FBI Director Kash Patel told Newsmax on Thursday that the arrest of a suspect in the 2021 pipe bomb case proves what he and others long believed: that the Biden administration allowed critical evidence to sit untouched for years, forcing the incoming Trump team to rebuild the investigation from the ground up.
Appearing on "Greg Kelly Reports," Patel called the breakthrough "a victory for the team across the interagency," crediting state and local law enforcement along with a newly energized federal effort.
"This is what interagency work looks like when you've got state and local authorities fix on a target of such high public priority," Patel told Newsmax. "In eight months, we came in and reviewed all of the evidence that had sat alone and on the sidelines for the prior four years of the Biden administration."
Patel said Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino assembled a nationwide team of specialists who were ordered to rescrub the massive trove of digital data, reexamine leads, and rebuild what he suggested had been a stalled or neglected probe.
"We demanded they reevaluate the information and evidence, scrub the cell phone logs and data centers, and look for investigative leads," Patel said. "This is what good cop work looks like."
Patel didn't mince words about why the case had remained unsolved for nearly five years.
"In my opinion, the prior administration either was completely incompetent or intentional in their weaponization of justice and law enforcement," he said. "And we know they have a track record — Arctic Frost, Russiagate, and so many others. So I put this in that folder."
He emphasized that the new investigative push involved intense manual work, not simply software queries.
"Look at 3 million lines of information. Look at the cell tower data dumps, triangulate, bring in the FBI's evidence response teams and subject matter experts," Patel explained. "This isn't some computer system where you dump in information and ask what it spits out. This is hundreds of people, thousands of man-hours, going line by line."
Once investigators isolated what they believed was the key breakthrough, Patel said the team moved swiftly with the Justice Department to obtain warrants, secure the community, and build a prosecutable case.
"Coming up short was not an acceptable position for me," Patel said, adding that the successful arrest reflects a return to objective, unpoliticized law enforcement.
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