The Pipe Bomber? Never Mind!

When I last looked at the January 6 pipe bomber two weeks ago, I noted that there were two competing stories coming out of one FBI. The best-publicized was that the individual in loose-fitting clothes, hoodie, and mask was a literally moonlighting female Capitol Police officer whom we'll call Ms C, who planted the bombs while wandering around Capitol Hill for an hour on the evening of January 5.

The other story was that it wasn't Ms C, or maybe not even the figure wandering around in the videos at all. Instead, the bombs may have been planted shortly before they were discovered on January 6 by someone completely different. The main problem with this version is that on one hand, we have to discount the figure wandering around the previous evening, and on the other, we have to identify someone else planting the bombs the following morning. We must assume hundreds of man-hours have already been expended searching the relevant video footage for this without result.

But beyond that, this story has been strange from the start. Blaze Media is Glenn Beck's outfit. Beck, a converted Mormon, has always been just a dollar-store Rush Limbaugh, and Blaze Media has never been known for breaking big new stories. New investigative stories typically come from reporters like Catherine Herridge, John Solomon, or Susan Crabtree. The Blaze Media story comes from Steve Baker and Joseph Hanneman, who simply don't have that record.

The second problem is that Baker and Hanneman claim they identified Ms C via "gait analysis", but this doesn't hold water. It implies that some sort of massive AI program reviewed millions of videos of ordinary people walking, compared them to the video on the FBI site of the wandering figure, and lo and behold, it spat out the name of Ms C. I don't think so. I think someone from somewhere in the deep state contacted Baker and Hanneman, said you might want to look at Ms C, and at best, they took a "gait analysis" app and ran it against the FBI video vs one of Ms C walking, and they said doggone it, it's Ms C!

That is, if they did anything like that at all. There's so much hinky about this story that I don't feel compelled to accept any of this. A CBS story from this past Tuesday seems much closer to the circumstances I've surmised:

Multiple sources said that a unit overseen by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard drafted a memo identifying the woman and describing allegations that she had placed the explosive devices outside Democratic and Republican party offices. The memo was written after ODNI was made aware of allegations from an outside source, an ODNI spokesperson said.

ODNI officials said the agency received a tip from a person affiliated with a media organization about potential criminal wrongdoing by an individual believed to be working at an intelligence agency and set about documenting it in a memo.

A copy of the unfinished memo was given to senior staff at the security officer's workplace, sources said.

. . . A short time after the unfinished memo began to circulate, the conservative news outlet, Blaze News, published details similar to those in the draft, including the woman's full name.

But the same CBS News story says that after her employer followed up with Ms C, she

cleared her name by providing an alibi: video of her playing with her puppies at the time the devices were placed, sources told CBS News. The FBI has now ruled her out as a suspect in the 2021 plot, according to three sources — but only after her name circulated on social platforms and a conservative news site.

This seems a little too cut and dried as well. I tend to think there's too much of an effort to wrap up any inconvenient questions and proclaim there's nothing more to see. Sundance at Conservative Treehouse, while more of a conspiracy theorist than I am, makes a convincing case for some sort of deep state agenda here:

However, the CBS narrative doesn’t focus on The Blaze or the reporting of Steve Baker, instead the media hit shifts responsibility to Tulsi Gabbard who is operating outside her intelligence oversight lane and conducting independent investigations which includes information from “outside sources.”

. . . Having followed the operations of these embed “intel officials” the motive for this operation against the office of the DNI is clear. You, me, all of us can see with clear non-pretending eyes, the intent of this op was to change the way Tulsi Gabbard is receiving information and to block the delivery of external sunlight.

There’s no better way for the “Seven Ways from Sunday” domestic group to operate than to seed false information (“whistleblower”) to their target (ODNI). Then work to externalize it (Steve Baker), emphasize it (Glenn Beck), build drama toward it, so that eventually it can then be cited as an example to ensure no further assistance is ever accepted. Isolate – Ridicule – Marginalize.

. . . Notice the script, the emphasis, the narrative as it is performed. All of it is entirely transparent.

But other pieces of the story as they've trickled out still strike me as strangely incongruous and oddly coincidental. Take the Washington Metro fare card that was somehow traced to the pipe bombing -- as I discussed here two weeks ago, the version we're given is that the FBI, maybe the same people who found the wandering figure in the hoodie and mask, or maybe not, combed the video from the prior day and identified someone else, someone completely different, who was wandering around the same area and taking photos of things with numbers on them, dumpsters and such.

This turns out to have been a childhood friend of Ms C's then-next-door neighbor, who'd dropped in from out of town, a real MAGA type whom the neighbor didn't trust, but whom he nevertheless lent his extra Metro card, the one he didn't use, to go down to Capitol Hill and wander around and take pictures of things with numbers on them for a book he was writing. Or something like that. Hey, doesn't everyone keep a second Metro card that they never use?

And this was all thoroughly investigated and ruled out as not suspicious. Or something like that. And the guy's then-next door neighbor, just out of the blue, was fingered five years later as maybe the person who was wandering around, completely independently of another guy who was tracked on video taking pictures of things with numbers on them, dropping backpacks with bombs under benches. All of this is completely random and coincidental, nothiong to see here. We're still searching for the suspect.

Except that while I don't normally wander around taking pictures of things like dumpsters with numbers on them, I do watch a lot of true crime shows on TV. One of the most common things you hear is seasoned detectives saying that in their line of work, there's no such thing as a coincidence. Ezcept that when you're investigating two pipe bombs that coincidentally didn't explode on January 6, there are coincidences up the wazoo, but this is perfectly fine.

Another thing I hear pretty frequently is cold case detectives saying when you've got a cold case that ought to be solvable, but it doesn't quite seem to fall into place, you've simply got to go back to the beginning and look at everything one more time. It's hard to think this hasn't yet been done here.

They need to start with Ms C's videotape of her playing with her puppies, but that's just one of a great many things that don't quite fit.