Did the FBI Tamper with the Frame Rate of the Jan 6 Pipe Bomb Footage?

Original article. Hard evidence of coverup. We must demand the Chain-Of-Custody for these videos and to release the videos that have not yet been released.
November 1, 2022


More than a year has passed since the FBI last released footage of the pipe bomber who allegedly planted explosive devices near the DNC and RNC party headquarters the night before January 6, 2021.

The FBI has reportedly collected 39,000 video files relating to the suspect’s identity, according to Steven D’Antuono, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington D.C. Field Office. Yet since September 8, 2021, not a single new video file has been released.

At Revolver, we have been focused on the two clips of video footage from DNC building security cameras that the FBI released on March 2021 and September 2021, respectively.

In August 2022, we definitively proved the DNC camera footage from the FBI’s September 2021 release should have captured the “money shot” of the pipe bomber taking the bomb out of the bag and planting it near a park bench in front of the DNC building. But for some reason, the FBI censored the tape so that the public could not see the alleged criminal walk back into the camera frame to commit the actual criminal act.

Over the past two months, we took a closer look at the DNC surveillance footage the FBI provided to the public. What we found was even more bizarre, and more damning than our initial discovery that the FBI is withholding critical footage of the pipe bomber actually planting the bomb.

The original “missing moneyshot” – reflecting the FBI’s deliberate censorship of the commission of the crime, effectively – is a red flag of such stunning proportions that it alone merits Congressional investigation under a GOP-led House commission on FBI malfeasance.

The new findings we are about to discuss, however, are so implausible, specific, and suspicious that we are compelled to demand that a future GOP-led commission subpoena and demand the exact chain of custody for the DNC surveillance tapes that the FBI released to the public

In this piece, we will analyze problems with a basic technical feature of the DNC video called the “frame rate.” For the convenience of the reader, we put together a short video that sketches the argument to follow:

Implausibly Low Frame Rate Suggests Possible Tampering

In our analysis of the DNC location surveillance footage provided by the FBI, we observed that the frame rate in the footage is so low that it barely exceeds 1 frame per second. We’ll explain the significance of this shortly, but first let’s cut straight to the factual findings.

Below, we show the final 13 seconds of the DNC security camera footage from the FBI’s September 2021 release. These are the 13 seconds during which the pipe bomber gets up from the DNC park bench and walks directly toward and past the security camera.

There are only 16 distinct frames in these 13 seconds, yielding an average frame rate of just 1.2 frames per second. This is so low that it is essentially “stop motion.

See for yourself:

What Is Frame Rate and Why Does It Matter?

Video has a “motion” look because a series of still pictures — or “frames” — scroll on screen so many times per second that individual frames are not discernible to the human eye, thus creating the appearance of fluid, real-life motion.

For example, a “flipbook” makes still pictures turn suddenly into a “motion picture”  when the still pictures are simply flipped through quickly:

In the video above, the flipbook moves at about 12 frames per second (fps). The average industry frame rate for most CCTV security cameras currently in use is about 15 frames per second. Modern security cameras are typically 30 fps and higher-end ones shoot 60 fps footage. Some very old dinosaur security cameras on decades-old systems shoot at around 8 fps.

The reason for the variation in fps is the trade-off between video quality and storage cost. The higher the frame rate, the larger the file size, and more storage is needed for the larger sizes, and storing all that data costs money.

So there is a fairly wide variation in security camera frame rate depending on one’s budget. But even at the absolute lowest end, you simply don’t see surveillance cameras operating at 1 fps.

The frame rate for camera footage has gotten much faster since the early days of cameras. For example, the Apollo moon landing for Apollo 16 in 1972 was shot on the moon with a 12 fps camera setting — 12 frames or distinct pictures per second.

HD footage in the modern era is now often shot at 120 fps. But security cameras, which record all day, face the aforementioned trade-off in storage size and don’t need all the extra frills of a super high-quality video.

At the same time, advancements in storage space efficiencies over the past 20 years have made it very cheap and easy to capture genuine motion at the 8-10 fps level, so institutions don’t even get cost savings anymore for “stick figure” stop motion cameras at or near 1fps like they did back in the 1980s.

