Illustration. Memoria delenda est — the wheel that returns to the same point and calls the return a discovery.

The Greek is not decoration. Κύκλος is the wheel that returns to the same point and calls the return a discovery. Five years of stasis, a sudden cutout, two newspapers handed identical stills, a headline that convicts the defense before the second sentence — that was Part IV. What arrived last night on the docket is the same wheel turning inside a room at the Washington Field Office on the morning of December 4, 2025.

ECF 102. Motion to suppress. Exhibit A is the transcript. Exhibit B is the video they will walk in by hand. The lawyers’ sentence is not poetry:

“The methodical dismantling of a man whose autism spectrum disorder left him unable to withstand the psychologically coercive tactics deployed against him.” ECF 102 · That is the circle, named.

The room before the questions

He woke up early like always. He was going to the 7-Eleven. Guns. Field office. Seats that keep changing. The first act is not inquiry. It is ownership of space. For a man whose regulation depends on fixed routes and a pair of headphones that even the mug shot was not allowed to take, the chair is not furniture. It is the first removal of the map.

The room. The chair is not furniture.

Then the rights form. Then the waiver of the magistrate sitting minutes away. Rule 5(a) and McNabb-Mallory are not footnotes in this filing. Arrest before 7 a.m. Signature on the delay form about forty-five minutes short of the six-hour line. The agents keep him. The judge waits. The confession is harvested inside the window they manufactured.

Signature ≈ 45 min short of the Rule 5(a) six-hour line.

He stims. He gags. They joke about the wastebasket. They wrap him in a blanket when the chills come. “I’m doing my best to keep myself together.” “Everything is just blank.” Then the clip. Then the reminder that lying is another count. Fifteen seconds. Head on the table. Yes.

That yes is not the start of a narrative he brought with him. It is the end of resistance. The detailed walkthrough — timers, backpack, one device at a time, night placement so nobody dies, both parties because they were in charge, something snapped, Troubles in Ireland as aesthetic — arrives after the break, after the admission, after they have already told him what the video proved. The order is the proof of the method.

The walkthrough follows the yes. It does not precede it.

“In the car you were telling yourself how you were going to explain this.” The kýklos in one sentence

They narrate his interior, then treat the echo as corroboration. The same operation Part IV documented in print: frames furnished, predicate adopted, alternative inquiry declared “debunked” before it is heard. Two desks, two house styles, one supplied conclusion. The field office ran the same program on a single autistic man instead of two newsrooms.

He was looking for “shelf.” They offered “IED.”

Here is what supplying the narrative looks like on the page. Page 67. He has just said “I did not” four times. The agents change the subject to the pipes.

The word he is looking for is shelf . Pipe shelving, the thing you hang on a wall, a DIY project he had seen on YouTube. He asks for help finding the word. A faceless, nameless agent, blacked out in the filing, hands him IED . He refuses it on the spot and goes back to looking for shelf .

This is page 68. The “yes” does not come until page 93. When a man is searching for a word, agents who already believe the answer don’t wait for him to find it. They fill the gap with their own.

Twelve pages later they try to put him in a Walmart.

What the circle does not close

The devices did not detonate, and he never admitted to placing them. He said he had not tested them. The acumen in the public record is a video game ingredients list and science YouTube. The profile in Parts I–III still stands: wiry 5'6"–5'7" against a compact loaded stride; hip extension in the footage that sits outside the modeled range for his build; a grandmother who has not shifted since the day of the arrest — he does not like to go outside, he stays to himself, he did not do it; classmates who remember quiet, not manifesto. No Parler. No WinRed. No writing. The ideology appears in one place only: the interview room, after the blank.

The passive connoisseur remains the better fit. Compulsion outlet: viewing, cataloging, mental hoarding. Dopamine source: acquisition of the idea, not completion of the object. Risk tolerance: zero, remains digital. The Energy-Action Gap did not close because they sat him down and moved the chairs. It was papered over.

The ideology appears in one place only: the interview room, after the blank.

