Details on Alleged DC Pipe Bomber, NYU Assault Suspect's Past, Air India Crash Cause: AM Update 12/5

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It's Friday, December 5th, 2025, and this is your AM update. We were going to track this person to the end of the earth.

After five years, the FBI arrests a suspect in connection with the pipe bombs planted in D.C. on January 5th, 2021.

New details on the lengthy criminal history of the man accused of assaulting an NYU student earlier this week. You look at the facts, and the facts right now say the guy killed all of them.

A former Navy pilot exclusively weighs in on whether the Air India crash was caused intentionally by the pilot. And a major climate change paper that set off alarm bells last year, now retracted.

All that and more coming up in just a moment on your AM update.

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The FBI filing a seven-page affidavit in federal court outlining a meticulous, exhaustive investigation sifting through millions of data points, leading investigators to arrest 30-year-old Brian Cole Jr.

in Woodbridge, Virginia, yesterday morning in connection with the D.C. pipe bombs discovered on January 6th, 2021.

Cole is charged with one count of interstate transportation of an explosive with intent to kill, injure, or damage a building, in addition to maliciously attempting to damage or destroy by explosion.

One pipe bomb found lying near the DNC, another near the RNC headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Neither went off, but investigators did determine viability. Upon taking office, FBI Director Cash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino renewing the Fed's drive to find the suspect.

Seen on video wearing wearing a hood and face mask, planting the devices. Attorney General Pam Bondi, U.S.
Attorney for D.C.

Janine Pierrow, along with Patel and Bongino at a presser yesterday afternoon. The FBI, along with U.S.

Attorney Pirro and all of our prosecutors, have worked tirelessly for months sifting through evidence that had been sitting at the FBI with the Biden administration for four long years.

Re-examined every piece of evidence, sifted through all the data, something that the prior administration refused and failed to do. We were going to track this person to the end of the earth.

There was no way he was getting away. This case involved millions of pieces of data, and it is a huge win because it was like finding a needle in a haystack.

The affidavit laying out the forensic trail that led the feds to coal.

According to investigators, both devices were built from similar component parts, including a one-inch by eight-inch pipe with end caps, 14-gauge electrical wire in red and black, alligator clips connecting the wires, a 9-volt battery and connector, a white kitchen timer, steel wool, paper clips, and homemade black powder.

FBI officials obtaining credit and banking records belonging to Cole showing purchases corresponding to the items used in the devices from October 2019 through December 2020.

Cole purchasing galvanized pipes the same size as the ones planted in DC in June and November of 2020. And caps matching the ones on the device purchased from Home Depot on multiple occasions.

Cole buying five 9-volt battery connectors near the end of 2019 and two white kitchen timers in June 2020.

The affidavit also detailing cell phone tower records, placing Cole's phone in the areas around the RNC and DNC the night the bombs were placed.

His phone pinging cell towers in the area approximately seven times during the period the devices were planted. Cole's height is listed as 5'6 ⁇ .

Video analysis of the suspect in security video estimating earlier a height of 5'7, plus or minus an inch.

Officials executing search warrants on Cole's home in Virginia, where he lives with his mother and other family members. Janine Pirro yesterday on Fox describing what agents found.

When the FBI went in this morning, they found a lot of other

products and pieces for pipe bombs. Like what?

Other pipes, other wires, other timers.

He was into this, very much into this. The family home, a five-bedroom, three-bathroom house valued at $611,000.
Cole graduated from high school in 2013 and did not attend college.

His mother's social media calling him, quote, the other part of my heart. A neighbor describing Cole to the New York Post as, quote, very antisocial, very.
He keeps to himself.

Another saying, quote, he seemed very quiet. He would never make eye contact, almost like he just didn't see you.
Cole worked for a bail bonds company run by his father.

The company, according to the Daily Wire, worked to free illegal immigrants from ICE facilities.

The company reportedly suing the first Trump administration's Department of Homeland Security over its immigration policies, complaining that illegals for whom they posted bond, who then jumped bail out of fear they would be deported by Trump were costing the company money.

The U.S. Court of Appeals tossing the case just weeks before Cole allegedly planted the bombs in D.C.

The wire also reported that Cole's father, in another case, hired the same attorney that represented Trayvon Martin's family, Benjamin Crump, in an effort to go after a Tennessee prosecutor who had concerns about the bail company's ethics after it had been suspended from operating in a nearby district.

Cole accusing the Rutherford County Assistant DA of racial persecution. Here he is again.
This is Cole Sr. at a presser with Crump in November 2021.

We hope that the Department of Justice can come in and do a brief investigation because what we see and what we've seen is

a lot of questionable acts that Mr. Zimmerman has demonstrated towards minority-owned companies.

