Intruder Wanted to Break Speaker Pelosi’s Kneecaps, Federal Complaint Says

 

Paul Pelosi, right, on Capitol Hill in Washington in March.

Intruder Wanted to Break Speaker Pelosi’s Kneecaps, Federal Complaint Says

 

Federal prosecutors filed charges on Monday against the man the police said broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and struck her husband with a hammer.

 

Prosecutor Announces Charges Against Suspect in Pelosi Attack

David DePape, who is accused of breaking into the San Francisco home of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was charged with attempting to kidnap Ms. Pelosi and with assaulting a relative of a federal official.CreditCredit...Eric Risberg/Associated Press

 

By Kellen Browning, Glenn Thrush and Tim Arango

Oct. 31, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/us/pelosi-home-attack-suspect-charged.html

 

SAN FRANCISCO — The man, lugging a backpack stuffed with rope, zip ties and a hammer, entered the mansion in San Francisco’s exclusive Pacific Heights neighborhood through a back door, leaving shards of glass on the ground.

 

The intruder woke up the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and later attacked him, fracturing his skull. The assailant’s mission, he would later tell the police, was to take hostage and perhaps break the kneecaps of Ms. Pelosi, whom he saw as “the ‘leader of the pack’ of lies told by the Democratic Party.”

 

All of it was detailed on Monday in a federal complaint against David DePape, 42, who was charged with attempting to kidnap Ms. Pelosi and assaulting a relative of a federal official. San Francisco’s prosecutor later filed six additional state charges against Mr. DePape.

 

The attack on the morning of Oct. 28 came amid an increase in politically motivated violence just ahead of next week’s midterm elections. And the Justice Department’s swift action in bringing criminal charges on Monday against the suspect reflected the sense of urgency at the highest levels of the American government to confront an issue that officials view as a stark threat to the nation. There has been a surge in threats and attacks against figures of both political parties in recent years, and Ms. Pelosi, in particular, has long been the subject of vilification and threats.

 

 

Mr. DePape was apprehended by the police at the Pelosi home in the early morning hours on Friday. The police said he forcibly entered through the back door of the house, encountered Ms. Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, 82, and, following a struggle over a hammer, struck him with it. Ms. Pelosi was in Washington during the attack.

 

Mr. Pelosi, who underwent surgery to repair his fractured skull and serious injuries to his hands and right arm, remains in the intensive care unit of a San Francisco hospital, surrounded by his family, according to a person familiar with the situation. On Monday, Ms. Pelosi thanked well-wishers and said that her husband was “making steady progress on what will be a long recovery process.”

 

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, which filed the federal charges, Mr. DePape told investigators in an interview that he wished to break Ms. Pelosi’s kneecaps if she “lied” and see her “wheeled into Congress” as a lesson to other members of Congress. Explaining why he didn’t flee the scene after he realized Mr. Pelosi had surreptitiously dialed 911, Mr. DePape compared himself to the founding fathers battling the British, saying “he was fighting against tyranny without the option of surrender,” according to the federal complaint.

 

Later on Monday, Brooke Jenkins, the San Francisco district attorney, announced the additional state charges, which include attempted murder, residential burglary, elder abuse, assault with a deadly weapon, false imprisonment of an elder and threatening family members of public officials. Mr. DePape, who was treated at a hospital for what the authorities described as minor injuries, was expected to be arraigned in superior court on Tuesday.

 

It was not immediately clear who was representing Mr. DePape in the cases.

 

The affidavit from an F.B.I. agent that accompanied the federal charges provided the most complete, and chilling, narrative of the break-in to date. It detailed a groggy early-morning home invasion that culminated with a single, sudden hammer blow, delivered in the presence of shocked police officers.

 

Mr. DePape broke a glass door and entered the residence, awakening Mr. Pelosi, according to the federal complaint. The suspect told Mr. Pelosi that he wanted to talk to “Nancy” and learned she was not there. When Mr. DePape said he would sit and wait for Ms. Pelosi, her husband said that she would not return for several days.

 

It was around that time that Mr. DePape took out zip ties from his pocket. In a recorded interview with police officers, Mr. DePape said he wanted to restrain Mr. Pelosi so he could go to sleep, because he was tired from carrying his backpack to the house.

