The Daily - The Man Who Tried to Kidnap Nancy Pelosi

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

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: A trail of strained relationships. An itinerant life that included a stint living in a storage unit. A personality that was “consumed by darkness.” Who is the man accused of attacking Mr. Pelosi?The assault at the Pelosi home comes as threats against members of Congress have increased in recent years.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, what we're learning about the man who violently attacked the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, about the growing number of threats against members of Congress, and about the woeful lack of security around those lawmakers. I spoke with my colleague, Katie Edmondson, about what she's found. It's Wednesday, November 2nd. Katie, over the past 24 hours or so, we have learned a lot of new information about this attack that occurred at the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and about the attacker himself. So based on all that information, what is the 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 complaint that paints a frightening story, really, of exactly what happened. Here's what we know. Shortly after two in the morning, a 42-year-old man named David DePapp shows up at the townhouse of Nancy and Paul Pelosi in San Francisco. And he breaks the glass of the back door and lets himself in. And he's carrying with him a book bag with a number of items, a rope, zip ties, and as we will find out later, at least one hammer. So once inside, he makes his way to the bedroom of Nancy Pelosi's 82-year-old husband,

Paul, who is asleep in bed. And Paul Pelosi wakes up to find this man looking at him. And he asks Paul, where's Nancy? As in, 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 DePap,

to which DePap says, well, I'll sit and wait. However long it takes. That's right. Wow. So Paul says, how can you and I resolve this situation? And DePap responds 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 elevator in the house to use a phone there, but DePap blocks him from doing that. Somehow he convinces DePap to let him go into the bathroom, and that's where Paul has been charging his phone overnight. And so Paul is able to call 911.

At this point we know it's 2.23 in the morning. And Paul tells the 911 dispatcher, there's an intruder in my house. There's some unknown male here with me. And now Paul has to sit and wait for police to arrive with this strange man with zip ties in his house. Probably what felt like the longest minutes in Paul Pelosi's life. I mean, a terrifying wait. So when police arrive, what do they see? But 82-year-old Paul Pelosi struggling with DePap, and they're struggling to get control of the same hammer.

They both have their hands, they're fighting with each other over who has control of the hammer.. They both have their hands. They're fighting with each other over who has control of the hammer. Wow. And police enter the house and they address DePapp and they say, what are you doing? And he panics and he takes the hammer and he hits Paul Pelosi over the head with the hammer. Right in front of the police. Right in front of the police. the hammer. Right in front of the police. Right in front of the police. And now Paul Pelosi is lying on the ground, unconscious, and officers rush to restrain DePapp. They send Mr. Pelosi on an ambulance to the hospital. And that, more or less, is how this whole terrifying ordeal comes to a close. Katie, what ends up happening to Paul Pelosi given this injury?

So it turns out that he had a fractured skull as a result of the attack and also severe injuries to his hand and arms. He ended up undergoing surgery for those injuries, and he is still in the ICU as of Tuesday afternoon. And once the attacker, Dupap, is taken into custody by police, what does he tell authorities about why he went to the house and why he did what he did? Well, he tells police in an interview that he was on a mission and that he wanted to take Nancy Pelosi hostage specifically because he saw her as being the,

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, it seems that he had envisioned a scenario in his head where he was going to confront Speaker Pelosi 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. 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 quote-unquote lie, then he was going to break her kneecaps. 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 the 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 911 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 at the house. And in the days since this attack, what do we learn about how DePapp came to hold these quite conspiratorial sounding views about Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats?

Why does he see them as a, quote, pack of liars? What we've learned is that David DePapp is someone who had lived an itinerant life, including a time period recently where he was living out of a storage unit. life, including a time period recently where he was living out of a storage unit. And according to an interview with a man who employed him recently, he found housing a few years ago in Berkeley. And apparently that's when he started spending a lot of time on conspiracy websites and forums and where he started to get into right-wing conspiracy theories like QAnon and Pizzagate. And just to explain that reference, Pizzagate, this is the discredited right-wing conspiracy theories like QAnon and Pizzagate. And just to explain that reference, Pizzagate, this is the discredited right-wing theory that Democrats are involved in a child pedophilia ring.

That's right. And QAnon has a similar core theme. So he starts a blog under the username David DePapp. And the blog gives us a sense of some of the things he was most concerned about. The blog articulates a lot of anti-Semitic ideas, concerns, to your point earlier, about pedophilia, anti-white racism, and quote-unquote

elite control of the internet. I mean, it's really just sort of a toxic stew. There are posts defending Adolf Hitler and saying aspects of the Holocaust were a hoax. Kind of a potpourri of right-wing online conspiracy thinking. Absolutely. Okay. So what emerges here is, I think we can say with some confidence, a portrait of an unstable person who's consuming a large volume of conspiratorial online content that somehow brings him to the conclusion that his patriotic duty is to injure Nancy Pelosi and thereby show the Democratic Party the error of its ways.