In April 2024, a state appeals court rejecting Cole's allegations, finding repeated misconduct by Cole's company warranted those sanctions. The WIRE reporting Cole Sr.

initially ran the company out of Fairfax County, Virginia, then moved it to Knoxville, Tennessee around 2017. Brian Cole Jr.
set to make his first court appearance later today.

FBI Director Cash Patel said to appear appear on the MK show today as well, where we will ask him about the case and much more.

New details on the exhaustive criminal history of James Rizzo, the New York man arrested on Tuesday for allegedly assaulting 20-year-old NYU student Amelia Lewis.

Lewis walking to class Monday morning when, as security footage shows, Rizzo stalked her down the sidewalk.

without her knowledge, slapping her hard on the backside before pulling her to the ground by her hair, then running away.

Cops arresting Rizzo on Tuesday in NYU off-campus housing, where prosecutors say the suspect was found surrounded by multiple stolen items totaling thousands of dollars.

It was a story you saw exclusively on the Megan Kelly show. Lewis, a friend of a close family friend of ours.

Rizzo, age 45, appearing in a Manhattan courtroom late Wednesday night, where he was charged with not just the assault on Lewis, but on another woman as well.

Officials also accusing Rizzo of elbowing a 68-year-old woman on Thanksgiving, slamming her into glass, causing an injury requiring six stitches.

Rizzo now charged with assault, persistent sexual abuse, forcible touching, and four counts of burglary, topping a lengthy rap sheet including 16 prior run-ins with law enforcement.

ABC reports that it was just this past September that Rizzo was released from prison after serving two years on a conviction for persistent sexual abuse.

Police saying in December 2023, he groped a 33-year-old woman asking, quote, oh, you want more?

That conviction resulted in Rizzo registering as a level two sex offender, which the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services classifies as someone at a, quote, moderate risk of reoffending.

Rizzo also reportedly charged with attempted murder in 1997 for beating and stabbing a man. The outcome of that case is unclear.

On Wednesday, Rizzo's attorney attempting to persuade the judge to release his client, citing his history of mental illness and housing instability. Hello? How is that an argument for his release?

The judge ordering Rizzo to be taken into custody, where he would receive medical attention and also said the judge undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Rizzo is due back in court in Manhattan on Monday.

He's now also facing parole violation matters, which remain ongoing.

Just to be clear, he was a repeat sex offender on the sex offender registry, newly out of jail, on parole, but already delinquent with his parole officer, squatting in an NYU housing facility, and no one did anything to track him down or turn him in, leaving him free to commit any other crimes he wanted.

Great job, New York City. Great job.

Coming up, U.S.

investigators clashing with Indian officials on the cause of the Air India crash this summer that killed more than 250 people and a doomsday climate report that caused all sorts sorts of commotion last year now retracted

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U.S.

officials now say Air India Flight 171's pilot, Captain Sumit Subberwal, deliberately caused the plane crash in June, killing 241 people on board and 19 more on the ground, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Only one passenger survived.

News that the crash may have been deliberate broke over the summer, but the journal now reports on significant tensions between Indian officials investigating the flight and American officials assisting.

The National Transportation Safety Board, along with reps from the FAA, Boeing, and GE Aerospace, are working with India on the crash inquiry because the plane was manufactured in the U.S.

and it was safety certified by American regulators. According to the journal, tensions beginning almost immediately.
American investigators first arriving in India shortly after the crash.

The chief of India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau reportedly telling them,

We're not a third world country. We can do anything you all can do.
We have the same capabilities. Indian authorities initially refusing to allow U.S.

officials to take their own photos of the wreckage and moving some pieces before they could be examined. U.S.

investigators also struggling to get Indian investigators to download and analyze crucial information from the black box, which contains flight data and a voice recording from the cockpit in the moments leading up to the crash, but ultimately Indian officials complying with U.S.

requests. From the journal, quote, the data showed someone in the cockpit moved the switches that cut off the engine's fuel supply.

The data also showed that Subarwal, the captain, did not pull back on the yoke in the final moments of the accident. In other words, as the plane was descending, he did not try to make it ascend.

The report released by the Indians providing a vague summary of of the moments, failing to identify the pilots by name, just that, quote, one pilot asked the other why he moved the engine cutoff switches while the other pilot denied doing so.

The engine switches moved back to run about 10 seconds later, according to the report. U.S.

officials believe it was the captain who cut the engines as the data shows the first officer did pull up before the plane crashed.

The journal reports its sources are worried the Indian government will not accept pilot suicide and homicide as the conclusion, and instead will point to non-existent problems with the plane or engines.

