Did NBC learn something inconvenient about the Pelosi attack?

Or were they just hoodwinked by some bad information? Let's think about it.

It takes a lot for a news outlet to yank a report it’s already published—it’s embarrassing, professionally damaging, a bad look—but that’s what NBC did on Friday, pulling down a bizarre and arguably bombshell report on the Paul Pelosi attack just a few hours after it aired. In that segment, reporter Miguel Almaguer cited “sources” who claimed that, when the police arrived at the Pelosi residence and the door was opened for them, Paul Pelosi

did not immediately declare an emergency, or try to leave his home, but instead began walking several feet back into the foyer, toward the assailant, and away from police.

That’s some big information, because it directly contradicts sworn testimony by law enforcement officials, who claim that Pelosi and his alleged assailant were standing side-by-side when the door swung open, after which the attack against Paul commenced almost immediately. If the man willingly walked toward his assailant when he had the chance to get very far away from him, that raises a few questions, namely: Why would he do that? What was going on there?

There seem to be two possibilities here: Either NBC’s report was a bombshell that sort of upended the official narrative about a bizarre attack at the home of one of the most powerful politicians in the world…or they got some bad information from a bogus source and ran with it.

For my part, my money rather favors the latter, if only because it’s the simplest explanation and I tend to go for those. But the former is certainly possible. I mean, somebody gave NBC this scoop. It was apparently a source who was both (a) outwardly trustworthy enough and (b) close enough to the investigation for the network to consider him reliable. Networks aren’t always the most stellar judges when it comes to this sort of thing, we all know that, but at the very least someone made a judgment call about this, so there’s presumably a paper trail of some kind that explains what happened here.

The whole thing really wouldn’t matter all that much if it were merely a local crime story, a strange incident at a prominent resident’s home in a city increasingly overrun by violence and dysfunction. But of course Democrats have tried to turn this into a midterm campaign tool—”Republicans,” “extremism,” “MAGA,” whatever—so the issues at play here are now of a bit more national import than that and people have modestly higher expectations about getting answers.

Of course, more than a little bit of this could be cleared up if the police would release the body cam footage of the incident—even just a few short clips of it—but the San Francisco DA is resolutely refusing to do so and indeed is vowing to never let the public see it. That, also, is a very interesting decision. There are lots of interesting decisions at play in San Francisco this week.