New Information On January 6 Pipe Bomber?

BREAKING: FBI releases new info, offers $500,000 reward for suspect who planted pipe bombs near the DNC on January 5, 2021 pic.twitter.com/GUbAI8Mzev

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) October 22, 2025

There's been a flurry of new stories about the FBI releasing video footage of a person who appears to be planting pipe bombs next to the Republican and Democrat National Committee headquarters buildings the evening before January 6, 2021. Actually, there seems to be little new. The FBI has a web page on its site dated September 8, 2021, only eight monthd after the incident, that includes nearly all the information about the suspect that media claims to be "new" in the latest release.

This includes still shots from the video and essentially the same description as in the renewed appeal, including,

The person who placed these bombs wore a face mask, glasses, a grey hooded sweatshirt, gloves, and black and light grey Nike Air Max Speed Turf shoes with a yellow logo. The suspect used a backpack to transport each of the devices.

By that September, the FBI had traced at leaast part of the suspect's path around the immediate area of the buildings and concluded,

Based upon the suspect’s route of travel to the DNC and from the DNC to the RNC, and the manner in which the suspect carries the backpack after placing the pipe bomb at the DNC, the FBI believes the suspect had a location in the vicinity of Folger Park from which the person was operating. Reviews of the suspect’s behavior in video footage and interviews with residents in the Capitol Hill neighborhood have led the FBI to believe the suspect is not from the area.

At that time, the lead FBI figure on the case was Steven M. D’Antuono, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office. D’Antuono appears not necessarily to have been with the Comey-McCabe-Wray program, and he left the bureau in late 2022 after differing with the Garland Juastice Department over the Mar-a-Lago raid:

In a closed-door congressional interview last week [June 2023], the official who led the FBI’s Washington Field Office at the time of its Mar-a-Lago search detailed a disagreement between bureau and Justice Department officials over how to recover sensitive papers that former President Donald Trump held onto after leaving office.

During his conversation with committee aides, D’Antuono said DOJ wanted FBI agents to immediately use a search warrant to seize documents from Mar-a-Lago, worried that any classified papers there could fall into the wrong hands. But D’Antuono’s team at the FBI’s Washington Field Office wanted to seek Trump’s permission, through the former president’s attorneys, to search the club — pointing out that Trump didn’t even spend his summers at Mar-a-Lago.

. . . “There was consternation from both sides” ahead of the Mar-a-Lago search, D’Antuono told the judiciary panel. “DOJ wants stuff. We were pushing back. That’s the beauty of our system, right. It’s like, that’s the judicial system in a sense.”

But other sources trace D'Antuno's resignation to a threatened Republican investigation:

Just weeks after Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee announced an investigation into recent “operations and actions” at the FBI, Steven D’Antuono, the assistant director in charge of the FBI Washington Field Office announced his retirement on Dec. 2 in a LinkedIn post.

. . . D’Antuono was the FBI agent in charge of the investigations into both the Gov. Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. He came under fire when two of the defendants in the Whitmer case were acquitted. At the time, there were allegations that the FBI had effectively entrapped them into taking part in the plot. Two other defendants initially received mistrials before being convicted in a second trial.

In a Nov. 18 letter written to FBI director Christopher Wray, the committee listed D’Antuono as one of nine FBI employees they would “require prompt testimony” from as part of their investigation.

As the 2023 link shows, D'Antuono did in fact eventuallty testify, but if he was no longer with the FBI by then, Wray couldn't have stopped him as he appears previously to have done. Although D'Antuono was in charge of the January 6 investigation, the Whitmer kidnap case, and the Mar-a-Lago raid, it appears that much of his testimony has never been released. It does appear that the FBI made almost no progress on investigating the January 6 pipe bombs since D'Antuono was in charge, but when he was in charge, it seems to have made the progress we've seen.