We spoke with former Navy pilot Wiz Buckley, who is not surprised to hear U.S. officials suspect this crash was deliberately caused by the pilot.
I'm not surprised at all.

We knew this early on. Modern-day jets are tattletales.

They're all electronic. They will let us know if something is wrong with a system.
And if

something would have had to have failed majorly for both engines to completely flame out right after takeoff. And we would have been able to discover that almost immediately.

I mean, and we're talking hours, you know, days after this mishap.

The fact that it's taken so long and it's still taken a long time tells us they're they're trying to you know rule out every possible mechanical weather act of God.

It seems like they're finally begrudgingly getting dragged to the most reasonable conclusion: it was the pilot. We asked Wiz whether it's possible the fuel supply could have been cut by accident.

Absolutely not. These fuel switches are impossible to move by accident.
They actually are a guarded switch, meaning you have to lift them up to move them. So it takes a conscious effort.

You can't bump them with your elbow. You can't hit them with an iPad, anything like that.
These fuel switches have to be lifted up and moved for this very reason.

In 1999, Egypt Air Flight 990 en route from JFK in New York to Cairo, Egypt, crashing into the Atlantic Ocean, killing everyone on board.

Wiz says investigators from both countries disagreed on the cause of that crash, too. Yeah, so this has happened before.

Egypt Air, when the captain went out to use the restroom, the first officer put the plane into a nosedive to crash it into the Atlantic Ocean.

And the captain came in and said, whoa, whoa, what are you doing? And the captain captain was actually fighting with this guy. That's what Boeing said.

That's what the FAA said. But the Egypt investigator said, no way.
You know, there's no way

a Muslim would kill himself or want to murder other people. So I think even to this day, the Egypt air people and the government of Egypt says, no, it was a mechanical issue with the airplane.

He would never do that. Wiz believes India's reluctance to conclude this captain acted intentionally is not based on facts.
All interest is self-interest.

So Boeing clearly doesn't want this to be a mechanical issue, but obviously Air India doesn't want it to be a crazy pilot issue because that makes them look bad.

So if you take out all the politics of it and just look at the facts, it's clear based on the evidence that the pilot did it. So they're probably going to end up disagreeing.

India just doesn't want to lose face. Air India doesn't want to lose customers.

And whereas the United States government has an interest in Boeing aircraft being safe and Boeing obviously has an interest in their people thinking that their airplanes are safe.

So, you know, if those are the two sides, what do we do? You look at the facts and the facts right now say the guy killed all of them.

For those who hear a story like this and feel that they never want to fly again, Wiz described safety measures on U.S. planes to mitigate something like this happening.

We can have ongoing screening, but here in the States, we started doing a two-person cockpit.

Like if the captain, you you know, gets up to go use the restroom, the flight, a flight attendant goes in there. So at least there's another body in the cockpit.

So if the guy or the gal does try and do something, you know, at least maybe they can try and wrestle him out of there. So you can't ever totally get rid of sociopaths or somebody who snaps.

But the days, at least in the United States, of a single person in the cockpit is gone.

We're always going to have somebody in there. It is so much more dangerous driving to and from the airport than the odds of having a suicidal pilot is near zero.
It's never zero, but it's near zero.

Kay, enjoy your flight.

A study predicting dire economic consequences due to climate change published in a major science journal last year, now retracted.

Science journal Nature last April publishing an alarming paper predicting an estimated 62% decline in worldwide economic output by 2100 if carbon emissions continue unabated, roughly tripling what earlier estimates had suggested.

The authors from Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact and Research also finding climate change could cost 38 trillion globally by 2049, the report triggering a frenzy of reporting.

Forbes, climate change could reduce the world economy 19% by 2049. CNN, climate change will make you poorer.
The Guardian, climate crisis, average world incomes to diminish by nearly a fifth by 2050.

Then this week, the authors retracting the paper after economists discovered major issues in the data for Uzbekistan, with the flaw heavily distorting the paper's conclusions.

By excluding Uzbekistan, projected losses in output dropped from 63% to 23%,

in line with all the previous studies. From the retraction note on Nature's website, quote, the authors acknowledge that these changes are too substantial for a correction.

The authors intend to submit a revised version of the paper for peer review.

This retraction coming just weeks after billionaire founder of Microsoft and a leading climate change activist Bill Gates urged a cooling on climate alarmism, including his own.

Gates telling the public, quote, although climate change will have serious consequences, particularly for people in the poorest countries, it will not lead to humanity's demise.

The biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been.

And that'll do it for your AM update. I'm Megan Kelly.

Join me back here for the MK Show live on Series XM's The Megan Kelly channel 111 at Noon East, on youtube.com/slash Megan Kelly, and on all podcast platforms.

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