Andrew McCabe on 2021 D.C. Pipe Bomb Case: ‘These Are Tough Cases’; ‘It Took the FBI 18 Years to Find the Unabomber’

EXCERPT:

MCCABE: “And I‘m sure a lot of that data was collected before this new, you know, refresh took place. But what they‘ve done is they‘ve taken every single piece of the bomb, from the end cap to the pipe to the battery connectors to the wires, every little piece they‘ve identified, where those things are sold. And they looked at the populations of people that bought each one. And as you layer that information on top of each other, you cross-correlate all that data, a smaller and smaller population of people begins to emerge. And some of the people in that population will be electricians or plumbers or people who would buy those things normally in the course of their work. But, eventually, your bomber, or a small group of potential bombers, rises to the top, and then you can do the very localized surveillance sort of work that‘s required to kind of take that next step. I‘m sure some version of that was happening for the entire time they‘ve been working this case. Let‘s remember, it took the FBI 18 years to find the Unabomber, right, after his first bomb in 1978. So, these are tough cases and sometimes take a long time.”