WRT Jake Tapper's ignorance/lie, did he and CNN minions look at the dude's non-"African" given name, "Brian", and his family's upscale home and ASSume he "had to be" white? Or did they knowingly and intentionally lie, knowing their lie would saturate the Internet before the truth started to circulate? Either is quite plausible.
On another tack, I commented on FB to a Friend who is a former FBI employee that while I no law enforcement experience, I cannot imagine the agents who gathered the evidence pointing toward Cole dropping the case without orders to drop it and/or being reassigned so that there was no one to investigate the evidence. Either way, there were PTBs who did not want the bomber planter identified publicly. What are the Las Vegas odds that those PTBs knew at least to some degree that he would inconvenience their anti-Trump narrative?