On January 5th, 2021 — the night before the Capitol riot — someone placed two improvised explosive devices outside Republican National Committee headquarters and Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C. Both devices failed to detonate. Nobody was killed. The case went unsolved for years, becoming one of the most puzzling unresolved crimes from that entire period.

Earlier this year the FBI arrested Brian Cole Jr., a 30-year-old from Woodbridge, Virginia. He faces federal felony counts for transporting and using explosives. The case against him has nothing to do with trespassing, nothing to do with political demonstration, like the hundreds of people arrested and charged that day for protesting at the Capitol building.  He is accused of planting bombs at the headquarters of both major American political parties.

His lawyers are now arguing that President Trump’s January 6th pardon covers his crimes and therefore he should be set free.

Um, I’m sorry, what?!?

Cole’s attorneys contend that his alleged conduct is “inextricably tethered to the events at or near the United States Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.” Trump’s pardon proclamation granted clemency to approximately 1,500 people charged with offenses related to the Capitol civil disorder — a sweeping act of clemency aimed at people the president believed had been politically persecuted for participating in a protest that got out of hand.

The lawyers point to Kenneth Harrelson, an Oath Keeper who received a commuted sentence for stockpiling firearms between January 1st and January 5th — before the Capitol events themselves — and argue that if pre-January 6th conduct qualified for clemency, then Cole’s case should too.

It is a creative argument. It is also an argument that would require a judge to believe that a man planting pipe bombs at party headquarters the night before a political rally is functionally equivalent to the political demonstrators the pardon was designed to protect.

Conservatives who supported Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons — and there are very good reasons to have supported them — need to think carefully about what this argument does to the policy they backed.

The case for the Jan. 6 pardons rested on a specific and defensible premise: the federal government prosecuted hundreds of Americans disproportionately harshly for what was, at its core, a protest that became a riot. Trespassers were hit with terrorism enhancements. People who walked through open doors were sentenced to years in federal prison. The prosecution was political, the sentences were excessive, and Trump was right to correct it.

None of that logic extends to pipe bombs.

Planting improvised explosive devices at the headquarters of political organizations is not a protest. It is not civil disorder. It is not trespassing or unlawful assembly. It is domestic terrorism by any reasonable definition — and notably, Cole allegedly targeted both the RNC and the DNC, which means his motive had nothing to do with supporting one side in the January 6th dispute.

If a judge accepts Cole’s argument, the Jan. 6 pardon no longer describes a specific political clemency action. It becomes a general amnesty for anything that happened in Washington D.C. in January 2021 — which is emphatically not what Trump signed, and emphatically not what his supporters were defending.

Cole’s lawyers cite the Harrelson precedent, and it deserves a straight answer. Harrelson’s pre-January 6th firearms stockpiling was directly connected to the coordinated group activity that culminated on January 6th — he was an Oath Keeper organizing for that specific day. The conduct was preparatory to the pardoned event.

Cole’s alleged conduct — planting bombs at party headquarters — has no demonstrated organizational connection to the Capitol events the following day. The argument that geographic and temporal proximity makes the conduct “inextricably tethered” is a significant legal stretch that would require rewriting the plain meaning of the pardon language.

The DOJ had not publicly responded as of publication. A judge will ultimately decide whether the pardon language reaches this far — and that decision will set a precedent that defines the scope of executive clemency for years.

Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons were defensible and, for most of the 1,500 recipients, clearly appropriate. This case is the exception that tests the rule. The right outcome — for the integrity of the pardon, for the coherent application of the law, and for the conservative case that the clemency was just — is for the court to draw a clear line between political protesters and pipe bombers.

Those are not the same thing. The pardon should not pretend otherwise.