For example, vendors showing off security camera frame rate comparisons on the market today tend to show a high end of 60 fps and low end of 8 fps.

As this helpful guide explains, the reason that no one uses “1 fps” security camera footage anymore is because when the surveillance camera only records one frame per second, one has to get extremely lucky to capture a clean shot of a suspect’s face looking at the camera — the suspect has to look right into the camera it for a full second, and practically say “cheese.”

This severe inadequacy helps to explain why 1fps surveillance cameras are an ancient figment of a bygone era decades ago when recording space on a camera was once expensive, and before technology and market changes two decades ago made storage space extremely cheap and better frame rates the industry standard.

Simply put — you don’t see 1 frame per second security cameras anymore in 2022. You can’t even buy anything on Amazon where 1 fps is the default or anywhere remotely close to a standard or recommended output.  In fact, a comprehensive 2021 study on surveillance footage frame rates found that 0% — that’s right, 0% — of surveillance cameras had a frame-rate below 5 fps.

This raises the strange and troubling question. Why does the security footage the FBI released from the DNC national headquarters depicting the alleged pipe bomber register at barely over 1 frame per second? Keep in mind, this implausibly low 1 frame per second surveillance footage is from the same camera from which Revolver proved in August that the FBI is withholding critical footage from the public of the pipe bomber actually planting the bomb.

READ MORE — Release the Tape: Revolver Has Definitive Proof FBI Is Hiding Critical Footage of Jan 6 “Pipe Bomber”

Did the FBI tamper with the tape in addition to withholding critical footage? Let’s dig a bit deeper.

An Unlikely Story

The DNC headquarters building is the national headquarters of one of the two major political parties in America. A lot of very important people work there and visit on a regular basis. The Vice President-elect of the United States herself, Kamala Harris, traveled to the DNC headquarters building the morning of January 6, 2021.

The historically-minded will remember that it was a break-in at the DNC headquarters 50 years ago that launched the greatest political scandal in modern American history.

For such an important place, with such important people, it is bizarre that the DNC security team was content with Jurassic Era surveillance footage at 1fps.

And keep in mind, this is Washington, D.C., the city that was once the murder capital of the country. Street crime around downtown DC, one would think, would be a concern to the DNC as a general matter, well outside the purview of VIP visits.

Heck, DNC staffer Seth Rich was, we are told, a victim of such street crime.

Given this context, can we really believe that the DNC national headquarters would have security cameras whose frame rate quality pales in comparison to old cameras at an average McDonald’s?

In fact, we know the DNC building takes security seriously, and precisely at the spot where the perp planted the bomb, at the precise pipe bomb crime scene covered by the 1 frame per second camera in question.

As demonstrated in our Google Earth walkthrough last month, the DNC cared enough about security in the park bench area that they employed what appears to be full-time security during the day looking straight out at the bomb site (photo below is from October 2018, per Google Earth)

Considering all of the factors above, including the DNC’s extra physical security at the exact spot the pipe bomb was allegedly planted, it is beyond odd and indeed downright suspicious that their surveillance footage would not only be poor, but at a 1 frame per second frame rate so poor as to be statistically impossible. Remember, the latest 2021 study on frame rates found that the number of currently operational surveillance cameras with a frame rate of less than 5 fps was statistically zero.

To underscore the difference between the frame rate of surveillance cameras at the Democrat National Committee Headquarters building, and that of cameras at your typical gas station or fast food establishment, Revolver put together the following amusing video:

It is important to remember that it is the exact same security camera that Revolver already proved captured footage — footage inexplicably withheld from the public by the FBI — of the the pipe bomber planting (or not planting) the bomb device that has had its footage somehow nuked back into the Stone Age with a 1 fps frame rate.

That is, we already know the FBI censored that exact tape and cut out the critical moment that would have depicted the pipe bomber planting the bomb. The question now is, beyond censoring the tape, did the FBI or their proxies tamper with it too? Did the FBI or proxies artificially degrade the version of the DNC surveillance tape they released to the public in order to make it more difficult to identify features (such as the face or the phone fidgeting) of the alleged pipe bomber?

