Candace Owens Says Feds Coerced Confession From Autistic J6 Pipe Bomb Suspect

Candace Owens said Thursday that federal agents coerced a confession out of Brian Cole Jr., the 31-year-old Virginia man charged with planting pipe bombs outside the Republican and Democratic national committee headquarters on January 5, 2021. His lawyers say he is autistic, and they are asking a federal judge to throw out the confession.

"It's positively sickening, how they coerced his confession out of him," Owens said on her podcast, Candace. "Positively sickening, as in, people should go to prison over this. We should be able to find out who the federal agents were, who sat him down."

Her target was the FBI under Director Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, the bureau's former deputy director. She said that "suddenly, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, they found the guy" once people began "sniffing around that story five years later." The FBI says Cole confessed, and the coercion account is an allegation made by his defense.

What the Brian Cole Jr. Motion to Suppress Says

The passages Owens read on air come from a motion to suppress that Cole's lawyers filed. It challenges statements he made in a custodial interrogation on December 4, 2025, the Washington Examiner reported.

As Owens read it, the motion says Cole, left alone in the room, repeated "I didn't, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't." It says he later wrote, "everything is just, everything is just blank." Agents then cued a surveillance video and asked him to identify the man in it. According to the motion, he twice denied recognizing the man, until an agent warned that "lying to federal agents is breaking the law. That's another crime." Seconds later, Cole answered yes.

The defense also says agents threatened to bring in members of his family. His attorneys say he has a Level 1 autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. The filing cites a report by Richard Leo, a professor of law and psychology at the University of San Francisco, which says the interrogation "involved the use of psychological interrogation techniques" that "increase the risk of eliciting false and unreliable statements." The Justice Department told The Blaze that it "intends to respond to the defense's motion in a filing with the Court."

The Pipe Bomb Case Record

On Wednesday, a grand jury returned a superseding indictment that doubled the charges to eight felony counts, giving each bomb its own set of counts. Cole was arraigned Thursday. He has pleaded not guilty to the earlier charges, the Washington Examiner reported.

In January, Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh ordered him held before trial, writing that "it was luck, not lack of effort" that the devices did not go off.

Candace Owens' Unsupported Claims

Owens went well beyond the court record. She called the case "another federal game set up, totally completely set up. The feds were behind this." She also said that "everyone on Capitol Hill knows that the individual was actually out of Nancy Pelosi's office and it was a woman, allegedly." She offered no evidence for either claim, and neither appears in the defense filing.

She also suggested that Scripps News was being fed footage. The same Scripps team aired a 2024 traffic-crash video of Cole and a 2022 crash video of Tyler Robinson, the man charged with killing Charlie Kirk. "I don't believe in a coincidence," Owens said, adding that the feds may be "highlighting people who are autistic on the spectrum." In the clip Owens played, Scripps correspondent Lori Jane Gliha explained how the Robinson video was obtained: "part of our research included contacting police departments in the communities in the area where Tyler Robinson lived and asking for any reports or videos."

Kash Patel's FBI Faces Pressure From the Right

Owens is not alone. Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky has called on Patel to resign over the interrogation, the Washington Examiner reported. Cole's parents have told their account to Tucker Carlson, NBC Washington reported. The same report noted that Bongino, before he joined the FBI as deputy director, said he had "zero doubt" the bombs were an inside job.

The Cole segment closed an episode mostly devoted to Owens' running feud with Erika Kirk and Turning Point USA.

Whether Cole's own words reach a jury in February is now up to U.S. District Judge Amir Ali.