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The Man Who Tried to Kidnap Nancy Pelosi

2022-11-02 | 🔗

Early on Friday, an intruder broke into the San Francisco home of Nancy Pelosi and bludgeoned Ms. Pelosi’s husband, Paul, with a hammer.

The shocking attack underlined fears about the growing number of threats against members of Congress and the woeful lack of security around those lawmakers.

Guest: Catie Edmondson, a congressional correspondent for The New York Times.

Background reading: 

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

This is an unofficial transcript meant for reference. Accuracy is not guaranteed.
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during all round those lawmakers. I spoke with my colleague katy edmonson about what she's it's Wednesday november. Second,. Kitty over the past twenty four hours, or so we have learned a lot of new information about this attack that occurred at the home of how speaker nancy policy and about the attacker. self, so beast on all that information. What is story, that's emerging. Well, let's start with the attack itself. What happened. Last thursday night was initially fairly murky, but federal investigators have since released a detailed criminal complained. The paints
a frightening story really of exactly what happened. Here's! What we now shortly after two in the morning, a forty two year old man named David to pap, shows up at the town house of Nancy and paul Pelosi and san francisco, and he breaks the glass of the back door and, let's himself and and he's carrying with him a book bag with a number of items, a rope zip ties, as we will find out later, at least one hammer so once inside he makes his way to the bedroom of nancy policies. Eighty two year old, husband Paul who is asleep and bad. and paul Pelosi wakes up to find this man looking at him, and he asks Paul where's nancy, where is the speaker of the house? I want to talk to her correct so it becomes immediately evident to Paul that this man is looking for his wife
and she's, not there she's, actually in d c on a trip and her security detail is with her and so Paul Pelosi is alone in his house and that's what he tells the path to which to pap says well I'll sit and wait, however, lunatics, that's right. Well so Paul says: how can you and I resolve this situation and papers signs that he wants to tie Paul up because he's very tired from carrying his bag into the house and breaking into the house and would like to rest and apparently at this point starts rummaging in his bag, for the zip ties and takes them out and Paul tries to duck into an, later in the house, to use the phone there, but the path block them from doing that. Somehow he convinces to pat to let him go into the bathroom and that's where Paul has been charging his phone overnight and so policy
will the call nine one one at this point. We know it's too twenty three in the morning and Paul housed nine, when one dispatcher theirs truth or, in my house, their sound unknown mail here with me and now Paul has to sit and wait for police to arrive with a strange man, but the dip ties and his house
we, what felt like the longest minutes in policies life, I mean a terrifying weight, so in police arrive, they knock on the front door, they forcibly enter the house and what do they see, but eighty two year old, Paul Pelosi struggling with de pap and their struggling to get control of the same hammer. They both have their hands there, fighting with each other over who has control of the hammer and police enter the house and they addressed a pop and they say what are you doing and he panics and he takes the hammer and he hits paul policy over the head with the hammer right and from the police right in front of the police and now Paul Pelosi is lying on the ground, unconscious and officers rush to restrain the path they send MR policy on an ambulance to the hospital, and
more or less, is how this whole terrifying ordeal comes to a close. What can you up happening to Paul pollution. Given this injury, so it turns out that he had a fractured skull as a result of the attack and also severe injuries. you his hand and arms. He ended up undergoing surgery for those injuries. He is still in the ice you as of tuesday afternoon and once the attacker, Japan is taken into custody by police what does he tell authorities about? Why went to the house and what he did, what he did more. He tells police and an view that he was on a mission and that he wanted to take nancy pelosi hostage, specifically because he saw her is being v, and this is his quote, the
leader of the pack of all the lies told by the democratic party, and he went on to tell police had seen He had envisioned the scenario in his head where he was going to confront speaker policy with all of these lies and that if she told him the truth- and we don't exactly know what he meant by that. But if she told him the truth, then he would allow her to go, but that he was convinced she was going to lie to him, and his plan was that if she continued to court unquote lie then he was going to break her knee caps and the reason he wanted to break her kneecaps rather than to kill her was because he wanted to send a message to other members of congress. He wanted to have her wheeled into house of representatives to show other lawmakers? This is what happens if you lie like she does, and in fact he told police,
