Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
Everybody was stunned on Friday morning when news broke that the 82 year old husband of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had been assaulted inside of his home early in the morning with a hammer.
The shock and awe grew after it seemed to become clear that the assailant was looking for the Speaker of the House herself - the third in line to the Presidency.
An assailant broke into the home and asked "Where's Nancy? Where's Nancy?”, according to NBC in the Bay Area.
San Francisco police Chief Bill Scott called it an “intentional” attack:
"This was not a random attack. This was intentional. And it's wrong. Our elected officials are here to do the business of their cities, their counties, and their states, and this nation. Their families don't sign up for this -- to be harmed. And it's wrong."
As such, DePape is now facing charges of attempted murder and other felonies.
I wholly condemn the attack, as I do all violence (especially political violence).
“This is an outrage and our hearts are with the entire Pelosi family. We pray Paul will make a full recovery,” former VP Mike Pence Tweeted this weekend.
And though I am hardly a fan of Ted Cruz, I think he said it best when he wrote on Twitter this weekend:
“We can have our political differences, but violence is always wrong & unacceptable.”
It is not in any way in dispute that Pelosi was attacked violently and wound up in the hospital as a result of his injuries.
It is also not in dispute that 911 was called and dispatcher Heather Grimes had the intuition to order a wellness check at the household based on what she heard. Her intuition may very well have saved Pelosi’s life, and she should be commended for it.
Politicians on the left wasted absolutely no time attributing the Pelosi attack to “The Republican Party” and “far right white nationalists”.
And, as Glenn Greenwald writes on Sunday morning, it’s “very possible that the instantly formed media narrative…will be proven true”.
For example, Hillary Clinton said on Saturday:
“The Republican Party and its mouthpieces now regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories. It is shocking, but not surprising, that violence is the result. As citizens, we must hold them accountable for their words and the actions that follow.”
Rep. Ilhan Omar Tweeted out on Saturday that the attacker, DePape, was a “far right white nationalist”:
“A far right white nationalist tried to assassinate the Speaker of the House and almost killed her husband a year after violent insurrectionists tried to find her and kill her in the Capitol, and the Republican Party’s response is to either ignore it or belittle it.”
President Joe Biden, with seemingly little to no evidence, attributed the attack to 2020 election deniers
“You can’t just say, feel badly about the violence, we condemn it. Condemn what produces the violence.
This talk produces the violence. The generic point I want to make is it’s one thing to condemn the violence but you can’t condemn the violence unless you condemn those people who continue to argue the election was not real, that it’s being stolen.”
While these politicians may ultimately prove to be right, it’s worth noting that there are some basic journalistic gaps in the story that need to be answered.
The first question we are left to wonder is the obvious: what was DePape’s true motivation?
Both sides in the media have painted the assailant in different lights. For example, Politico wrote that “he subscribed to the discredited narrative that the 2020 presidential election was illegitimate and espoused a range of bigoted and radical beliefs. He expressed anti-Semitic views and appeared to embrace the QAnon movement, which posits a secret cabal of pedophiles has been protected by people in power.”
But then there was this NY Post opinion piece (and Substack post) by Michael Shellenberger, which noted that “DePape lived with a notorious local nudist in a Berkeley home, complete with a Black Lives Matter sign in the window and an LGBT rainbow flag, emblazoned with a marijuana symbol, hanging from a tree”.
DePape’s neighbors said of him:
“What I know about the family is that they’re very radical activists. They seem very left. They are all about the Black Lives Matter movement. Gay pride. But they’re very detached from reality. They have called the cops on several of the neighbors, including us, claiming that we are plotting against them. It’s really weird to see that they are willing to be so aggressive toward somebody else who is also a lefty.”
Finally, on Sunday it was reported that DePape’s ex and purported former life partner Oxane Taub, told Fox News that he used to be left-leaning:
"When I met him, he was only 20 years old , and he didn't have any experience in politics, and he was very much in alignment with my views, and I've always been very progressive. I absolutely admire Nancy Pelosi."
Possible explanation: It is possible that these leaders on the left are correct. There is also the possibility that DePape’s mental faculties were lacking - or that something entirely different was taking place. We should know when DePape enters his defense what his side of the story is.
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The second question is: who is the unidentified person that let law enforcement into the home the morning of the break-in?
Politico reported early this weekend that there was apparently a third person in the home at the time of the incident:
David DePape forced his way into the home through a back entrance, Scott said. Officers arrived at the house, knocked on the front door and were let inside by an unknown person. They discovered DePape and Pelosi struggling for a hammer, and after they instructed them to drop the weapon, Scott said, DePape took the hammer and “violently attacked” Pelosi.
Possible explanation: Was it a housekeeper? Live-in staff? Body cam footage should make this clear.
A third question relates to whether or not it is normal for glass to be on the outside of the home due to a forced entry into the home.
It was reported that the suspect, not law enforcement, entered through the sliding glass door. ABC News wrote:
“The break in at Nancy Pelosi’s house is suspected to be targeted, law enforcement sources tell ABC News. The suspect allegedly entered the house through a sliding glass door, carrying a hammer, and was apparently looking for the House Speaker herself.”
Putting aside that these appear to be french doors, and not sliding glass doors, one must then ask if this is the point of entry in question.
The opinion of D. W. Wilber, who has “over thirty years of experience in Security and Counterterrorism as a former Intelligence Officer serving with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense in Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East, and law enforcement,” was that the glass on the outside of the door was an anomaly.
"As a cop for 11 yrs in St. Louis I never once worked a burglary where the broken glass and debris at the entry point was OUTSIDE the residence," he wrote on Twitter.
Possible explanation: Perhaps these weren’t the doors in question during the attack, or perhaps the door was broken from the inside out during the struggle and was not the point of entry.
Which brings us to the fourth unanswered question, which was whether or not there was security in, or around, the house the night of the incident.
Lawyer Harmeet K. Dhillion wrote on Twitter this weekend that there were “multiple law enforcement officers” on the perimeter of Pelosi’s home when they tried to serve a lawsuit there.
“My firm served a lawsuit against Paul Pelosi one time in SF after attempting to serve at other residences—Napa, Georgetown. They weren’t home, but staff were, & multiple law enforcement officers were on the perimeter. Break-in is odd given this level of security."
Possible explanation: Is it possible there was no security because Nancy Pelosi wasn’t on the premises?
And as Glenn Greenwald pointed out this weekend, there’s also the fifth question of how Paul Pelosi was able to take a bathroom break in the midst of an attack.
Greenwald is right when he says it “requires more scrutiny” after Politico reported that Pelosi told the intruder “he had to go use the bathroom” in the midst of the break-in. From there, Pelosi was apparently able to dial 911 from a phone that he had left charging…in the bathroom.
Possible explanation: Your guess is as good as mine.
The very same Politico article that pointed out the bathroom break also noted that the 911 dispatcher thought there was “something more to [the 911 call]”.
You can listen to the call here and decide for yourself. Was Pelosi speaking in code to try and get a message to the operator - and not DePape - that he was in distress?
Or, when the operator said there was “something more” to the call, was she referring to something else?
There’s a good chance the media and politicians are right and this attack was an abhorrent, politically motivated violent act and, again, I strongly condemn violence of all types, especially political violence.
But there are also several gaping holes in the story that I think good ole’ fashioned journalism - and probably some police body camera footage - will shed some much needed light on.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Elon Musk, who noted on Sunday morning in response to Hillary Clinton that there’s “a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye”.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
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