Note: All allegations are clearly attributed. This piece is presented as straight news, not as an opinion.
After nearly five years, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) says he is “99% certain” a small group of U.S. Capitol Police officers were involved in an “inside job” surrounding the still-unsolved pipe bombs discovered near the Republican and Democratic national committee headquarters on January 6, 2021.
In a new video interview released by Free the People, Massie and BlazeTV investigative reporter Steve Baker walk through previously unreleased surveillance footage, internal FBI documents, and whistleblower claims that they argue point back to a narrow circle of law enforcement officers and mid-level federal officials.
Federal investigators have never publicly identified the person who planted the two pipe bombs the night before the Capitol riot. The FBI continues to offer a $500,000 reward and has repeatedly urged the public to help identify a hooded suspect captured on grainy security video walking through Capitol Hill with a backpack and placing devices outside the RNC and DNC.
New Video: ‘Backpack Guy,’ ‘Man Bun Guy,’ and a Third Location
Massie told Baker that his staff was among the first to piece together how the second device at the DNC was actually found on January 6 — not by random civilians, but by two plainclothes Capitol Police counter-surveillance officers whom investigators nicknamed “backpack guy” and “man-bun guy.”
“We discovered before anybody else on the planet how the second pipe bomb on January 6 was found,” Massie said, describing hours spent in a Capitol video review room during the 118th Congress. He said staff traced the movements of the two officers who walked up to police SUVs outside the DNC and reported the device.
According to Massie, newly surfaced footage compiled by Baker and an outside video analyst appears to show those same two officers doing more than just stumbling across a suspicious object.
The edited clips — not yet released by the FBI but shown in the Free the People segment — allegedly depict:
- The hooded pipe-bomb suspect sitting for about 77 seconds beside a bush outside the Congressional Black Caucus Institute (CBCI), rummaging in a backpack and leaning under the shrub
- The same suspect later placing a device by a bench outside the DNC
- The two counter-surveillance officers arriving on January 6 after the first bomb at the RNC was reported, walking past the CBCI bush once, then returning roughly 40 seconds later so that “backpack guy” can lean back and look underneath it
- The pair then circling over to the DNC, passing the benches once, and only on a second pass alerting nearby officers to the device under a different bush
Massie said the footage raised what he framed as basic statistical and investigative questions.
“What is the probability that two pipe bombs laid out in the open for 16 hours … [both] get discovered within 20 minutes of each other, by plainclothes officers, after the first breach?” he asked, arguing the odds were “extremely low” without some foreknowledge.
Massie added that when he later brought one of the counter-surveillance officers into his congressional office for an informal, un-transcribed conversation — accompanied by then-Capitol Police Assistant Chief Ashan Benedict, a former ATF special agent — the officer could not give a clear answer for why he and his partner went to those specific locations or stopped searching for additional devices after the second bomb was found.
“It was the weirdest meeting in the world,” Massie said in the interview. “There was no good reason for why the search for pipe bombs was over once they found the second pipe bomb.”
Phone Data, ‘Exclusion List,’ and a Whistleblower
The congressman’s renewed push comes on the heels of a joint interim report he co-authored with Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) in January titled “Four Years Later: Examining the State of the Investigation into the RNC and DNC Pipe Bombs.” That report stressed that although the FBI dedicated dozens of agents, issued multiple geofence warrants, and pulled large data sets from cell carriers and advertising-technology firms, the bomber remains unidentified.
One section of that report states that by early February 2021, the FBI had identified “186 [phone] numbers of interest” from geofence and cell-tower records around the bomb sites. Of those, 36 numbers were assigned for interviews, 98 required more investigative work, and 51 were flagged as “not needing further action” because they “belong[ed] to law enforcement officers or persons on the exclusion list.”
In the interview, Massie linked that internal FBI categorization to his concerns about an “inside job,” saying it meant that “if a police officer had been involved the night before, the phone data was excluded from tracking and geofencing.”
