EARLY SATURDAY MORNING, the Blaze published the most hyped investigation from a right-wing media outlet in recent memory—an exposé on what it claimed was the likely identity of the January 6th pipe bomber.
In the Blaze’s telling, a female former Capitol Police officer who joined the CIA shortly after January 6th was “a forensic match” for the individual caught on camera footage the night before. The article, which included the woman’s name and several pictures of her, purported to be buttressed by “gait analysis” comparing the ex-officer to videos of the bomber.
The article’s claims seemed like the first major development in a mystery that has befuddled Washington for years. They were quickly picked up by leading Republicans, including Trump appointee Kari Lake and several Republican members of Congress. Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.), the chair of the House’s new January 6th subcommittee, promoted the story on social media, as did Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). Rep. Anna Paulina Luna declared on X that “a capitol police officer placed a pipe bomb at the RNC on J6,” adding that the Blaze story was proof that Republicans would “all be in the gulag” if not for Trump.
“This woman was the Capitol Hill pipe bomber,” wrote Women for Trump cofounder Amy Kremer on X, who helped organize the Ellipse rally that preceded the January 6th riot.
Two days later, it seems like that excitement may have been more than a little overcooked. Rather than matching the Blaze’s reporting, rival January 6th reporters on the right are casting doubt on its conclusion. The Justice Department and FBI have stayed notably silent on the claims. And instead of uncovering the likely identity of the pipe bomb–dropping suspect, the Blaze may have a legal mess on its hands.
In a sign of how things are going, Luna has quietly deleted her post about the woman’s identity.
No one has ever been publicly identified by law enforcement as a suspect in the pipe-bomb case, which saw an unknown figure lay bombs outside both Republican and Democratic headquarters on Capitol Hill ahead of the riot.
The mystery has loomed especially large for conservatives, who see the FBI’s failure to catch the perpetrator as proof that the laying of the bombs—and perhaps the Capitol riot itself—was an inside job orchestrated by federal law enforcement to entrap Trump supporters. In the most common version of this theory, the devices were a ruse meant to distract Capitol Police and ratchet up tensions between law enforcement and pro-Trump protesters right before the riot began. In the most nefarious version, the bombs were meant to further portray the protesters as violent, reckless, and criminal.
When Trump took office again, MAGA expected answers. But, frustratingly for the right, the installation of Trump diehards like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino as the leaders of the FBI hasn’t turned up any more information. In October, the new Trumpified FBI appeared to concede that it didn’t have any kind of information about a “false flag” operation when it put out another call for information about the bombs, which includes a $500,000 reward. (If you know who the pipe bomb–layer is, please don’t hesitate to pick up that phone and dial 1-800-CALL-FBI!)
The idea of a CIA and Capitol Police connection to the unexploded IEDs landed like a bombshell (sorry) on the right in part because of days of breathless promotion from the Blaze. The story would reveal “the biggest scandal of my lifetime, maybe in the last hundred years,” declared Blaze founder Glenn Beck a few days before it ran. The pipe-bomb suspect, according to Beck, was “at the highest levels of government.”
One of the reporters on the story, Steve Baker, posted on X that the investigation had uncovered “the biggest scandal and conspiracy in American history.” The story’s publication had been preceded by days of frenzied speculation among right-wing conspiracy theorists, especially after Baker said the article was delayed at the request of government sources.
The Blaze story is unique for two reasons. For one, Baker was himself a January 6th defendant; he pleaded guilty to his role in the riot late last year. Before his March sentencing could take place, Trump ordered the mass-pardon of January 6th participants, which included Baker.
Perhaps more important, though, is that right-wing media outlets have gotten more gun-shy about implicating non-public people of crimes. After landmark lawsuits resulted in rulings against InfoWars and Fox News over conspiracy theories, putting them on the hook for massive amounts in damages, right-wing pundits have tended to go after more vaporous groups like the “cabal” or even just an unnamed “they,” the better to avoid the prospect of a similarly damaging libel suit. The fact that Baker had named and published photos of a specific person gave the impression that he might actually have the goods.
