Mike Benz Has A Good Lead

Mike Benz draws an interesting connection with the alleged January 6 pipe bomber in the video embedded above. At 3:20:

The guy in chgarge of the FBI at the time was the one who sold fake pipe bombs three months earlier in the Whitmer fednapping case. Steve D'Antuono was how did they bust them on the Whitmer fednapping case, where over half of the co-conspirators turned out to be federal assets or informants. It was two FBI agents, this is the Detroiit FBI Field Office, Steve D'Antuono these guys were under, who went to a bunch of Three Percenters, that was one of the militia groups, the big three militia groups, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers on January 6, went to the exact miltia group that was involved in January 6, infiltrated them, convinced them, trained them on how to build homemade pipe bombx, and then busted them buying pipe bomb parts and chaged them with attempted possession of weapons of mass destruction.

According to Wikipedia,

On October 8, 2020, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced the arrests of 13 men suspected of orchestrating a domestic terror plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, and otherwise using violence to overthrow the state government.

. . . Two men pleaded guilty and offered to testify on behalf of the prosecution as part of a favorable plea deal, while two men were acquitted at trial. Two other men, who had received a hung jury at the first trial, were later found guilty of kidnapping conspiracy and conspiracy to possess weapons of mass destruction. One of those men was also convicted of another explosives charge.

. . . The defense has argued that this is a case of entrapment, claiming to have identified twelve FBI informants. They contend that the entire plot was fabricated by federal agents.

According to this site,

Steven D'Antuono was the Assistant Director of the FBI Washington DC Field Office from 13 October 2020. . . . [He previously was] special agent in charge of the Detroit field office from 2019 to 2020 . . . . In January 2021, in the aftermath of the 2021 United States coup d'etat attempt [sic], he worked hand-in-hand with the US Attorney's office and local and national police to arrest and charge multiple individuals who took part in the insurrection, opening over 160 case files.

Steven D'Antuono has already appeared here several times in connection with his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on June 7, 2023. It's worth quoting again what I quoted in this post almost two years ago:

"People surmise and suspect that, 'oh, there's all this video all over the country, all over D.C.' It's not true," Steven D'Antuono, the former head of the FBI Washington Field Office, testified before the House Judiciary Committee on June 7, 2023.

. . . "We did every check, every lab test, every data. We ran this through systems back and forth, up and down, sideways, all over the place," he testified about the search for the suspect.

Thery did every check, every lab test, except it looks like they never did gait analysis, which is the focus of the Blaze Media story, and which was apparently used to track down Osama bin Laden -- certainly it was a known tool as of 2008:

Nearly seven years after Osama Bin Laden disappeared, US intelligence agencies are still chasing his shadow. And shadows are precisely what they should be looking for, says NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

By analysing the movements of human shadows in aerial and satellite footage, JPL engineer Adrian Stoica says it should be possible to identify people from the way they walk – a technique called gait analysis, whose power lies in the fact that a person’s walking style is very hard to disguise.

So, even though gait analysis was available to the FBI in 2021, they apparently didn't use it, although it looks like gait analysis might have identified the perp -- unless, of course, they knew who the perp was all along. Gait analysis could simply be a cover explanation; the actual basis could well be something else, like an informant. But Mike Benz's remarks in the video above are bringing me to a new theory:

• I've noted the incredible amateurishness of the figure in the hoodie, face mask, and custom shoes in the video, as well as the next-door neighbor, who was apparently traced almost immediately due to a Washington Metro card
• But then there's the stranger question of how the videos seem to show the two bombs being planted the evening of January 5, but a Secret Service sweep of the DNC headquarters found no bomb the morning of January 6, yet a local woman nevertheless did find a bomb about 12:30 that day
• The photos of the alleged hoodie-and-face-mask perp, Shauni Kerkhoff, do not suggest what Trump would call a high-IQ individual -- in fact, they almost suggest someone with a handicap
• Steven D'Antuono, under whose authority the "investigation" of the bomber took place, had a history of exploiting and entrapping low-IQ individuals to make high-profile cases.

So I'm starting to lean in the direction tbat Kerkhoff, if in fact she is the person in the hokey disguise in the video, is a dupe, a mark, one of a cast of suckers recruited and handled by FBI agents to play a role equivalent to Marinus van der Lubbe, a mentally questionable individual who was convicted and executed for setting the Reichstag fire.

One thing that makes me wonder if this is the case is Kerkhoff's apparent ambivalence in setting the bombs -- she wanders around, sits down on a bench, gets up, wanders around some more before finally placing them. I suspect she was deeply conflicted about planting bombs she was convinced would kill and maim many people, although I suspect they were fake, created by schemers from the start to look like amateur devices, but she believed they were real.

However, something about the plot went awry, and things didn't turn out as planned. I think the bombs were fake and never meant to explode -- that D'Antuono would claim they were viable in his testimony strikes me as suspicious -- but Kerkhoff and the next door neighbor suddenly became unnecessary (I'm not sure why they weren't rubbed out, to tell the truth). But because whatever was supposed to happen didn't work out for whatever reason, it was important to call off the investigation.

However, I'm also coming to the opinion that the Blaze Media investigation is so buttoned-down and so limited in its actual scope -- all it ever does is put a name to a hoodie and face mask -- that I think it's been heavily massaged by current FBI and Juastice Department insiders, and they already know a great deal more than is in the published story. For instance:

DOJ Pardon Attorney Ed Martin says he spoke with Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino over the weekend, who gave him a very promising update on January 6th and the pipe bomber:

"I spoke to Bongino and he said 'We are in this completely. It's not off the radar.' I know we are making… pic.twitter.com/jGovWEhPgX

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) November 11, 2025