While most of us prepare to welcome in the New Year, the FBI and local law enforcement agents in Nashville, Tennessee are still trying to piece together the story of Anthony Warner and how he wound up blowing himself up, along with most of a city block, on Christmas morning. One of the potentially key individuals who has been mentioned repeatedly in the early days of the investigation is a “mystery woman” from California to whom Warner transferred the deeds for two properties in the past couple of years. Her name is Michelle Swing and she’s an executive in the music industry in Los Angeles, but up until now we didn’t know much about her. She claims she didn’t even know about the most recent house transfer and refused to comment on the nature of her relationship (if any) to Warner, referring all other questions to the FBI.

Now the press has dug up at least a couple of details about Swing, though I’m not sure if this really moves the investigation forward in any significant way. It turns out that Michelle Swing is just the daughter of a friend of Warner’s, or so his former attorney claims. (NY Post)

The woman who was given two homes by Nashville RV bomber Anthony Quinn Warner was the daughter of one of his friends, the attacker’s former lawyer said.

Los Angeles-based music exec Michelle Swing, 29, became the heart of numerous conspiracies after she was gifted the double deeds — including Warner’s own home exactly a month before his Christmas morning blast.

A lawyer who represented him at the time, Ray Throckmorton III, told The Tennessean that the crazed, hate-filled paranoid loner told him Swing was just “the child of a friend of his.”

If we take this story at face value, then Swing isn’t involved in the attack in any way. And for the record, nobody has suggested that she was, at least to my knowledge. But this explanation only adds another layer of weirdness to a story that’s already straining the boundaries of credulity.

Keep in mind that while Ms. Swing claims that she wasn’t aware of the deed transfer to her of Warner’s primary residence in November, she most certainly was aware that he gave her another house in January of 2019. We know that because the gift caused a rift in Warner’s family and she wound up signing that house back over to Warner’s mother later last year.

Then there are the optics of these gifts. We have friends with children and we occasionally do nice things for them like buying their Girl Scout cookies or helping out school fundraisers. But never once have I considered signing my house over to one of them. If Swing is the “daughter of a friend” who was that important to Warner, why not give the property to the friend? Or how about some member of his own family? It certainly sounds as if his mother could use some financial help. This doesn’t make any sense, much like the rest of the story of the final years of Anthony Warner’s life.

Michelle Swing keeping her lips sealed about the nature of their relationship (if any) probably isn’t all that unusual. It would be fairly standard for the FBI to ask her to remain mum while an investigation is ongoing. But it doesn’t seem as though the investigation would be compromised if she simply stated that she and Warner were friends, lovers, business partners or whatever. Provided she didn’t say anything about the attack (if she even knows anything), the FBI should have been able to continue their work undisturbed. Perpahs she’ll tell us more later, but her silence at this point raises some red flags, at least in my opinion.

Besides, Warner supposedly had a girlfriend who probably would have liked to get a free house. You remember her, right? She’s the one who tried to tell the police that her boyfriend was building bombs more than a year ago.

Warner’s ex-attorney had a few more things to say, by the way. He describes Warner as a guy who “hated life and he hated everything and everybody.” He also said that the bomber was “extremely reserved and suspicious and paranoid and distrustful.” That definitely paints the picture of someone who might go off the deep end and pull off a massive public attack. But if so, then why did Warner go out of this way to make sure the blast went off when there was almost nobody around to be killed? None of this adds up and we’re still left in search of a motive. Hopefully, it will be better than the 5G conspiracy theory if we ever learn what it was.