First things first: Chris Wray’s FBI didn’t fail you. They betrayed you.

Four years of “failure” in the DC Pipe Bomber case suggests an honest-but-incompetent effort on behalf of the world’s foremost investigative agency to find the person who planted functional and potentially deadly pipe bombs just outside the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican National Committees on the night of January 5, 2021. The reality, though, is that the FBI spent years persecuting every touristy grandma who wandered into the Capitol on January 6 while completely ignoring the trove of pipe-bomb evidence.

“We did not discover any new information,” said FBI Director Kash Patel, who added that his bureau “reexamined every piece of evidence, sifted through all the data, something that the prior administration refused and failed to do!”

Think about it: The pipe bomber committed his crime in the most heavily surveilled area of perhaps the most heavily surveilled city in the world. And the FBI was able to, within days of January 6, positively identify hundreds of Trump supporters who were at the Capitol that day and then branch out across the country to conduct armed pre-dawn raids at their homes. And yet Wray’s rotten-at-the-top FBI and the Biden Two-Tiered Justice Department somehow couldn’t manage to find this guy?

That guy is apparently 30-year-old Brian Cole Jr. of Woodbridge, Virginia, who’ll be arraigned in DC federal court this afternoon. Cole is a black man, and he’s apparently a Trump-hating social justice advocate, not some fringy bearded knuckle-dragging white Trumper. So he clearly doesn’t fit The Narrative, does he?

“How much earlier could we have caught this guy if resources hadn’t been diverted?” asked Democrat Senator Mark Warner, in a desperate attempt to divert attention from Cole’s political affiliation to changes Patel and President Donald Trump are making at the FBI.

Well, about four years earlier, as it turns out.

The smoking gun of the pre-Trump FBI’s lie? That’s easy, and it’s plain as day. Georgia Republican Congressman Barry Loudermilk’s House Administration Oversight Subcommittee told us more than a year ago that cellular carriers “have told Congress they possess intact phone usage data from the vicinity where two pipe bombs were planted” just before the January 6 Capitol riot, and this revelation is “directly disputing FBI testimony that agents couldn’t identify a suspect because the phone data was corrupted.”

As Patel put it yesterday, “We went back and looked at the cellphone tower data dumps. We went back and looked at the providers and what information they provided pursuant to search warrants at the time and asked questions such as, ‘Why weren’t all the phone numbers scrubbed?’ ‘Why aren’t they connected?’ And, ‘Why wasn’t there any geolocational data done?’ That is either sheer incompetence or complete intentional negligence — and neither of which is acceptable for this FBI.”

Here’s an armchair investigative tip: Instead of poring over the purchase receipts of umpteen-thousand pipe endcaps at Home Depot and Lowe’s and elsewhere, why not first narrow your search to, say, all the purchasers of an exceedingly rare pair of Nike Air Max Speed Turf shoes in black-gray-yellow and in a size befitting the profile of the 5-foot-7-ish person we’ve been seeing for years in all that video footage? I mean, those Nikes aren’t as rare as the size-12 Bruno Magli Lorenzos whose bloody footprints happened to be all over the crime scene at Nicole Brown Simpson’s house 31 years ago, but still. Apparently, only 25,000 of that specific Nike shoe were ever sold anywhere. Anyway.

Now if Patel and company could only figure out why the FBI didn’t investigate the group of guys who constructed that hangman’s gallows in broad daylight on Capitol Hill on the morning of January 6 — you know, the group of guys who are clearly visible in photos taken that day, the group of guys who dispatched two of their members to buy coffee at 6:45 a.m. from a coffee shop right across the street from the FBI building at 601 4th Street NW. That group of guys.

As to the pipe bomber, our Mark Alexander asks, “Other than his motivation, WHY did this take five years to resolve? The answer in part is because Biden’s weaponized DOJ spent so much time on the J6 prosecutions of mostly nonviolent offenders.”

On a related note, one news organization appears to be in big trouble for having jumped the gun on the identity of the pipe bomber. Someone might be announcing a massive lawsuit against Glenn Beck’s media empire in 5, 4, 3…