SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The man accused of attacking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer told police he wanted to hold the Democratic leader hostage and “break her kneecaps” to show other members of Congress there were “consequences to actions,” authorities said Monday.
In a chilling federal complaint, officials say David DePape, 42, carrying zip ties, tape and a rope in a backpack, broke into the couple’s San Francisco home early Friday morning, went upstairs where 82-year-old Paul Pelosi was sleeping, and demanded to talk to “Nancy.”
“This house and the speaker herself were specifically targets,” San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said at a Monday evening news conference announcing state charges against DePape, including attempted murder.
“This was politically motivated,” Jenkins said. She implored the public to “watch the words that we say and to turn down the volume of our political rhetoric.”
Investigators believe DePape had been researching in advance to target Pelosi, Jenkins said in an interview with The Associated Press.
“This was not something that he did at the spur of the moment,” she said.
In a statement late Monday, Speaker Pelosi said her family was “most grateful” for “thousands of messages conveying concern, prayers and warm wishes.” Her husband underwent surgery for a fractured skull and other injuries after the attack. She said he was making “steady progress on what will be a long recovery process.”
The stark narrative laid out by state and federal prosecutors stands in contrast to the mocking jokes and conspiracy theories circulated by far-right figures and even some leading Republicans just a week before midterm elections. A record number of security threats are being reported against lawmakers and election officials.
At a campaign event Monday in Arizona, Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor, drew hearty laughs as she joked about security at the Pelosi home.
In addition to the state charges, DePape was also charged Monday in federal court with influencing, impeding or retaliating against a federal official by threatening or injuring a family member. He also faces one count of attempted kidnapping of a United States official because of their official duties.
No attorney has been listed for DePape. He is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday on the state charges, and prosecutors will ask for him to be held in jail without bail.
Authorities said DePape smashed a glass door in the back of the home with a hammer, went to the upstairs bedroom and told a surprised Paul Pelosi to wake up.
When Paul Pelosi told the intruder his wife was not home, DePape said he would wait — even after being told she would not be home for some days. The assailant then started taking out twist ties to tie Pelosi up, the complaint says.
DePape told investigators he wanted to talk to Speaker Pelosi and viewed her as the “leader of the pack of lies told by the Democratic Party,” according to the eight-page complaint.
“If she were to tell DePape the ‘truth,’ he would let her go and if she ’lied,’ he was going to break her kneecaps,” the complaint alleges.
“By breaking Nancy’s kneecaps, she would then have to be wheeled into Congress, which would show other members of Congress there were consequences to actions,” the complaint says DePape told investigators.
The federal complaint says DePape said he wanted “to use Nancy to lure” another person, but it provides no details of such a plan.
After DePape confronted Paul Pelosi in his bedroom, Pelosi tried to make it to an elevator in the home to reach a phone, but DePape blocked his way, Jenkins said. In a nightshirt, Pelosi then told the assailant he had to use the restroom, allowing him to get to his cellphone and call 911, according to authorities.
Police were dispatched to the home in the upscale Pacific Heights neighborhood around 2:20 a.m. Friday. They arrived two minutes later to see the two men struggling over a hammer, and then DePape struck Pelosi at least once before being tackled by officers, Jenkins said.
She said police body camera footage “shows the attack itself.” Police later found a second hammer, along with rope, tape and a diary in DePape’s backpack.
In the ambulance to the hospital, Paul Pelosi told police he had never seen DePape before, the complaint said. And Jenkins said Sunday, “We have nothing to suggest that these two men knew each other prior to this incident,” a statement contradicting vulgar unsupported suggestions on social media.
DePape told investigators he didn’t leave even though he knew Paul Pelosi had called 911 because “much like the American founding fathers with the British, he was fighting against tyranny without the option of surrender,” the affidavit said.
Speaker Pelosi, who was in Washington, D.C., at the time of the attack, returned swiftly to California. Unlike presidents, congressional leaders have security protection for themselves, but not their families.
DePape is a Canadian citizen who legally entered the United States in 2000 but has stayed long after his visa expired, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Family described DePape as estranged, and he was known by some in San Francisco as a pro-nudity activist who appeared to embrace a range of conspiracy theories. DePape has lived for the past two years in a garage at a residence in Richmond, California, the complaint said.
The attack was an unsettling echo of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, when rioters trying to overturn Joe Biden’s election defeat of Donald Trump stormed the halls eerily calling “Where’s Nancy?” Some carried zip ties.
Elon Musk over the weekend tweeted, then deleted, a fringe website’s conspiracy theories to his millions of followers, as his purchase of Twitter has raised concerns that the social media platform would no longer seek to limit misinformation and hate speech.
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., was among those making light of the attack on Paul Pelosi, tweeting crude jokes about it.