But the actual reporting was not exactly definitive. To make their case against the former Capitol Police officer, Baker and coauthor Joseph M. Hanneman focused on a comparison between the officer’s gait, some of which was apparently captured in years-old footage of her playing soccer, and footage of the pipe-bomb suspect from the night of January 5, 2021. Instead of using suspect footage released by the FBI, however, the Blaze claims it used footage “from another source” the article doesn’t name.
Critically, the Blaze didn’t release an actual video comparison or significant details of the gait analysis. Instead, it draws on the work of a man the Blaze called a “video sleuth,” a little-known X user named Armitas whose online profile image is a picture from the 1998 role-playing video game Xenogears.
The story is bolstered by claims that the FBI tied the woman’s neighbor to a vehicle and subway card connected to the setting of the bomb. Former FBI agent Kyle Seraphin, who has become a right-wing media personality in his own right after leaving the bureau, is quoted in the article as saying he worked on a surveillance detail monitoring the woman’s neighbor in the aftermath of January 6th.
That’s extremely circumstantial stuff that raises more questions than it answers: Who is Armitas? How reliable is “gait analysis”? If they were surveilling this person’s neighbor right after January 6th, then why didn’t they act on that tip or hunch in the subsequent four and a half years?
There is another piece of critical context that is worth noting here. The woman who was identified by the Blaze as being responsible for laying the pipe bombs was already a target of the MAGA right. She was photographed as one of the officers firing pepper balls at January 6th rioters, and later testified against January 6th participants in at least two cases, according to court records. All of which raises an additional question: Were the amateur investigators on the right looking into her specifically—or even searching for ways to implicate her specifically?
JUST AS THE BLAZE ARTICLE WAS TAKING OFF, it suffered a near-immediate blow to its credibility. While the article initially claimed that the woman now works on CIA director John Ratcliffe’s security detail, the article was corrected after the CIA clarified that she worked as a security guard on CIA property.
Baker and Hanneman don’t have a sterling record when it comes to prior reporting about the pipe-bomb story. In August 2024, they reported for the Blaze that Capitol Police officers had “interacted” with the pipe-bomb suspect right around the time the bombs were planted. That would imply the agency was somehow involved in the bombing. Shortly after, however, the Blaze added an editor’s note undermining the story’s entire premise, conceding that the person seen in the video was not the bomb-dropper.
No one has seized on these credibility questions more enthusiastically than Julie Kelly, a right-wing media figure who has become the dean of the MAGA January 6th counternarrative. Kelly, who has had her own investigations into the pipe-bomb mystery, has lambasted the Blaze for not including the alternate video they claim more clearly shows the gait in question in their story.
“I am shocked at the weak evidence cited in The Blaze article and nonexistent evidence contained in the piece itself,” Kelly tweeted.
That’s prompted pushback from other MAGA personalities who are on board with Gaitgate (sorry again). Blogger Joe Hoft, cofounder of the Gateway Pundit—or should I say Gait-way Pundit?—theorized that Kelly wants the FBI’s $500,000 reward for the pipe-bomb suspect’s identity for herself.
The most damning evidence against the Blaze story, however, may come from the Trump administration. High-ranking Justice Department official Ed Martin appeared to support the article before it came out, tweeting sequentially “P” “I” “P” “E?” before deleting the posts containing the letters. At the same time, Martin tweeted out that neither he nor the FBI had made a determination of the pipe–bomb suspect’s identity.
In a statement sent to several outlets, including The Bulwark, the FBI said it was still investigating the case—phrasing that has been taken by many on the right as proof that the former Capitol Police officer isn’t a suspect.
“There’s no other way to accept this statement, other than they’re saying the Blaze has it wrong,” Trump ally Benny Johnson said on his show on Monday.
If its claims prove false, the Blaze could be left holding the bag for a potentially mammoth libel suit. In its Saturday article, the Blaze noted that the woman’s Alexandria home was already being protected by law enforcement officers.
By Monday, Beck himself appeared to be walking away from the story he had trumpeted just a few days earlier as “the biggest scandal of my lifetime.” Despite the Blaze publishing the officer’s name on Saturday, Beck refused to name the woman on his podcast, saying “a match is not guilt.”
“This person of interest is still a citizen whose life carries the same dignity and presumption of innocence as yours and mine,” Beck said. “I can’t tell you what is true in this story yet.”