On the other hand, I had a faint memory that a pipe bomb suspect had been traced to a Virginia station on the Washington Metro. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Wasn't there a J6 pipe bomb suspect traced to a Metro stop in Virginia?" It replied, in typical Chronme AI style, with an attempt to set me straight:

No, no J6 pipe bomb suspect has been successfully traced to a specific metro stop in Virginia. While there has been public discussion of this theory, the individual who placed pipe bombs near the DNC and RNC on January 5, 2021, remains unidentified.

The golden mountain does not exist! You'd think AI would be smart enough to have taken Philosophy 101. But then AI proceeds to identify the golden mountain notwithstanding:

The idea that the suspect was traced to a Virginia metro stop comes from a statement by former FBI agent George Seraphin, who was fired from the bureau.

Seraphin, who has criticized the FBI's handling of the case, claimed that early in the investigation, the bureau used Metro system video and a Metro SmarTrip card to track the suspect getting off a train at a Northern Virginia stop. However, he admitted he did not know if the FBI followed up on this lead.

The FBI has never confirmed or released information about any Metro-related lead for the suspect.

So who is George Seraphin? He appears in an October 2022 NBC News story. Seraphin was identified as a

suspended FBI special agent who joined Truth Social and did an interview with conservative firebrand Dan Bongino after his suspension. Seraphin has written that the Jan. 6 cases keep him awake at night, and promoted a fundraiser for a Jan. 6 legal defense fund.

Seraphin himself, in a video posted online, said that he was at a shooting range with local law enforcement officials when the Jan. 6 attack happened, and thought that a bunch of “goofballs” were behind the attack.

“We were laughing about it, and there’s no other way to say it,” he said. “We were literally laughing, people were cracking up, you know, somebody has Nancy Pelosi’s podium. Is that the way that our country is supposed to act? No, but these were a bunch of clowns, that’s not what an insurrection looks like to me.”

In another message on Truth Social, Seraphin said he had “literally hundreds of employees” standing behind him. “You’ll only see me. But you will hear them. And we aren’t happy.”

Seraphin was on now-FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino's radio show several times during the Biden years and made general reference to an association between a Wasshington Metro card and the January 6 pipe bomber, but said little more specific. According to this NBC News story, Seraphin was suspended from the FBI in 2021 for refusing to take the COVID vaccine. He is one of several former agents who were in contact with Kash Patel prior to his designation as FBI Director:

Patel "keeps tabs on me and the guys that he’s helped out, and also we share information about FBI stuff," Seraphin told NBC News.

Patel, through his foundation, provided financial help to Seraphin and other agents who hAd been suspended from the FBI. However, that relationship has more recently soured:

Alexis Wilkins, the longtime girlfriend of FBI Director Kash Patel, is suing an ex-agent and self-described whistleblower for defamation, alleging he called her a former Israeli spy whose relationship with Patel is a “honeypot” operation.

The defendant, Kyle Seraphin, “has maliciously lied” about Wilkins by “falsely asserting that she—an American-born country singer—is an agent of a foreign government, assigned to manipulate and compromise the Director of the FBI,” Wilkins’ attorney wrote in the lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court in Austin, Texas.

Wilkins accuses Seraphin, a conservative podcaster who calls himself a “recovering FBI agent,” of “using this fabricated story as self-enriching clickbait.”

On one hand, there may be nothing to the possible connection between the J6 pipe bomber and a Washington Metro card. On the other, Kyle Seraphin seems to be so squirrely that the FBI probably needs to retrace all its steps in that case.

Meanwhile, we seem to know almost nothing more than we knew in late summer 2021. My current theory, like my theory about Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson, is that the pipe bomber's actions appear to be disorganized. On one hand, he wanders around the several-block area of the scene, possibly checking to see if he has a tail, but the streets are deserted -- if he had a tail, there's nothing he could do to disappear. But on the other, he seems completely unaware that in the 2020s, cameras are everywhere.

The guy seems too clueless to be any sort of professional. But the story needs to be followed up to eliminate any serious doubt.