(NewsNation) — The retired FBI profiler credited with helping crack the “Unabomber” case is curious to learn the motivations of Brian Cole Jr., the 30-year-old Virginia man accused of planting two pipe bombs in the nation’s capital in January 2021.
Cole is accused of targeting the Republican and Democratic committee headquarters on the eve of the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol complex, raising questions about whether the events were linked. No one was injured by the pipe bombs, though authorities said the devices had the potential to kill.
Evidence suggests Cole was compiling materials for the bombs as early as 2019, well before the divisive 2020 election and the challenges that followed, notes James Fitzgerald, a former criminal profiler and forensics linguist for the FBI.
“He was mission-oriented,” Fitzgerald said of the suspect. “What I’m not sure, though, is, what was his mission? What was his motivation?”
He said as criminals go, bombers generally undertake a great risk in building their devices. Rather than attacking someone up close, with a gun or a knife, Fitzerald said, “they want to do this long-distance, with time and separation.”
Federal authorities said Thursday there was no breakthrough in the Washington pipe bomb case that led them to Cole. Rather, agents reexamined existing evidence, something Fitzgerald likened to old-fashioned “gumshoe work.”
“These agents took a bunch of information that was in file drawers and digitized somewhere, and they said, ‘It’s time to review this stuff and go over it once again and break down every single possible iota of evidence here,’” he said.
The infamous bomber that Fitzgerald helped bring down, Montana recluse Ted Kaczynski, killed three people and injured nearly two dozen more in what authorities consider a domestic terror campaign. It spanned nearly two decades before Kaczynski’s arrest in 1996.