person was not only accompanied by the CIA and their bomb sniffing dogs on January 6, but that this individual was also on scene at the DNC and RNC pipe bomb locations. Very interesting indeed.

So we learn that the ATF was not only utterly instrumental in handling the response to the January 6 pipe bombs; we learn that it was the ATF that brought the CIA in to help with their bomb sniffing dogs. How interesting that not only is CIA involvement on January 6 confirmed, but of all domains of January 6, the CIA was specifically involved in supplying bomb-sniffing dogs, presumably on scene at the pipe bomb locations. Readers will recall that one of the many damning anomalies of the pipe bomb story is how the Secret Service dogs could have missed the DNC bomb in their first sweep. Now, especially in light of the recent video that emerged depicting plain-clothed officials with dogs sweeping the DNC area, we are compelled to wonder whether those were in fact CIA dogs.

Of course, as the Special Agent in Charge of the ATF’s Washington, D.C., field division, Ashan Benedict would have likely been involved with getting the CIA on board to help with the incident response.

It would be fair to assume that Benedict is part of the January 6 pipe bomb coverup based on the simple fact that he himself suggested the preposterous notion that Secret Service agents and the Capitol Police officers at the scene of the DNC bomb acted with an utter lack of concern, even allowing schoolchildren to walk by the bombs out of some desire not to cause panic. Benedict would then go on to sit back and nod approvingly as his subordinate (who was on the scene at DNC and partners with the man who discovered the bomb) offers an equally absurd non-answer as to how, after magically discovering the DNC bomb within 15 minutes of the first bomb’s discovery, he and his partner somehow didn’t think to look for a third bomb. The Capitol Police officer in question simply did not have an answer for this other than that he just somehow knew. For Benedict to nod in approval at such an answer is downright bizarre.

First, we should note that Benedict is not some random guy sitting in on this meeting. Benedict is the Assistant Chief of Police of the Capitol Police, in charge of Protection and Intelligence. He is the senior officer in this closed-door meeting and effectively the handler for the Capitol Police officer in question. It is in this capacity that Benedict endorses the Capitol Police officers’ unbelievable answer, and he does so despite direct knowledge from his participation in the Intel group chat on January 6.

From this chat, it is evident that many of Benedict’s subordinates (then in the ATF) were circulating speculation and chatter about the possibility of more bombs, exactly as one might expect. Benedict isn’t just a casual participant in the group chat either; it is clear from the fact and the manner in which Benedict ends the group chat chain that he is the senior officer in the chat as well (remember, he was Special Agent in Charge of Washington, D.C., ATF at the time).

Evidently, everyone was worried about the possibility of a third or more bombs, except for the Capitol Police officers, who mysteriously were able to discover the DNC bomb. Clearly, they knew something the rest of the responders did not, and clearly, Benedict is pretending their answers aren’t absurd despite knowing better.

It is all the more remarkable that Benedict would act as though it were normal that the Capitol Police officers who discovered the DNC bomb didn’t think there could be a third bomb, as Benedict spoke to the media shortly after January 6 and used the January 6 pipe bombs to openly speculate that the same individual could attempt to plant another bomb soon, potentially at Joe Biden’s inauguration.

See, for instance, this CNN piece published shortly after January 6, 2021:

Three weeks after the US Capitol insurrection, authorities in Washington, DC, have gathered only limited information about the person who placed two devices that were rigged to explode outside of the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic parties on the day of the siege – and are asking the public for help, afraid that the bomber could strike again.

[…]

But as tips have poured in and charges have mounted against rioters who stormed the legislative building on January 6, the identity of the would-be bomber remains a mystery and one of the most troubling avenues of the massive federal investigation.

[…]

“They could potentially be building more bombs right now,” said Ashan Benedict, the special agent in charge of the Washington Field Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, in an interview Wednesday.

And the following CNN piece:

With regards to the investigation into pipe bombs planted in Washington during the Capitol siege, Ashan Benedict of the ATF in Washington said the probes are “ongoing.”
One arrest has been made of a man who allegedly brought 11 Molotov cocktails in a truck, but the FBI has been seeking information about another alleged person who planted bombs near political party headquarters.
He said agents from the ATF are working with Secret Service and others in advance of the Inauguration, and warns people bringing firearms into DC, where guns are strictly regulated, to follow the law or else risk being arrested.

