FBI Pushes Back Against The Blaze’s Report That Claims To Identify DNC Pipe Bomber

The FBI has pushed back against The Blaze’s recent story that claims a former Capitol Police officer was a potential match for the individual who placed pipe bombs outside of the DNC on January 5th.

In a report by the conservative news site The Blaze, the news site claimed “gait analysis” found a 94% match between the a capitol police officer and the pipe bomb suspect.

FBI Director Dan Bongino rejected The Blaze’s report and took to X and stated the Blaze’s most recent report was “grossly inaccurate.”

NBC News reported more details on the FBI’s response to The Blaze’s story:

The FBI on Thursday threw cold water on a story on a right-wing website that named a former Capitol Police officer as a potential match for the individual who planted pipe bombs at the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee before the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In a letter to a Republican congressman who leads a new committee investigating Jan. 6, the FBI explained that it had been tracking a separate person of interest who took photos near the RNC on Jan. 5 and then took the Metro back to his friend’s home, where he was staying to attend a Jan. 6 rally.

The FBI said it had focused on the home because the person taking the photos used the homeowner’s SmartTrip card on the Metro. The congressman, Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, posted a section of the letter on X, which was amplified by the FBI Rapid Response account.

The owner of the home happened to be a neighbor of a former Capitol Police officer named in a story as a potential suspect in the pipe bomb incident on the conservative news site, The Blaze. The Blaze cited a “gait analysis” — a study of how a person walks — saying that it found a 94% match between the officer and the suspect. The former officer now works in campus security for the CIA, a source with knowledge of the person’s employment told NBC News.

FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino posted Thursday that some reporting about “prior persons of interest is grossly inaccurate and serves only to mislead the public.”

NBC News is not naming the former officer, as the person has not been credibly accused of any wrongdoing.

In a statement given to NBC News on Friday, an attorney for the officer said they had been “falsely accused in social media accounts of being involved in the placement of pipe bombs outside the DNC and RNC buildings on the evening of January 5, 2021,” and noted that the officer had testified at two Jan. 6 trials and “categorically denies” involvement with the pipe bombs.

“These shameful allegations are recklessly false, absurd, and defamatory,” the attorney, Steve Bunnell, said in a statement first provided to The Washington Post.

The home appears to have come into recent focus because of former FBI Special Agent Kyle Seraphin, who was close with Kash Patel but has since become a major critic of the FBI

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The Washington Post reported, Shauni Kerkhoff has sought legal counsel:

Last week, several Republican lawmakers latched onto a claim, published in the conservative news outlet The Blaze, that a “gait analysis” suggested the person captured on security videos on the night of Jan. 5, 2021, was a former officer with the Capitol Police. The officer, Shauni Kerkhoff, was on duty at the Capitol the following day and testified in some of the first trials against rioters.

Steve Bunnell, an attorney for Kerkhoff, voluntarily identified his client by name in a statement to The Washington Post, saying she had been so widely and falsely accused in recent days on social media that she had to push back. “These shameful allegations are recklessly false, absurd, and defamatory. Ms. Kerkhoff categorically denies them,” said Bunnell, a former federal prosecutor.

Ed Martin, an associate deputy attorney general in the Justice Department, dismissed a claim on the social media platform X on Friday that he had determined Kerkhoff was the bomber. “This is false. Neither Mr. Martin, nor DOJ has made this determination,” Martin wrote on X.
The FBI did not respond to questions about Kerkhoff but said solving the pipe-bomb case “remains a high priority for the FBI and our law enforcement partners.”

In the months after Jan. 6, FBI officials declined to assign a single agent to investigate Donald Trump or those around him for efforts to overturn the results of the presidential election — actions that later became central to special counsel Jack Smith’s ill-fated case against Trump.

By contrast, Bureau leaders in the Washington Field Office quickly poured resources into the pipe-bomb investigation. They saw the would-be bomber as a key to understanding how extensively the day’s political violence had been planned — and whether the bombs were intended to divert police from the Capitol as Trump’s supporters stormed it.
One of the first steps that FBI investigators took was to scour the blocks around the sites where the bombs were found in the hour before the riot began — one near a dumpster outside the Republican Party headquarters, and the other near a bush and garage entrance to the Democratic National Committee building.