President Joe Biden (D) blamed Republicans on Friday night for a man who attacked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D) husband during the early morning hours on Friday.
Police said at a press conference that they responded to the home at around 2:30 a.m. and that when they arrived on scene, they witnessed the suspect and Paul Pelosi fighting for control of a hammer. The suspect “pulled the hammer away from Mr. Pelosi and violently assaulted him with it,” police said.
Addressing a crowd on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania, Biden called the attack “despicable,” saying there is “no place in America” for it.
“There’s too much violence, political violence, too much hatred, too much vitriol,” Biden said. “And what makes us think that one party can talk about stolen elections, COVID being a hoax, that it’s all a bunch of lies, and it not affect people who may not be so well balanced.”
“What makes us think that it’s not going to corrode the political climate?” he continued. “Enough is enough is enough. Every person of good conscience needs to clearly and unambiguously stand up against violence in our politics, no matter what your politics are.”
Heavy.com, a fact-finding website, highlighted a tweet from a Mission Local journalist Joe Eskenazi that stated: “My sources also name the suspect in this morning’s hammer attack on Paul Pelosi as David DePape, born 1980, of Berkeley. He would appear to be a former Castro nudist protester. Things appear set to be bizarre for a while.”
The report highlighted a 2013 article from the San Francisco Chronicle in which the same man appears to have been mentioned, although his name is spelled wrong in the article, but is spelled correctly in the captions of one of the photos included in the article. The article described him as a “hemp jewelry maker.”
CNN reported that the suspect posted debunked conspiracy theories on social media.
Biden has repeatedly sought to portray himself as a unifier, while in reality, he has launched vicious political attacks against his opponents, including claiming that Trump supporters “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”