Exclusive | Republicans grill FBI over troubling discrepancy about Jan. 6 pipe-bomb suspect still roaming free

GOP lawmakers are demanding answers from the FBI after a former head of the bureau’s DC office claimed a person who laid pipe bombs before the Jan.6 riots has not been ID’d in part because of “corrupted” cellular data — a fact disputed by major US carriers.Sen.

Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Rep.Jim Jordan of Ohio and Rep.

Barry Loudermilk of Georgia fired off a letter Monday to the bureau’s acting director, Brian Driscoll, about the troubling discrepancy.The congressmen wrote that the cell carriers “indicated that they neither provided corrupted data to the FBI nor received any notification from the FBI of any issues accessing the data.”The pols’ inquiry comes after FBI Washington Field Office Assistant Director in Charge Steven D’Antuono — who led the probe of pipe bombs placed outside Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee headquarters before the riot four years ago — testified before Congress in June 2023 that “some data” had been “corrupted by one of the providers, not purposely.“It wasn’t purposely corrupted.I don’t want any conspiracy theories.

But that could have been good information that we don’t have, right? So that is painful for us to not to have that,” D’Antuono told members and staff of the House Judiciary Committee at the time.The discrepancy highlighted by the Republican lawmakers raises questions about whether the FBI abandoned its probe too early, thinking the wannabe bomber’s identity was not as important as rounding up other Jan.6 criminals and thus putting its resources elsewhere.A report issued by House Republicans earlier this month noted that the agency’s probe into the bombs ended after about a month — leaving the would-be violent suspect still roaming free.“By the end of February 2021, the FBI began diverting resources away from the pipe bomb investigation,” the report said.“One possible explanation for the reduction in resources is that the number of credible le...