A brief rundown of what we don't know about the Pelosi attack in San Francisco last month

Okay I lied it's not that brief.

We’ve had about 2,100 news cycles since Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer in San Francisco last month so it’s easy to forget that the whole thing was top-tier news for like six straight days. They arrested a guy at Pelosi’s home, they charged him out the wazoo at both federal and state, Paul Pelosi got released from the hospital and appears to be doing fine, and so everyone’s moved on.

Yet this is still a weird case. In fact it’s only gotten weirder even as it’s receded more and more from the public eye. It could be useful at this point to give a brief rundown of everything we know for certain since the incident occurred last month. Here it is:

• On Oct. 28, Paul Pelosi was attacked in his home, receiving a severe head injury that necessitated hospitalization.

That’s it. That’s pretty much all we know for sure. Here are the things we emphatically do not know:

• Who opened the door? There have been several conflicting accounts of what occurred when police arrived at the scene of the incident, most specifically who opened the door when police arrived and what happened directly after. A federal criminal complaint filed on Oct. 31 claims that, when police knocked on the front door of the Pelosi residence, “the door was opened.” No mention of who opened the door. According to the complaint, alleged attacker David DePape later claimed that Pelosi himself opened the door. A motion to detain filed the next day by the San Francisco District Attorney also claims that Paul Pelosi opened the door “with his left hand.” A grand jury indictment handed down Nov. 9 claims the two responding officers opened the door. An NBC report from earlier this month, citing unnamed sources, once again claimed Pelosi opened the door, and further claimed that Pelosi actually walked back toward his attacker after he opened the door. That report was quickly scrubbed and the reporter who delivered it, Miguel Almaguer, was quickly suspended. Yet an NBC report from last week claims that, per a source who reportedly have viewed the body cam footage from the incident, “Paul Pelosi opened the door with his left hand,” which verifies at least half of Almaguer’s account, and DePape’s, though not the grand jury indictment. Which of these accounts is true?

• Did Paul Pelosi in fact walk back toward his attacker? This has been a major source of controversy. Media outlets claim this point of contention has generated a bunch of “conspiracy theories,” but in the mainstream media “conspiracy theory” can refer to either (a) batshit wild-eyed speculation or (b) lines of inquiry the mainstream media are simply uninterested in following. In this case it seems to be the latter. It’s really completely unclear what happened. We know that Miguel Almaguer claimed Pelosi opened the door and walked back to his attacker. We know this contradicts the grand jury indictment, but not necessarily the San Francisco D.A. indictment, nor DePape’s claims, and maybe—though maybe not—the federal complaint.
  
  In his report last week, NBC’s Bigad Shaban said his source verified Almaguer’s claim that Pelosi opened the door. Shaban himself appeared to try and partly verify claims that Pelosi walked back toward his attacker; in his report he asked San Francisco D.A. Brooke Jenkins if she could comment on why Pelosi “didn't run out of the house towards police officers when he was able to actually open the door for them when they arrived.” Jenkins completely dodged the question, claiming that “everybody reacts to situations differently” and that Pelosi “will one day need to explain to potentially a jury why he did what he did and what thought process was going on in his mind.” What the hell? If you want to talk about conspiracy theories, I mean, that just sounds like a completely conspiratorial response. It sounds like she knows something serious.
  
  Here is my rough assessment on what I think is probably the truth: (a) Probably nothing weird or inexplicable happened here, Pelosi probably just opened the door for the police and then quickly thereafter he was attacked; (b) right now we don’t know for sure either way; and (c) none of this would matter all that much if there wasn’t so much bizarre, contradictory, uncertain information floating around about it. But the affidavits don’t match up, the bodycam footage from the police isn’t available, the journalists who report on it are getting shitcanned, and the D.A. doesn’t want to talk about it. This is all very, very weird.
  
  In any event, it is worth pointing out that, in this context at least, there almost by definition has to be some sort of conspiracy afoot here. Somebody is lying—either one or both NBC sources, or the D.A., or the grand jury, or maybe (though not definitively) the federal affiant, or some or all of them. It’s not a conspiracy theory if it’s true! Okay, I get that’s what conspiracy theorists always say. Still though, right?
  

• Why did NBC suspended Miguel Almaguer? This might seem unconnected, or at least not directly connected, to the Pelosi attack. But actually it’s one of the more bizarre elements to the story. Suspending a journalist is a big deal; it’s usually done only in egregious cases, particularly in the mainstream media, where massive screw-ups happen all the time with little repercussions. And moreover Almaguer does not seem like an obvious candidate for suspension. He’s won a Murrow award and an Emmy; he’s been with NBC News for about 13 years and appears to have had a modestly distinguished track record there. His suspension doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
  
  I suppose the simplest explanation is he got benched because he used a bad source that gave the network a bad scoop and made everyone look bad. But think about it: The guy’s a seasoned reporter. He knows how to vet sources at least to the point of reasonable confidence. He almost certainly had multiple editors on this story as well, and editors tend to want to know the identity of an anonymous source unless it’s absolutely necessary they don’t find out. And brother, let me tell you, when the anonymous source is giving a bombshell scoop on a story about the spouse of one of the most powerful people in the world, the editors want to know who it is. So Almaguer thought the source was good; so did his editors; everyone apparently greenlit it and it made it to broadcast. And yet he got suspended for it nonetheless. What gives?
  
  One slim but still very real possibility is that Almaguer got taken by a source who seemed very reliable but who had some sort of chip on his shoulder and who wanted to plant weird misleading information at a major news outlet, presumably to embarrass the Pelosis in some way. As we noted above, this would constitute a conspiracy of some kind, possibly from a high-ranking law enforcement official. But that seems rather more unlikely, all the more so when you remember that Almaguer is a mainstream journalist, almost certainly very liberal, and probably not likely to get snookered by a hostile right-wing plant.
  

• What does the body cam footage show? Brooke Jenkins, the district attorney for San Francisco, has vowed to block the public “as much as possible” from seeing the body cam footage of the incident. Seriously, she said that: “We’re going to make sure that we limit the evidence as much as possible.” That’s also very weird. I get that, whatever happened here, this is a very sensitive and traumatic incident for the Pelosi family. But it wouldn’t be that hard to show a censored/edited version of the body cam footage, right up to the split-second before Pelosi was attacked. That would at least clear up…well, you know…some of the stuff I’m writing about here.

  
  At the very least we’d see who opened the door and whether or not Pelosi did indeed walk back toward his assailant afterwards. That would bring a swift end to the conspiracy theorizing and the speculation, one way or another. But Brooke Jenkins doesn’t want to release the cam footage, and she doesn’t want to talk about how Paul Pelosi behaved when police got there, so all we’re left with is a rash of contradictory reports and testimonies from widely divergent sources, including at least one suspended journalist. Not exactly helpful!

As I’ve said before, in all probability these questions will eventually be answered and they’ll turn out to be completely noncontroversial and boring. That’s just usually how it goes. Still, in the meantime, we can speculate. Or should I say…theorize. Nah I’m not gonna say that.