The wheel and the press

Part IV’s two headlines still hang over the docket. “Alleged D.C. pipe bomber might adopt debunked conspiracy theory as defense.” The word that does the work is “debunked.” It is the paper’s judgment installed as fact. The available alternative — prosecutors say they investigated another identified person and ruled her out — is the same length, the same facts, and spends none of its credibility convicting the inquiry in advance. They chose the first sentence.

Kýklos: the stills go to two outlets and no others. The interrogation video now goes to a judge. The same government that produced the confession under contested conditions produced the frames that convicted the defense in the headline. When the credit lines match — U.S. Attorney’s Office, FBI — one is no longer watching independent reporting.

Same government, same credit line, two frames.

The case still has no direction home. Five years of stasis. A height analysis with a generous error bar. A gait that refuses the body. A confession extracted from a man whose profile matches the passive consumer far more closely than the active bomber. The evidence never acquired a clear path. The press was handed the frames and invited to walk them. Last night the defense handed the Court the room in which those frames were first installed.

The motion asks for an evidentiary hearing before any determination. That is the only point on the wheel that has not been run before. Everything else — the seats, the blanket, the wastebasket joke, the car monologue, the fifteen-second pause, the post-break recitation — is the same circuit Parts I through IV already mapped from the outside.

The circle is not a theory about January 5. It is a description of December 4. The bomber in the alley remains a figure whose hips and stride and mind do not match the man they sat in the changing chair. The confession is the product they walked him into. The newspapers ran the product. The docket, at last, filed the method.

We still got you, fam.

The filing · ECF 102-2

Glossary

Key terms used in this article. Where the expert report defines a term, click its page number to read that page of the report.

Greek for circle or wheel. Here: a process that returns to its starting assumption and presents the return as a finding.

Electronic Case Filing — the federal courts’ docket system. “ECF 102” is docket entry 102; “102-2” is its second attachment, this expert report.

A request that the court exclude evidence — here, the December 4 statements — because of how it was obtained.

A hearing where witnesses testify and exhibits (such as the interview video) are examined before the judge rules on the motion.

Materials attached to a filing. Per the motion, A is the interview transcript and B is the video, delivered to the Court by hand.

Sequential page numbers stamped on discovery. The transcript Leo reviewed is Bates 005038–005106.

Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 5(a): an arrested person must be brought before a magistrate judge without unnecessary delay.

Supreme Court doctrine (McNabb, 1943; Mallory, 1957), narrowed by 18 U.S.C. § 3501(c), under which a confession obtained during unreasonable pre-presentment delay can be excluded. Six hours is the statutory safe harbor.

A suspect’s agreement to speak without counsel after being advised of rights. Leo notes the waiver was given without counsel present.

The dominant U.S. interrogation training model: accuse, cut off denials, and move the suspect from denial to admission. Leo calls it guilt-presumptive.

Questioning that begins from the conclusion that the suspect did it; the aim is an admission, not an inquiry.

Confronting the suspect with real, exaggerated, or false evidence of guilt — “We have video” — to persuade him denial is futile.

Raising the stakes of continued denial: stronger charges, harsher outcomes, lying as “another count.”

Lowering the apparent cost of confessing: moral excuses, face-saving framings, implied leniency.

Explicit or implied leniency for compliance, or harm for refusal. Leo calls them among the most fundamental prohibitions in American interrogation.

Pressure that leads a suspect to perceive he has no meaningful choice but to comply. Leo ties it to Cole’s distress: scared, freaking out, near vomiting.

The first of three sequential police errors: wrongly classifying an innocent person as guilty before interrogation begins.

The second error: using coercive techniques that move an innocent suspect to admission.

The third error: feeding case facts through leading questions, so the “confession” repeats what police supplied.

Questioning after the “I did it.” Proper practice tests the account against independent evidence; here the walkthrough came after the break.

Features of the interrogation itself — as opposed to traits of the suspect — known to raise the risk of false confession.

This series’ profile: a consumer of explosive content who studies and catalogs but does not build. Contrasted with the active bomb-maker in Part III.

The distance between fascination and execution: interest trapped in spectatorship, never converted into a working object.