Former Capitol police officer sues Blaze Media over pipe bomb allegation

Source: Politico

04/21/2026 04:16 PM EDT


A former Capitol Police officer who helped fend off the Jan. 6, 2021 attack is suing a right-wing media outlet for accusing her of planting pipe bombs that became a key inflection point in that day’s chaos.

Shauni Kerkhoff, 31, accused Blaze Media and two of its former reporters of relying on a faulty “gait analysis” of surveillance footage to wrongly suggest she was the person who planted pipe bombs outside the RNC and DNC the night before the Jan. 6 riot. The false accusations triggered conspiracy theories, threats and an FBI investigation.

“They simply made it up,” lawyers for Kerkhoff argue in the 127-page lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia. “Ms. Kerkhoff was not the January 6 pipe bomber. She was a normal, private person — with a family, career, and hobbies — who was at home with her boyfriend and their dog at the exact time a hooded suspect was captured on CCTV placing pipe bombs in Washington, D.C. Defendants disregarded these facts — and Ms. Kerkhoff’s humanity — when they plucked her from obscurity to satisfy the whims of their conspiracy theory.”

Kerkhoff, who now works at the CIA, says the Blaze and its reporters — Steve Baker and Joseph Hanneman — used the flimsy allegations against her to generate a dangerous furor that fit their conspiratorial narratives about the attack on the Capitol. She is seeking an unspecified financial award.

Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/04/21/january-6-attack-pipe-bomber-lawsuit-00885392