With nearly 10,000 threats against members of Congress in the last year, U.S. Capitol Police have advised lawmakers to take precautions. Chief Tom Manger, who leads the force, has said the threat from lone-wolf attackers has been growing and the most significant threat the force is facing is the historically high number of threats against lawmakers, thousands more than just a few years before.
The beating of the speaker’s husband follows other attacks and threats. This summer, a man carrying a gun, a knife and zip ties was arrested near Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house in Maryland after threatening to kill him. In 2017, Republican Rep. Steve Scalise was seriously injured when a Bernie Sanders supporter opened fire on Republicans at a congressional baseball game practice.
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Mascaro reported from Washington and Dazio reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Michael Balsamo in Washington and Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report.
Musk boosts surge in misinformation about Pelosi attack
Within hours of the attack on Paul Pelosi, conspiracy theories deflecting blame for the assault on the husband of U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi were already swirling online.
It didn’t matter that authorities said Paul Pelosi was alone when the suspect broke into the couple’s San Francisco home. Or that investigators said they didn’t believe the two men knew one another.
It didn’t even matter that the suspect, David DePape, confessed to investigators that he broke into the Pelosi home to target the speaker.
Misleading claims about the assault spread rapidly anyway, and not just thanks to trolls in obscure internet chatrooms. The claims received a major boost from some prominent Republicans and Elon Musk, now the owner of Twitter, one of the world’s leading online platforms.
On Monday, posts falsely suggesting a personal relationship between Pelosi and the alleged assailant, soared on Twitter, a day after Musk tweeted and deleted a link to an article suggesting one.
Musk hasn’t said why he linked to the article, or why he deleted his post, which came in response to a tweet from Hillary Clinton that condemned the attack. Twitter did not immediately respond to questions from The Associated Press on Monday.
“It’s like he forgot for a second that he was now the owner of the platform, and not just anther user who can say whatever he wants,” said Brad Greenspan, a tech entrepreneur and an early investor in MySpace. “Now, being the owner, there are a whole new set of responsibilities.”
One of several Republicans to amplify the baseless conspiracy theory, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., defended Musk on Monday with a tweet that repeated the misleading claim about “Paul Pelosi’s friend attacking him with a hammer.”
Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., joked about the attack with his own tweet, since deleted, that repeated the conspiracy theory.
Donald Trump Jr., meanwhile, ridiculed Paul Pelosi on Twitter with false assertions.
The claim also spread to other platforms, including fringe sites like Gab and Truth Social, where posts mocked the 82-year-old victim.
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins on Monday begged other political leaders to be mindful of their comments about the case.
“We of course do not want distorted facts floating around, certainly not in a manner that is further traumatizing a family that has been traumatized enough,” she said.
The posts focusing on Paul Pelosi were just a subset of a recent wave of hateful and conspiracy theory-laden posts that followed Musk’s purchase of Twitter.
Within just 12 hours of Musk’s purchase being finalized Friday, references to a specific racist epithet used to demean Black people shot up by 500%, according to an analysis conducted by the National Contagion Research Institute, a Princeton, N.J.-based firm that tracks disinformation.
Extremism experts and disinformation researchers had warned that the change in ownership could upend Twitter’s efforts to combat misinformation and hate speech, especially with this year’s midterm elections just days away.
Yosef Getachew, director of the media and democracy program at Common Cause, said there’s a significant risk that misinformation spreading so soon before the election could confuse or frighten voters, or lead to more polarization or even acts of violence.
“Rather than cave in to conspiracy theorists and propaganda peddlers, we urge Musk to ensure Twitter’s rules and enforcement practices reflect our values of democracy and public safety,” Getachew said.
Authorities in San Francisco held a press conference Monday to discuss the latest on the investigation into the attack. DePape told police that he wanted to take Nancy Pelosi hostage and “break her kneecaps,” they said.
District Attorney Brooke Jenkins debunked several other aspects of the conspiracy theory as well, saying there’s no evidence DePape knew Paul Pelosi, and saying Pelosi was alone at home when DePape broke in.
While belief in conspiracy theories is nothing new to American history, experts who study disinformation say they can become dangerous when they persuade people to consider violence as an alternative to politics, or when they cause people to ignore inconvenient truths.
DePape appears to have authored racist and often rambling online posts in which he questioned the results of the 2020 election, defended former President Donald Trump and echoed QAnon conspiracy theories.
QAnon adherents support the belief that Trump is secretly waging a battle against a sect of blood-drinking Satanists who have controlled world events for eons. The movement has been linked to an increasing number of acts of real-world violence in recent years.
Social media has sped up the proliferation of conspiracy theories, helped believers organize, and enabled groups to weaponize disinformation for their own ends, according to Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, a group that supports new regulations on platforms.
Twitter and other platforms, Haworth said, have “created a toxic atmosphere where public officials and their families are at risk (and) now online threats are spilling over into real-world violence.”