CNN managed to step on a rake again, and this time Jake Tapper was the one holding it. During Thursday’s broadcast of The Lead, Tapper confidently described accused D.C. pipe bomber Brian Cole Jr. as “a white man,” even though the photo his own network had just published showed very clearly that Cole is black. Viewers did not need to adjust their televisions. Tapper really said it.
🚨 WTF?! CNN’s Jake Tapper just went out of his way to LIE and call the J6 pipe bomb a “WHITE MAN”
CNN REFUSED to show a picture of the alleged bomber—who is clearly a BLACK MAN—so I overlayed a photo of him on their clip
CNN can’t help themselves but push anti-white rhetoric pic.twitter.com/Y4UJVjbT8A
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) December 5, 2025
CNN had just become the first outlet to publish an image of Cole, pulled from his mother’s Instagram account. Cole’s father is black too, and at one point even hired civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who rarely gets involved in anything that does not center on racial discrimination. So the idea that Cole could somehow be mistaken for a white man takes a special kind of newsroom tunnel vision.
Naturally, the reaction online was brutal. Benny Johnson wrote, “You can’t make this stuff up.” Another user piled on with, “Jake is sharp as a tack. Nothing gets past him. Dude’s elite!” You could practically hear the sarcasm dripping off the screen. Others were more direct. One viewer insisted, “It’s impossible that he does not know what he is doing,” while Nick Sortor accused CNN of pushing “anti-white rhetoric.”
Not everyone was out for blood though. One person joked that Brian “may be a top 3 white name,” which, to be fair, explains at least part of the confusion. Another blamed production staff, saying Tapper probably “never looked at the graphics” and just read whatever was scripted for him. Honestly, that might be the most believable explanation.
Cole, thirty, was arrested early Thursday in Woodbridge, Virginia. He faces federal charges for using an explosive device and attempted malicious destruction by explosive materials. Authorities say he is the long sought suspect who allegedly planted pipe bombs near both the Republican and Democratic National Committee headquarters on January 5, 2021, just hours before Congress certified the 2020 election results.
Investigators believe Cole may have been building the eight inch galvanized pipe bombs as far back as 2019. The case crawled along for years, with Pam Bondi and Kash Patel calling out the Biden administration for sitting on critical evidence. The Trump administration had renewed the five hundred thousand dollar reward for information leading to an arrest, but now that federal agents made the capture themselves, that money stays put.
In the end, CNN’s big scoop turned into another reminder of why viewers do not exactly treat the network as a beacon of accuracy. Even when they have the picture right in front of them, they still manage to tell a completely different story.
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