That's right. of its ways. That's right. And Katie, as someone who covers Speaker Pelosi, covers Democrats, covers all of Congress, what were you thinking as you digested all of this information over the past few days? Well, 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 uptick in threats to members of Congress for over a year now, talking with members about threats they receive daily. And it just didn't feel surprising that something like this would happen.

It felt inevitable. We'll be right back. Katie, before the break, you mentioned you've been reporting on the uptick in 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 Congress is not a new phenomenon. There was, of course, the shooting of Gabby Giffords in 2011. Gabby Giffords, in 2011. And in 2017, there was the gunman who shot Steve Scalise on a baseball field outside of Washington, D.C. And notably, one of those victims was a Democrat, Gabby Giffords. The other, Steve Scalise, a Republican. That's right. And those two incidents, obviously, were 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. Right, kind of, they were one-offs. That's right. But what we've really seen, and I think a way that the landscape has really changed in a major way is that suddenly lawmakers are now contending with a proliferation of frequent threats. And many of them, in fact, are related to these larger conspiracies that we were talking about earlier that David Tapp 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 6th. And I would say that was the jumping off point for a lot of this reporting.

Well, describe exactly what this reporting looked like. What did you do? Well, one of the first things that we did was to take a look at the numbers. We wanted to make sure that this wasn't a case of a couple of prominent examples that was skewing sort of the way we were thinking about this. And so we went to Capitol Police, who tracks the threats that members of Congress receive. And what they told us was that between 2016 and 2021, threats against members of Congress actually increased tenfold. Wow. So in 2021 alone, there were almost 10,000 threats

reported to Capitol Police. Which is especially staggering when you think about how many members of Congress there are. 535 divided into 10,000 is a pretty astonishing number of threats. It's a staggering number. And then we looked at a second pool of data as well.

And those were threats that were deemed serious enough, not only for Capitol Police to investigate, but to actually culminate in prosecutors 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 75 indictments, cases in which someone was charged with threatening a member of Congress.

And what we found looking at those cases was that more than a third were made by Republican or pro-Trump individuals. And those were against Democrats, but also in some cases Republicans who were deemed insufficiently loyal to the former president. So that's Republicans threatening Republicans. So that was a third of them. That's right. And then nearly a quarter were made by Democrats targeting Republicans. Hmm.

And we saw some sort of sharp spikes in that category around specific events. So I'm thinking of the Kavanaugh confirmation. We saw a sharp uptick in Democrats threatening Republicans 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 tinfoil hat conspiracy theories that didn't really

have any ideological leaning, that it was just impossible to quantify. So in this admittedly small pool of threats that led to indictments, you said 75 or so, it seems there's a fair amount of ideological diversity. But I'm curious, are these threats pretty much directed at the same small handful of lawmakers? Is that the case? Well, you're 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, particularly 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 in Seattle, where a man who was actually a neighbor of Congresswoman Pramilda Jayapal, he had previously sent an angry email to her. And then he started showing up outside of her home, armed with a semi-automatic handgun, shouting threats and profanities. 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. getting threats. Of course, Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois,

who serve on the January 6th Select Committee in Congress, have spoken quite openly about just the deluge of threats they've received from Republicans, from Trump loyalists, after electing to serve on the committee. But when you look at the overall picture, I have to say, Speaker Pelosi is unfortunately really in a league of her own on this front. She gets, by a huge magnitude, a larger number of threats than anyone else. And I think a large part of that is because she's been the most powerful Democrat in Congress for a long time. And for decades, she has really been demonized in advertising, in 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 2006 campaign cycle, at that point, Republicans made a film spoof that portrayed an evil Democratic empire led by, quote unquote, Darth Nancy. And then a couple years later, the Republican National Committee ran an advertisement featuring Ms. Pelosi's face framed by the barrel of a gun. The CIA, their business is deception. And it was emphasized by the sound of a bullet firing as red bled down the screen. And that was supposed to be, they say, a parody of the James Bond film Goldfinger. But I think, Michael, really the through line here has been that for years,

