Sen Ted Cruz seemed to be amplifying misinformation about the man suspected of attacking Nancy Pelosi’s husband after he’d earlier condemned the incident as “horrific”.
On Friday, hours after learning that Paul Pelosi, 82, had been “violently assaulted” in the San Francisco home that he shares with the House speaker, who was in Washington DC at the time of the attack, the Texas senator tweeted out a message that said he and his wife Heidi were praying for the Pelosi family.
“We can have our political differences, but violence is always wrong and unacceptable,” he tweeted on Friday.
The Republican lawmaker then made an about-face on those earlier sympathies extended to his Democratic colleague, as by Monday he began posting tweets from unreliable sources that seemed to promote falsehoods and innuendo about the suspected attacker, 42-year-old David DePape.
In one of the posts, Sen Cruz had reshared a screenshot from alt-right activist Matt Walsh, in which he pushed back against the information that has been widely reported from reliable news outlets that Mr DePape had recently become engaged in posting on far-right political blogs.
In some of those posts published to a subscription-based blog, viewed by The Independent, Mr DePape was seen expressing a range of transphobic, antisemitic and racist views, alongside conspiracy theories tied to Covid-19 and QAnon, among others.
Mr Walsh, and seemingly Sen Cruz, seemed to both challenge the notion that Mr DePape was engaged in militant right-wing conspiracies, with the former writing: “I don’t know what the h*** happened at Nancy Pelosi’s house and I suspect none of us will ever know for sure. But I do know that trying to paint a hippie nudist from Berkeley as some kind of militant right winger is absurd and will always be absurd.”
Mr Cruz, appearing to agree with Mr Walsh’s conclusions, later quote tweeted a screenshot of the right-wing activist’s thread with the caption: “truth”.
Mr Cruz is hardly the first conservative from within the Republican party to begin trafficking in support of conspiracy theories and spreading falsehoods about the attack against the 82-year-old.
Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene took to Twitter to defend Elon Musk after the new owner of the microblogging platform had posted - and since deleted - a tweet that supported an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about the attack on Ms Pelosi‘s husband.
On Sunday, Musk had shared a link to a news article claiming without evidence that Mr Pelosi had met his attacker in a San Francisco gay bar on the night that he was attacked.
After deleting his tweet on Sunday night, the Twitter owner posted a screenshot of a New York Times headline reporting on his post that he had shared content from a website “known to publish false news”, with a joking rebuttal: “This is fake – I did not tweet out a link to The New York Times!”
For her part, the Georgia Republican took to the same social media platform on Monday morning to defend Musk’s actions, writing in a post: “The same mainstream media democrat activists that sold conspiracy theories for years about President Trump and Russia are now blaming @elonmusk for ‘internet misinformation’ about Paul Pelosi’s friend attacking him with a hammer.”
“The media is source of misinformation,” added the congresswoman, who herself is known to traffic in conspiracy theories about election fraud, QAnon and Covid-19 vaccines.
While a select group of lawmakers from the Republican seemed to struggle to get behind the message of denouncing violence enacted on an elected official, there were others within the party who spoke out in support of the House Speaker over the weekend.
“Horrified and disgusted by the reports that Paul Pelosi was assaulted in his and Speaker Pelosi’s home last night,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Twitter.
Republican congressman Steve Scalise, who was nearly killed in June 2017 when a gunman opened fire on the Republican congressional baseball team at a practice in Virginia, similarly decried the attack as “horrific”.
Nancy Pelosi addressed the incident in her first public remarks over the weekend in a letter addressed to colleagues, where she thanked those who had spoken out against the assault that left her husband “brutally attacked”.
“Our children, our grandchildren and I are heartbroken and traumatized by the life-threatening attack on our Pop,” she said in a statement.
The 82-year-old underwent surgery on Friday to repair his fractured skull and remains in hospital where his son said he is responding to treatment.
“They are rebuilding him slowly,” Paul Pelosi Jr told reporters outside the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center on Sunday evening, according to the New York Post.
Prosecutors in San Francisco are expected to announce charges of attempted murder, assault and elder abuse on Monday afternoon.
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins told ABC7 that Ms Pelosi was the target of the attack, and that the suspect could face additional federal charges.
Mr DePape is expected to be arraigned in a California courtroom on Tuesday.