S

Benedict publicly uses the pipe bomb story to speculate that there will be future bombs, and yet somehow endorses the Capitol Police officers’ response that they didn’t think to look for additional pipe bombs on January 6 itself!

The answers the Capitol Police officials gave regarding the damning questions raised by the surveillance footage depicting the discovery of the DNC bomb were so glaringly implausible and disingenuous as to remove any doubt in our minds as to the fact of a cover-up. As we put it in our first piece on the closed-door meeting in question:

Up until this point, the damning reporting we’ve done at Revolver News has overwhelmingly suggested that the January 6 pipe bombs were an operation and that the investigation into these bombs was in fact a cover-up. Before learning of the conversations above, we would have said the chance of January 6 pipe bombs being a hoax and cover-up was 99 percent, leaving a 1 percent chance that some bizarre, exotic, but plausible and innocent explanation could be given for the anomalies we’ve covered. Now we are in a position to rule out that remaining 1 percent of doubt. The January 6 pipe bombs are 100% a hoax and 100% a cover-up.

Given that Ashan Benedict was the senior Capitol Police official who presided over that meeting, who affirmatively offered the most absurd and unbelievable explanation for the scandalous response to the DNC pipe bomb, and who nodded his head in endorsement of other absurd explanations, we are now convinced Benedict is a key figure in the January 6 pipe bomb cover-up. Add to this the recently exposed ATF text chain, which fortuitously casts still further doubts upon the answers provided (and that Benedict assented to), and we are still more convinced of Benedict’s cover-up role. It is our strong view that the only rational explanation for the fact pattern described above is that the Capitol Police officers who discovered the DNC bomb somehow knew in advance that it did not pose a threat and that they did not simply stumble upon it but rather “discovered” it under false pretenses. Again, it is our strong and considered view that Benedict knows this and is covering it up.

Let us return for a moment to the CNN pieces cited above, in which Ashan Benedict gives statements as an expert on the pipe bombs. That Benedict was sought out immediately after January 6 for comments and expertise on the pipe bomb underscores the forgotten (or never really known or emphasized) fact that the ATF played a major, if not the most significant, role in the immediate response to the January 6 pipe bombs.

Our own extensive and damning coverage of FBI Washington Field Office (WFO) head Steven D’Antuono as the public face of the pipe bomb investigation perhaps played a part in overshadowing the critical role the ATF played in the first response to the pipe bomb. Incidentally, Steven D’Antuono, in his retirement, voluntarily spoke with the Judiciary Committee and, more or less, admitted that the official pipe bomb story doesn’t make any sense, but begged the committee nonetheless not to entertain “conspiracy theories.”

Back to the ATF, we see that the ATF group texts FOIA’d by Judicial Watch further reinforce the fact that the ATF was institutionally the key and head first responder to the pipe bomb incidents. As the Special Agent in Charge of the ATF in Washington, D.C., Ashan Benedict effectively oversaw that critical response effort to the pipe bomb. In fact, several news reports indicate that Benedict himself was at the scene of the pipe bomb incidents as the incident commander and not simply conducting the response from afar (which makes his answers at the closed-door meeting with congressional officials still more damning).

CNN:

When the first report of a bomb came into the ATF through DC’s Metropolitan Police Department, Benedict and his top deputy got in a car and drove to the scene, something he says he only does in the most serious cases.
“It was probably one of the most stressful environments that I’ve been around,” Benedict said.
“While we’re standing there at this bomb scene, the radios from the uniformed officers I’m speaking with are going off in greater intensity. It’s not just your normal radio transmissions – folks are calling for help and their voices are raised,” he said.

See also from Newsweek:

Additional Justice Department ATF agents enter the Capitol Complex. ATF Washington Field Office director Ashan Benedict, who was at one of the pipe bomb scenes, activated the special response team that was standing by and called in every other available ATF agent to assist.