Republicans have sought to paint Ms. Pelosi as a symbol of a partisan enemy. a partisan enemy. Since 2018, Republicans have spent more than $227 million on advertisements featuring her as a villain. Just on Nancy Pelosi, $227 million. That's right. And this year alone, they've poured more than $61 million into advertisements featuring Ms. Pelosi. advertisements featuring Ms. Pelosi. Well, to that point, how direct a connection is being made and should be made between the ads that you just described that feature Nancy Pelosi 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's people who either study domestic extremism or who study extremism among the far right in particular, what they said is that they're 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 it to my attention. The phrase they keep using over and over to describe this ecosystem and its outgrowth is called stochastic terrorism. Explain that. Well, it's this concept where in an ecosystem that constantly demonizes or dehumanizes either a specific group or an individual, 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 Paul Pelosi, I have to imagine journalists have approached the Republican Party and Republicans who paid for these ads that feature Nancy Pelosi and asked them, in retrospect, do you regret paying for those ads, broadcasting those ads? what are they saying? Well, we've seen across the board, really, Republicans not wanting to accept any responsibility for creating this ecosystem. We saw, for example, Ronna McDaniel, who is the chairwoman of 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 Congressman Tom Emmer. Good morning. And then we saw Tom Emmer. 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 where you're firing a gun.

And it showed him shooting at a firing range with the hashtag. Hashtag fire Pelosi. Fire Pelosi. Do you not understand that that is suggestive to people who are in a bad state and in this current environment, how risky it is? As you're talking about the importance of lowering the rhetoric. I disagree. Why do you leave that up? 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 midterm elections, again, targeting Pelosi or demonizing her. I don't expect to see any of those come down. They're going to remain on TV, in newspapers, on flyers through November 8th. That's our expectation. So, Katie, where does all of this leave the threatened lawmakers that we have been talking about? The fact that the rise in threats has risen 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 terrified. And the reason that they're terrified is that the baseline for a member of Congress is that you do not get any type of special security. No security.

That's right. I think actually a lot of people don't understand this, but if you are in a leadership position on Capitol Hill, 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 if you are a low-level congressman from Wisconsin, for example, or even for that matter, a committee chairman, you do not get any sort of security detail through Capitol Police. Wow.

And in fact, if you are a member of Congress who has received threats, what you find is that there's actually quite a high bar to clear in order to get Capitol Police to assign you a security detail. What is that bar? No one really seems to know outside of Capitol Police who have declined to share any types of red lines in this situation. But there have been some members of Congress, some of the liberal Congresswomen 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're not always getting a security detail as a result of that. and that they're not always getting a security detail as a result of that. And so 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 FEC in order to pay for private security. is allowed by the FEC in order to pay for private security. Senator Raphael Warnock, for example, has spent nearly $900,000 of campaign funds for his own protection since being sworn into 2021. Yeah. Senator Cruz was the second highest spender of those that we took a look at. He spent nearly $600,000 on private security. And then the second poll that we see is lawmakers trying to change their footprint in the community or change their behavior in certain ways. I've heard, for example, of lawmakers minimizing the number of in-person town halls they have because they're concerned about being adequately able to staff those with security. I've heard about Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's office compiling essentially sort of an old-fashioned Facebook every morning.

So they'll compile a binder with the photos of people who have threatened her and ask their staff to familiarize themselves with those faces in case one of them should walk into the office. So what you're describing is the Capitol Police and Congress itself telling these lawmakers, the most threatened members of Congress, basically that they're on their own, that they should take care of their own protection. And 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, it kind of feels like a lose-lose

for everybody, including the lawmakers and their safety. I mean, Michael, everyone knows what the solution or a solution is here, and that is for Congress to allocate more money to protect themselves. That's something I don't think is going to happen. I think lawmakers are extremely reluctant to take a vote that makes it seem like they're giving themselves a perk that their constituents don't have. But you have to wonder if 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. Well, Katie, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thanks, Michael. On Tuesday afternoon, in a rare public statement, the chief of the United States Capitol Police, Tom Manger, acknowledged that his department needed more resources to protect members of Congress, citing what he called today's political climate. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, two days after losing Brazil's presidential election,

President Jair Bolsonaro agreed to a transition of power, easing fears that he would contest the results and undermine the country's democratic system. Bolsonaro, who had previously said that the only way he could lose the election was if it were stolen, did not officially concede defeat. concede defeat, but in a short speech, he thanked his supporters and encouraged them to remain peaceful despite their disappointment. And the Times reports that Twitter is experiencing an exodus of executives and advertisers in the week since Elon Musk completed his purchase of the social media giant. At least three senior executives, including the head of customer experience, have quit the company, on top of the four other top executives that Musk has already fired. At the same time, one of the world's largest advertising companies,

IPG, instructed its clients to stop advertising on Twitter, saying it feared that Musk would lower standards for the kind of content that can appear on the platform. Today's episode was produced by Asta Chaturvedi, Will Reed, and Sydney Harper. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn, contains original music by Marian Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landvark of Wunderli. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bolboro. See you tomorrow.