that one of the reasons he decided not to run away when he knew Paul Pelosi called nine one. One was because he saw himself fighting a righteous battle against tyranny. Just like the founding fathers during the revolutionary war- and he said it was his patriotism that required him to stay, the house, and in the days since this attack, What are we learn about How d have came to hold these quite Your toil sounding views about nancy policy and the devil, Why does he see them ass, a quote pack of liars. what we ve learned is that David to path is someone who had lived an itinerant life, including a time period recently where he was living out of a storage unit. and according to an interview with the man who employ them recently, he found house a few years ago in berkeley an appeal
leave that's when he started spending a lot of time on conspiracy, websites and forums in hand where he started to get into right wing conspiracy theories like q and on and keeps the gate and to explain that reference? again? This is the discredited right wing fury. The Democrats are involved in a child. Pedophilia ring that's right, and cuban on has a similar core theme.
so he starts a blog under the username David to pass, and the blog gives us a sense of some of the things you is most concerned about. The blog articulate a lot of anti semitic ideas concerns to your point earlier about pedophilia anti white racism and quoting quote elite control of the internet. I mean it. It's really just sort of a toxic still their posts. Defending Adolf hitler and saying aspects of the holocaust were a hoax kind of a poor perry of right wing online conspiracy thinking Lately, ok, so what emerges here is, I think we can say with some confidence a portrait of an unstable person whose consuming alive the volume of conspiratorial online content. That somehow brings him to the conclusion that his patriotic duty is to injure name people who and
or by show the democratic party, the air of its ways. That's right and kitty as someone who covers speaker policy covers Democrats covered all of congress. What were you thinking as you digested. All of this information over the past few days will. My first reaction obviously was just being absolutely horrified frankly to read some of the details about this attack, but I have to tell you: I've been looking at the up taken threats to members of congress for over a year now, talking with members about threats, Davis, leave daily, and it just didn't feel surprising that something like this would happen. It fell
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book a year. The mid term elections are a referendum on the party in power, but this year things filled different. Our democratic system under direct ran demography. When you read I realize, and as the politics EDA we're gonna need. Some clarity, I must add, herndon from the new york times. It's the runner provided ever you get your pockets katy before the bread you mentioned you been reporting on the uptake and threats against members of congress. Tell us about that reporting. Well, I think the first thing to say, Michael, is that violence against members of com, It is not a new phenomenon. There is, of course, the shooting of gabby Giffords and twenty eleven and twelve Seventeen. There was the gun man who shot steve squeeze on a baseball field outside of washington d c.
The, and notably one of those victims was a democratic gotta, give her the other stiff police are republican, that's right and those two incidents, obviously or a terrifying for members of congress, but I think to a certain extent, there was always kind of a grim understanding for lawmakers that those types of lone wolf attacks could happen regard they were. There were one offs, that's right, but what we really seen- and I think a way that the landscape has really changed in a major way.
Is that suddenly lawmakers or now contending with a proliferation of frequent threats and many of them in fact, or related to these larger, conspiracies that we were talking about earlier? The David tap became enmeshed in right. For me, one of the points where I thought that we really needed to take a closer look at this was after january sex, and I would say that was the jumping off point for a lot of this report. I would describe as every what does reporting look like what'd. You do little one of the first things that we did was to take a look at the numbers. You wanted to make sure that this was a case of a couple of prominent examples that was skewing sort of the way we were thinking about this, and so he went to capital police who tracks the threats that members of congress received
and what they told us was that between twenty sixteen and twenty twenty one threats against members of congress actually increased tenfold web. So in twenty twenty one alone there were almost ten thousand threats reported to capital police. Which is especially staggering when you think about How many members of congress there are five hundred and thirty five divided into ten thousand? Is Pretty astonishing number of threats, it a staggering number and then be looked at a second pool of data as well, and those were threats that were deemed serious enough not only for capital police to investigate but to actually culminate in a prosecutor.
Charging someone with making a threat against a member of congress and how many of those very serious threats were identified. So we took a look at just over seventy five indictments cases and If someone was charged with threatening a member of congress and what we found looking at those cases, I was that more than a third were made by republican or probe trump individuals, and those were against Democrats, but also in some cases, were pub can you were deemed insufficiently loyal to the former president. So that's republicans threatening republicans too, that there was a third of that's right. And then nearly a quarter were made by democrats targeting republicans, and we saw some sort of sharp spikes in that category. Around