S

Finally, it is important to note a few details about Ashan Benedict’s unusually convenient career trajectory in light of our belief in his key role as a cover-up man for the J6 pipe bombs. Benedict was Special Agent in Charge of the D.C. ATF on January 6, and in this capacity, he was one of the senior officials directly involved in the first response to the pipe bombs. In April 2021, Benedict left the ATF to join the Washington, D.C., Metro Police as assistant chief of police, effectively running the day-to-day operations of the department.

In May, D.C. Mayor Bowser named Benedict as the interim chief of police of the Washington, D.C., Metro PD. How strange for someone like Benedict to leave his over two-decade-long tenure with the ATF to take a temporary position running Washington, D.C.’s local police force—a local police force, which we will learn in a forthcoming article, has its own damning role on January 6. After this brief stint running the DC Metro Police, Benedict left in November 2023 to take his current position as Assistant Chief of Police of the US Capitol Police, where he oversees Dignitary Protection and Intelligence.

Thus, we see that since January 6, Ashan Benedict has managed to leave ATF and obtain senior positions in two other critical institutions (Metro PD and Capitol Police) responsible for the first response to the January 6 pipe bomb—an odd career trajectory unless he wanted to make sure he was in a position to tie up loose ends and keep the appropriate secrets across the relevant agencies. It is crucial to understand that his current role at the Capitol Police is not just in intelligence, of course, but also counter-intelligence, and this puts him in a coveted position to gatekeep and monitor any attempt to get to the bottom of January 6. To take but one example, any congressional official who wishes to obtain access to the plainclothes Capitol Police officer who discovered the DNC pipe bomb must go through Benedict. Benedict can be seen sitting right behind witness US Assistant Chief of Police Gallagher at the House Administration Committee’s hearing on the pipe bombs:

And of course Benedict was present at the crucial closed-door meeting with Congressman Massie and other congressional officials, in which the key questions pertaining to the surveillance footage of the DNC pipe bomb’s discovery were discussed. Benedict, as mentioned, offered flagrantly implausible explanations for the damning behavior caught in the video and acted as a kind of handler to the Capitol Police officer who was questioned, offering a watchful eye and nodding in assent to additional implausible and clearly disingenuous answers provided to the congressional officials present. How convenient for Benedict that he was present at the scene of the DNC pipe bombs as the commander of the first response and is now in a position to gatekeep congressional officials who hope to get to the bottom of what really happened.

The release of the surveillance footage of the DNC pipe bomb’s discovery had the advantage of an undeniable “surface scandal,” which helped to introduce an underlying scandal. The surface scandal was that the footage showed US Capitol Police and Secret Service officials standing around lackadaisically while allowing a group of schoolchildren to walk right in front of a presumably live explosive device. This surface scandal is undeniable to anyone who sees the video. The underlying scandal is that it is clear that the officials in question somehow knew in advance that the bomb was not a threat, despite later going through the spectacle of deploying a bomb-safe robot to defuse the device they had earlier allowed schoolchildren to walk by.

Benedict’s excuse for this flagrantly negligent behavior—that the officials didn’t want to cause panic—is Benedict’s surface scandal. After all, how can it not be a national scandal that Benedict, who is head of not only intelligence but of dignitary protection at the Capitol Police, would defend such a flagrant breach of safety protocol? Are we then to believe that if a bomb is discovered near the Capitol, Benedict may opt to allow members of Congress to walk right by it inadvertently, so as not to cause panic? This surface scandal simply cannot be denied, and it is hard to see how Benedict should be able to keep his job.

Most importantly, this surface scandal will be a useful entry point to the underlying scandal, which is that Benedict, of course, doesn’t really think it’s normal or acceptable protocol to allow people to walk in front of a bomb. He gave that answer because he knows that the Capitol Police officers in question both discovered the DNC bomb under false pretenses and also knew in advance that it was fake, and he wants to cover this up and cover up the reasons for it. The underlying scandal is that Ashan Benedict is overwhelmingly likely to be a key figure in the cover-up of the J6 pipe bomb hoax, and he is currently head of intelligence for the Capitol Police.

Now we have a name, and we’re one giant step closer to the end game of unraveling this whole tangle of thorns once and for all.

Stay tuned: there are two follow-up pieces that will pick up where we’re leaving off and prime the American public for one of the biggest scandals and crimes of recent history.

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