 

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At one point, Mr. Pelosi tried to access an elevator, which has a phone, but was blocked from doing so, according to the local prosecutor. At some point after that, Mr. Pelosi ducked into a bathroom to call 911 from his cellphone at 2:23 a.m., the complaint said. Officers with the San Francisco Police Department arrived eight minutes later to find the two men struggling over a hammer.

 

When they asked what was going on, Mr. DePape “responded that everything was good,” the F.B.I. agent wrote. At that moment, Mr. DePape yanked the hammer from Mr. Pelosi’s grip and struck him once in the head, rendering him unconscious on the floor.

 

The officers quickly restrained Mr. DePape, who told them that he had left his backpack near the smashed door window on the rear porch. When they examined its contents, they found another hammer, tape, rope, two pairs of gloves — rubber and cloth — and a journal.

 

The police recovered the zip ties in the bedroom.

 

Ms. Pelosi has Capitol Police protection wherever she goes. But her husband did not have security that night, the local prosecutor said on Monday.

 

Kidnapping and assault are usually charged under state laws by local authorities, but in extreme circumstances, such as cases involving federal officials or judges, they can become federal crimes.

 

If convicted, Mr. DePape faces a maximum of 20 years in prison for the attempted kidnapping of a federal official in the performance of official duties, and up to 30 years for assaulting an immediate member of a federal official’s family and inflicting a serious injury with a dangerous weapon.

 

Ms. Pelosi’s spokesman had no comment on the charges.

 

Federal law makes such an assault a federal crime when it is done “with the intent to impede, intimidate, or interfere with” the work of an official or “with intent to retaliate against” that person — a charge that stems from Mr. DePape’s attempts to find the speaker.

 

The attack on the Pelosi home in San Francisco contained echoes of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. When rioters broke into the halls of Congress on that day, some of them carried zip ties and shouted, “Nancy, Nancy, where are you, Nancy?” A person who had been briefed on the Oct. 28 attack said Mr. DePape had been loudly demanding to know where Ms. Pelosi was.

 

Much remains unknown about Mr. DePape. But the authorities have been examining what appeared to be Mr. DePape’s copious online presence, which included angry rants and extremist views.

 

The domain of a blog written by a user who called himself “daviddepape” was registered to an address in Richmond, Calif., in August, and law enforcement determined that Mr. DePape had lived there for about two years, according to the federal complaint. From August until the day before the attack on Mr. Pelosi, the blog featured many antisemitic sentiments as well as concerns about pedophilia, anti-white racism and “elite” control of the internet.

 

One of the blog posts suggested that there had been no mass gassing of prisoners at Auschwitz, and others were accompanied by malicious and stereotypical images. Another reposted a video lecture defending Adolf Hitler.

 

In the aftermath of the attack, Republicans and other conservative voices spread lies, misinformation and baseless conspiracy theories about the assault, ominously suggesting that the media was withholding sordid facts about the case.

 

Elon Musk, the billionaire who completed his takeover of Twitter last week, posted a link to a discredited newspaper known for publishing falsehoods and claimed that “there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” The publication, offering no evidence, suggested the assailant was a male prostitute. Mr. Musk’s tweet was later deleted.

 

Some conservative media outlets framed the assault as a consequence of “soft on crime” policies of Democrats, a frequent attack line by Republicans around the country in the lead up to the midterm elections.

 

In comments that — deliberately or not — served to debunk some of the conspiracy theories, prosecutors said on Monday that Mr. Pelosi had never seen his attacker before.

 

Ms. Jenkins, the San Francisco district attorney, said that the widespread misinformation circulating on the case had made it all the more important for prosecutors to present the facts to the public.

 

“We of course do not want distorted facts floating around, certainly not in a manner that is further traumatizing a family that’s already been traumatized enough,” she said.

 

Luke Broadwater, Steven Lee Myers, Stuart A. Thompson, Luke Vander Ploeg, Emily Cochrane and Adam Goldman contributed reporting.

 

Kellen Browning is a technology reporter in San Francisco, where he covers the gig economy, the video game industry and general tech news. @kellen_browning

 

Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice. He joined The Times in 2017 after working for Politico, Newsday, Bloomberg News, the New York Daily News, the Birmingham Post-Herald and City Limits. @GlennThrush

 

Tim Arango is a Los Angeles correspondent. Before moving to California, he spent seven years as Baghdad bureau chief and also reported on Turkey. He joined The Times in 2007 as a media reporter. @tarangoNYT