House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was seen leaving her home on Sunday, heading to the hospital to see her husband after he was attacked this week by someone trying to find his wife. She refused to answer questions from the press standing by.
National Security expert Juliette Kayyem spoke to CNN's Jim Acosta on Sunday, saying that the attacker was echoing some of the things heard during the Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S. Congress.
"It's chilling and reminiscent of Jan. 6th. You saw this with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan. It is the publicness of the violence." Kayyem explained. "So, this is just exactly what we saw on January 6th. So as we know the suspect was very much radicalized by the political discourse of the Jan. 6th apparatus of those who would not apologize for it, and began to become radicalized, at least from the social media reports. So that he mimicked the Jan. 6th attack to go after the person. We always talk about -- of course, Paul Pelosi was the victim, but the person he was looking for was Nancy Pelosi. She's second in line for the presidency, and every intention it seems like between a hammer and everything else to cause grave bodily harm, if not that."
She went on to attack Elon Musk, the new head of Twitter, who spread a baseless conspiracy theory about the attack. He has since deleted the tweet after overwhelming backlash.
Acosta also played the clip of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who passed the incident off as nothing more than normal crime, ignoring the political nature of the attack.
"I think what was interesting, you played the Kevin McCarthy clip. And I'm glad you reached out to him. But if you notice, he said, we have to stop the crime," she said. "So, he's putting it into a narrative that this is just a crime, rather than this is a political attack against the Speaker of the House. She was not there, but her husband was. And so you're going to see this trying to create a different way of describing it that we're seeing. Even some mainstream media that somehow puts this into the crime bucket rather than the political violence one."
She went on to say that the most important part is not to dismiss the attack as just another "lone wolf" attack.
"He's a crazy guy, he's had lots of drugs. Whatever it is. And then you do this is a phenomenon of what's happening in this country, which is violence as the extension of politics. And silence does not work with these people. You have to condemn it, and that has come from the Republican Party, this has to come from leadership," said Kayyem.
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