specific events. So I'm thinking of the cabinet confirmation. We saw a sharp uptake in democrats threatening begins and also around the attempted repeal of the affordable care act? Then we had the rest of them, and this is actually interesting is that you weren't really able to determine political affiliation, because so many of them were suffused with conspiracy theories and sort of in file had conspiracy theories that didn't really have any ideological leaning that did. It was just impossible to quantify so in this, admittedly small pool of threats that lead to indictments. You said seventy five or so it seems there is a fair amount of eighty logical diversity.
But I'm curious, although these threats pretty much directed at the seem small handful of lawmakers, is that the case all your right Michael? A lot of these threats are directed over and over again at the same lawmakers, and we particularly see that for members of congress who are democratic women of color? So I'm thinking about members of the squad peculiarly Ilhan omar, the congresswoman from Minnesota and alexandria, Ocasio cortez from new york they are certainly among the most threatened members of congress. and there was a really frightening episode a few months ago and see at all, where a man who was actually a neighbour of congresswoman promoted, jaya Paul. He had previously set
angry email to her, and then he started showing up outside of her home armed with a semi automatic hand, gun shouting, threats and profanity is, and you do see, these threats start to accumulate around certain lawmakers right and on the other side of the coin, we also see certain republican lawmakers routinely getting threats, of course, congresswoman liz, cheney of wyoming and Adam Kensington of illinois shoe serve on the january sex select committee congress have spoken quite openly about just the delusion of threats Dave received from republicans from trump loyalists after electing to serve on the committee. But when you look at the overall picture, I have to
If a speaker Pelosi is unfortunately really in a league of her own on this front, she gets by a huge magnitude of a larger number of threats than anyone else, and I think a large part of that is because she has been the most powerful democrat in congress for all long time, and for decades she has really been demonized. An advert hiding and partisan media. As this kind of villain figure Can you give us a couple of examples of that process of vilification? Well, it really started as she was poised to become the first female speaker of the house. So looking back to the two thousand and six campaign cycle at that point, republicans made a film spoof that portrayed an evil democratic empire led by current darth Nancy, a man a couple years later. The republican national
did he ran and advertisements featuring miss close his face, framed the barrel of a gun. The cia, their business in his manner was emphasised by the sound of a bullet firing, as red blood down the screen, and that was supposed to be. They say a parody of the James bond film gold finger I think, Michael really. The through line here has been that four years republicans have sought to paint miss policy as a symbol of a part as an enemy since twenty eighteen. republicans have spent more than two hundred twenty seven million dollars on advertisements featuring her as a villain just on nancy policy, two hundred and twenty seven million dollars. That's right, and this year alone, they've poured more than six
De one million dollars into advertisements featuring this policy tool to that point, How direct a connection is being made and should be made between the ads that you just described. That feature: nancy policy and images of violence toward her and what just happened at her house in san francisco. you know, Michael when I talk to experts about this and that people who either study domestic extremism or who study
extreme is among the far right in particular, but they said is that there are concerned that these types of advertisements are kind of one thread feeding into this larger, dangerous ecosystem and I'd actually never heard this phrase before, but they brought to my attention the phrase they keep using over and over to describe this ecosystem and it's our growth is called to cast a terrorism before them. It's this concept, aware in an ecosystem that constantly demonizing or dehumanize, is either a specific group or an the visual it becomes essentially statistically likely that the outgrowth is going to be violent and at the same time you won't necessarily be able to easily predict when that violence will happen, or how it will happen well, since this attack on policy I have to imagine, journalists have approved
the republican party and republicans who paid for these adds that feed nancy policy and asked them in retrospect. Do you regret paying for those adds broadcasting those ads. What are they saying? What we ve seen across the board, really republicans not wanting to accept any responsibility for creating this ecosystem, and we saw, for example, Rhonda mcdaniel. He was the chairwoman. the republican national committee say that this was simply a deranged individual and she actually said that it was unfair for people to try to put any of this responsibility on republicans. And we turn now to the chairman of the national republican congressional committee, minnesota congressmen, Tom am are good more emma.