Remember — two years on, the FBI still hasn’t even told us the gender of the suspect. They have told us bupkis about the alleged MAGA terrorist who walked around the apex heart of Capitol Hill, on foot, for more than an hour, making cell phone calls, touching surfaces, and depositing physical devices.

The award the FBI set for the public to identify the pipe bomber — $100,000 — is ten times less than the award they offered Christopher Steele for dirt on President Trump. That tells you where their priorities are, and where they aren’t.

It is painfully obvious the FBI does not want to identify the pipe bomber. And because the pipe bomber is almost assuredly a government asset of some sort, the FBI doesn’t want civilians to be able to make out the suspect’s identity either.

Why then did the FBI even release the DNC security tape clips in the first place?  It was probably too difficult for the FBI to deny the existence of the DNC security tape altogether. And DNC officials demanded, in the early days of 2021, the trappings of a real investigation and the bogeyman of a real suspect, so the tape had the effect of getting an uninquisitive media to squawk a good tune.

It is quite possible the FBI sought to get the best of both worlds by releasing a version of the DNC tape that is so massively degraded (and key moments censored) that it is virtually useless. We see that the pipe bomb suspect has a cell phone in hand, but a degraded frame rate could be particularly useful, for instance, if the pipe bomb suspect was continually using his or her cell phone to text a third party, and the FBI wanted to hide this conspiratorial aspect of the pipe bomb affair from the public.

Here we note that it is trivially easy to artificially lower a video’s quality and output a clip at a lower frame rate than the source footage captured. All that is required is engaging an output setting available in every retail video editor. Any 14 year old kid could tamper with video footage in this fashion, so it’s not exactly much of an operation for a rogue FBI operative or outsourced third party multimedia contractor to do. It’s a lot harder to falsify a FISA warrant than manipulate surveillance footage, and we saw how the Feds had zero qualms about doing the former.

If the FBI did tamper with the tape, it wouldn’t be the first time. Merrick Garland’s Justice Department, which absolutely railroaded the Oklahoma City Bombing investigation under Garland’s tenure during the Clinton years, got caught editing the security camera tapes they were forced by court order to finally release to the public in 2009 — 14 years after the event. Even after all that time the tape was edited to remove key details. We are starting to see, perhaps, this Merrick Garland calling card again on January 6.

Members of Congress: Now Is the Time to Be Heroes — Demand the Chain of Custody of the Tapes

The January 6 investigation is the biggest investigation in FBI history, and the pipe bomber was the most high profile and by far the most dangerous threat of the day in terms of mass death potential and early domination of headlines that set the tone for the so-called “insurrection.”

Besides, this would-be mass murdering superkiller is still out there, and he/she/zir evidently has a taste for bombing major political headquarter buildings.

It’s been two years and the FBI says they haven’t found a fingerprint, a hair follicle, a skin cell, an age range, a gender, or a cell phone ping from the exact coordinates we can see he/she/zir texting from in the surveillance footage.

The pipe bomber played Security Camera Frogger on the home turf of the center of the U.S. national security state itself for over an hour and we’re supposed to believe the source tapes at the DNC national party headquarters the night before January 6 had lower resolution and frame rates than those shot on the surface of the moon 50 years ago.

Fortunately, for the DNC tapes at issue here, there’s a super easy solution: Get the chain of custody for the tapes.

Those tapes were retrieved by someone at the FBI, from someone at the DNC. Those people have names. Since we only have clips of the released tapes, we know the chain of custody for the tapes should disclose who the tapes were sent to for processing and editing.

Every FBI agent who touched those tapes can be called to testify about what he/she did with them. They can be called to testify about the source footage itself — why the “moneyshot” moment went missing in the public release, and why the final released footage didn’t match the source footage from the original point in the chain of custody.

Let them come back and sing the Jeffrey Epstein “tapes malfunctioned” song again, or “agents fell asleep” excuse, which they will almost surely feel forced to do if they get pressed hard enough.

But put it to them. Every episode in this sordid FBI saga over January 6 is something ordinary Americans will remember forever.

The FBI can keep its tyranny, or its legitimacy, but it cannot keep both.

** End **