I’m not sure what his theory is here and I’m not sure he’s sure either. But the nice thing about “just asking questions” is that you don’t need to have a fully formulated theory. You’re … just asking questions.

His question are leading, though, which means he has some suspicions. From what I can tell, his theory is this: The FBI, possibly in cahoots with the Biden campaign, planted the two pipe bombs at the RNC and DNC to divert police resources from the Capitol as the insurrection began, all part of their sinister plot to make Trumpers look bad on January 6. Even more alarming, Kamala Harris ended up visiting DNC headquarters that morning, passing within yards of the still undiscovered bomb. It’s unclear whether Tucker thinks Harris knew the bomb was there or if some mastermind who knew it was there encouraged her to go, but it’s all far too coincidental to be innocent. And it’s weird that the public didn’t know until just last month that Harris was at the DNC that day. There must be a cover-up of sorts happening.

In fairness to him, that last part is pretty weird. Although Occam’s Razor suggests that the reason for keeping it quiet is that Team Biden thought the security lapse was embarrassing and didn’t want to call attention to it. You typically don’t want to signal to enemy powers that the vice president’s security detail may not be up to snuff.

Tucker goes on to claim that the bombs were basically inert, evidence that they were a pre-planned diversion rather than a serious attempt to do harm. That’s not what the FBI says, though:

Both devices were viable and could have been detonated, resulting in serious injury or death. The #FBI and @ATFHQ are offering a reward of up to $100,000 for info. leading to the location, arrest, and conviction of the person(s) responsible for the placement of the bombs. 2/3

— FBI Washington Field (@FBIWFO) January 6, 2022

He also finds it bizarre that the feds have been unable to identify a suspect after a year of investigation, another hint that this was an inside job and that they’re not earnestly looking for a suspect. Is it bizarre, though? The suspect was wearing a hood, a mask, and gloves. The bombs were made with commonly available materials. It took the feds awhile to identify a suspect in the anthrax letters of 2001 even though anthrax is a far more exotic substance, unavailable to the general public. Why wouldn’t it take them awhile to find this guy?

The key to his theory, if I’m understanding him correctly, is the timing. What are the odds that the bombs would be found at almost the precise moment that crowds began to confront police outside the Capitol, drawing the FBI and other law enforcement to the RNC and DNC instead? Could it be that an FBI agent just happened to stumble across one of the bombs at the most opportune moment?

Actually, no. The person who found the bomb at the RNC — which was discovered before the one at the DNC — was a woman en route from doing her laundry. She was walking by the building and spotted something odd:

To reach the laundry room, Younger must walk out the front of her building and walk around to the back via an alleyway that’s shared with the Republican National Committee building, which is located at 310 First St. Southeast.

“It’s an old city block with the buildings flush together,” [Karlin] Younger says. She started her laundry, returned to her apartment, and then around 12:40 p.m. went back out to put her clothes in the dryer.

Younger closed the back gate and as she did so, looked down at what she thought was a piece of garbage or recycling intended for the cans that sit near the gate.

Then she looked a little closer.

“It was right next to the garbage can,” she says. “I saw a tangle of wires. I looked closer and saw a six-inch pipe capped on both ends. Then I saw a timer that was stuck on the number 20. It was a radial dial.”

She told a security guard outside the RNC to come look. He sent a few other guards over and they realized what it was. The police were called, arrived almost immediately, and began evacuating the block. I’m guessing that as word got back to police headquarters that a bomb had been found, they decided to do a sweep of DNC headquarters too. And lo and behold.

Is Younger in on the FBI bomb-planting plot? If not, how is the timing of the bomb’s discovery anything but a coincidence with the start of the insurrection?

Also, if the point of this alleged bomb plot was to divert the maximum number of police away from the Capitol, why wouldn’t the plotters have made sure to detonate the bombs? More chaos means more resources drawn to the scene and more blame unfairly attributed to the patriots who were busy at the time punching cops at the Capitol.

Any false-flag theory about the January 6 pipe bombs should also have to grapple with the case of Lonnie Coffman. Quote: “On January 6, Coffman parked his truck — which contained unregistered firearms, a crossbow, machetes, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, a large capacity ammo clip and 11 Mason jars filled with gasoline and Styrofoam — a few blocks from the Capitol.” Coffman wasn’t an agent provocateur, needless to say; he pleaded guilty to federal charges in November and is currently serving time. If we can believe that Coffman was prepared to commit violence against the political establishment in the name of “stopping the steal,” why is it hard to believe the RNC/DNC bomber was in town for similar reasons?

Tucker and other January 6 apologists have spent months trying to advance the idea that the riot was an inside job. Sometimes that means pointing at Ray Epps, sometimes it means dark insinuations about whether unindicted co-conspirators named in indictments of the rioters might be undercover federal agents, sometimes it means casually wondering whether the sitting vice president may have known something in advance about a bomb being planted outside her own party’s HQ. All of that is designed to exculpate the insurrectionists by reframing them as victims that day rather than offenders. But even if it were true that there were FBI agents in the crowd egging them on, Tim Miller asked last year, what would that prove?

Imagine that FBI agents infiltrated the Women’s March, or the March for Life, or an LGBT rights rally. Now imagine that some tough guy crisis actors showed up, waited for the right moment, looked at their fellow protestors and said “Let’s Charge The Capitol!”

How do you think that would’ve played out exactly? Would the well of the Senate have been breached by a rabid mob in pink pussy hats? Would the nice pro-life kids have gone crazy and beaten the cops senseless? Would the Capitol police have gotten glitter bombed and attacked with rainbow flags?

I mean the whole notion is absurd on its face.

There are no magic words that will convince someone to riot if they’re not already very much inclined to do so. But here’s Tucker with the counterargument, that it’s all a deep-state plot.

Who planted the pipe bombs found on January 6? Thirteen months later, and the FBI still has no idea. pic.twitter.com/oql0BLRx12

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) February 10, 2022