On Friday, footage from home security cameras and police body cameras that captured the attack on Paul Pelosi, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, was released to the public. In the wee hours of the night on Oct. 28, 2022, 42-year-old David DePape broke into the Pelosi home in the Pacific Heights area of San Francisco. He used a hammer to break in. The attack left Paul Pelosi in the hospital with a fractured skull.
The Republican Party and the conspiracist wing of the conservative movement (which basically includes most Republican elected officials these days) quickly tried to downplay this attack on an elected official’s spouse as something other than what was being presented. They made bad jokes about it. They implied that there was something untoward about the whole situation. Specifically, online MAGA-sleuths said that Paul Pelosi was clearly having some kind of drug- and alcohol-fueled extramarital liaison with this man that went wrong. Considering there was no evidence to imply this, it was a truly debased position to take privately, let alone publicly.
With the video out now, it is clear that the story that was told by authorities in the first place is backed up by the video evidence, the police report evidence, and the eyewitness evidence. But that doesn’t mean Fox News’ guests aren’t still willing to promote a well-debunked narrative—even when their misinformation is being contradicted in real time, on the same screen they are spewing lies on.
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Brian Claypool is a criminal defense attorney that Fox News likes to bring in to talk about things like Alec Baldwin’s potential liabilities in the tragic deaths on the set of the film Rust. He’s there to basically push the sexiest, most inflammatory version of legal expertise in order for Fox News to gin up their viewership’s heart rates. On Friday, Claypool was brought on to talk about the Pelosi case and the footage that was revealed.
Claypool had an issue working against him: On Thursday night, he went on Jesse Watters’ crappy primetime misinformation hour to admonish the Department of Justice, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and San Francisco law enforcement for potentially lying about everything they had said about the Paul Pelosi attack. His entire spiel was that if the video showed this, and if the video showed that, it would prove something nefarious and present a legal problem of epic proportions. It wasn’t.
So when Claypool came on Fox News Friday, with the video out for everyone to see, he wanted to continue swinging at the fences that there was some conspiratorial defense that could be offered up. His position, as a criminal defense attorney, is that he was right—even though he was wrong in every single assertion he had made less than 24 hours previously. In this one exchange, Claypool attempts to go all Lionel Hutz and asks hosts Sandra Smith and John Roberts, “Where is the evidence of a breaking and entering?”
The next part is the best part, especially because there was very public evidence of a breaking and entering at the Pelosi residence long before today’s video release. The hosts simply pointed to the footage of DePape … breaking … and … entering.
Here’s a thought.