We saw a tom emperor, he went on face the nation and was grilled about a video he posted. I want to ask you about this when it comes to political violence on your twitter feed, you posted this video we're going to show just a few days ago. Your fiery and gone, and it's that showed hammy shooting at a firing range with the hashtag hashtag fire pelosi. Fire polo here, I am I'm right down there sitting on the latter suggested to people who are in a bad state and in this current environment, how risky it is as yet, mountain regions of lowering the rhetoric addition reward please I don't again- and he again also said he's not inciting violence I think the bottom line, though, is that you will not see any of those advertisements in the last week of the mid term elections again targeting close your demonizing her. I don't expect to see any of those come down They're gonna remain
on tv in newspapers, on fires through november, it that's our expectation, ok. We're does all of this leave the threatened lawmakers that we have been talking about the fact that The rise in threats has run seemingly exponentially and the appetite. for? Lowering the temperature, as you just said, is basically nonexistent. The lawmakers that I've spoken to over the past few days are too we're fired and the reason that their terrified is that the baseline for a member of congress is that you do not get any type of special security, no security, better. I think. Actually, a lot of people don't understand this, but if you are in a leadership position, on capital hell. So if you're, the speaker of the house, if you're the Senate majority leader or the senate minority leader, for example, you get a security detail, but
Few are a low level congressmen from wisconsin, for example. or even for that matter, a committee chairmen. You do not get any sort of security detail through capital police, In fact, if you are a member of congress who has received threats, what you find and is that there is actually quite a high bar to clear in order to get capital police to assign you a security detail. What is that no one really seems to know outside of capitol police who have declined to share any types of red lines in their situation. But there have been some members of congress, some of the liberal congress, women we talked about earlier, who have publicly expressed frustration that they're getting death threats that they find to be quite serious and that they are not always getting a security detail as a result of that and
The result is that you have lawmakers really trying to take things into their own hands and try to figure out how to protect themselves. One option that we ve seen some lawmakers take is dipping into their campaign funds, which is allowed by the effie sea. In order to pay for private, security, senator Raphael Warnock, for example, has spent nearly nine honey thousand dollars of campaign funds for his own protection, while since being sworn into twenty twenty one year, senator crews was the second highest spender of of those that we took a look at. He spent nearly six hundred thousand dollars on private security and then the second pull that we see as lawmakers trying to change their footprint in the community or change their behaviour in certain ways: I've heard, for example, of lawmakers minimizing the number of in person town halls they have, because their are concerned about being adequately able to staff those with security.
I've heard about congresswoman, alexandria, Cassio Cortez is office, compiling essentially sort of an old fashioned facebook every morning, so compile a binder with the photos of people who have threatened her and ass. Their style familiarize themselves with those faces in case one of them should walk into the office. So what you're describing is the capital police and congress itself telling these makers, the most threatened members of congress base, they're on their own. But these, to take care of their own protection. As a result, many of them are coming up with solutions that involve them curtailing their interactions with voters and nothing about that. Would seem to be ideal, in fact, a kind of feels like a lose lose for everybody, including acres and their safety, Michael everyone knows what the solution or a soul,
ocean is here, and that is for congress to allocate more money to protect themselves. That's something I don't think going to happen. I think lawmakers are extremely reluctant to take a vote that makes it seem like they're, giving themselves the park that their constituents dont have. But you have to wonder: This attack on Paul Pelosi wasn't enough to get lawmakers to really seriously think about how to fix this problem. My personal worry, frankly, is that it's going to take something much worse and no one wants to see that happen. Ok, thank you very much appreciate Thanks man on tuesday afternoon in or where public statement
The chief of the united states, capital police Tom manger acknowledged that his department needed more resources to pray members of congress, citing what he called to these political climate in what way back but a one offers commercial solutions. You can bank on now more than ever, your business faces specific challenges and unique opportunities. That's why capital one offers a comprehensive sweet, a financial services, custom tailored your short and long term goals, backed by the expertise, strategy and resources of a top ten commercial bank. A dedicated team works with you to support your success and help achieve your goals, explore the possibilities of capital, one dot com,
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Transcript generated on 2022-11-03.