Massie also revisited testimony from former FBI Washington Field Office chief Steven D’Antuono, who told the House Judiciary Committee last year that potentially helpful location data from one cellular provider had been “corrupted,” hindering efforts to pinpoint the suspect’s device.
According to the joint report, Loudermilk later wrote to several major telecom CEOs; the companies told Congress they did not provide corrupted data to the FBI and had not been contacted by the Bureau about such a problem.
Separately, Massie said he has now received a protected disclosure from a current FBI employee who alleges that a promising lead involving two “persons of interest” in Falls Church, Virginia — known inside the case file as POI-2 and POI-3 — was dropped after only two days of surveillance, even though agents had described the pair’s movements as “highly suspicious” in internal emails. The House report confirms that FBI special operations teams conducted physical surveillance on two such persons of interest before ultimately ruling them out months later.
Massie said the whistleblower claims that the case team’s suggested follow-up investigative steps were “just dropped,” and that follow-up interviews with the two individuals were conducted by a transit police officer rather than FBI agents.
Alleged Threats and FBI Response
In one of the most explosive new allegations, Massie said on camera that a senior FBI official’s staffer threatened his office with a separate fraud investigation after he raised concerns about the whistleblower’s treatment.
“One of Director Patel’s staff threatened my staff with a criminal investigation if we didn’t straighten up, play ball,” Massie said.
Massie said he relayed that allegation directly to a top FBI official in a subsequent phone call and later received what he described as a “non-apology” text from the staffer saying, “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.”
He also said an FBI employee he had not spoken with for months texted him urgently as he was flying to Washington to meet Baker about the case and wrote, “Yeah, I heard you were coming to D.C.” Massie claimed he had not shared his travel plans even with his own staff or family and called the timing “disconcerting.”
The FBI has not publicly commented on Massie’s latest accusations. The Bureau has previously defended its handling of the pipe bomb probe, noting that agents have conducted more than 1,000 interviews, reviewed some 39,000 video files, and chased down numerous false leads, including a gym employee whose limp was scrutinized because it resembled the bomber’s unusual gait.
Capitol Police, Secret Service, and Missing Records
Massie was careful to say he believes “99% of the Capitol Hill Police are top-notch” and that front-line officers “put their lives on the line.” But he argued that a small cluster of insiders — combined with opaque policies and missing records — has eroded trust.
Among the issues raised in the Loudermilk–Massie report and in the new interview:
- Multiple security cameras near the DNC were allegedly turned away when the second bomb was discovered and later destroyed, although alternative angles allowed investigators to reconstruct some of the scene.
- The location where the DNC device was eventually found — under a bench near a parking garage entrance — was in a Capitol Police CCTV “blind spot,” although DNC-owned cameras captured the suspect briefly sitting at a bench nearby the night before.
- The Secret Service wiped text messages and some device data from agents assigned to Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’s detail despite multiple preservation letters from Congress and inspectors general, blaming a routine equipment upgrade.
Massie said former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund has told Congress there is “no way” the devices were part of any authorized training exercise, given the number of permitted protests and events on January 5–6 and the risk of confusion.
‘Either Incompetent or Complicit’
The FBI continues to say it does not know who planted the bombs or why. But with the suspect still at large and public pressure growing from both left- and right-leaning critics, Massie argued that the time for deference to the Bureau’s internal explanations is over.
“FBI management is either incompetent or complicit,” he said, clarifying that he was referring not to the current director and deputy director personally, but to the middle management and case supervisors who were in place when the bombs were planted.
“The only way you could possibly get to the bottom of all this is to get one of these people in,” Massie added, urging federal investigators to subpoena and formally interview the counter-surveillance officers and senior officials who oversaw the initial response, under oath and on the record. “Somebody needs — the FBI needs — to get those folks in [and] maybe offer one of them a deal if they’ll explain everything.”
In the meantime, the FBI’s half-million-dollar reward remains active, and the hooded pipe-bomb suspect remains nameless.