The speaker of the House of Representatives is the highest-ranking member of Congress and second in the presidential line of succession. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is thus provided a full-time Capitol Police protective detail. Commensurate with continuity of government plans, should both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris be incapacitated, Pelosi’s security detail has advanced capabilities and liaises closely with the U.S. Secret Service.
These protective measures go significantly beyond what other senior members of Congress receive. And all members of Congress saw their security boosted this summer following the January 2021 Capitol riot.
So how on Earth did an assailant access Pelosi’s San Francisco residence and beat her husband, Paul Pelosi, with a hammer?
‘WHERE IS NANCY?: PAUL PELOSI INTRUDER WANTED TO KNOW WHERE SPEAKER WAS BEFORE ATTACK
One possible answer is that Paul Pelosi directed the Capitol Police to leave the residence and deactivate its security systems. Living under 24-hour government protection can be grating, after all. This matters because the Capitol Police will have installed numerous perimeter and access control systems at Pelosi’s residence. It’s standard procedure for senior U.S. government officials under protection.
Still, these security efforts are not supposed to stop simply because a protectee such as Speaker Pelosi is not in residence at any one time. A potential assailant might seek to use the absence of their prospective target to conduct reconnaissance for a future attack. They could even plant a delayed-use weapon, such as a bomb. Perimeter and access control systems are employed to detect entry and deny access to a location, and to provide warning so that security officers can respond to a possible threat. The bottom line is that if Paul Pelosi requested a suspension of security measures, the Capitol Police should have rejected that request.
Clearly, something went wrong in San Francisco on Thursday night. The San Francisco Police Department provided the first response to the incident. Its officers arrested the suspected assailant. More ominously, NBC News reports that the assailant shouted “Where’s Nancy?!” as he attacked Paul Pelosi.
The Capitol Police must thus urgently answer two main questions. First, what protective systems were employed at the time of the attack — and if they were inactive, why? Were they malfunctioning and, if so, why weren’t those malfunctions detected earlier? Second, why were no Capitol Police officers from the agency’s San Francisco field office deployed for protective security patrols?
Even the nation’s foremost protective service agency has suffered facility security lapses. In 2015, a DHS inspector general report found that the Secret Service claimed that faulty alarms at former President George H.W. Bush’s residence were not a problem because agents and officers were conducting “roving patrols.” Other incidents have occurred since then at locations under Secret Service protection, including at the White House Complex.
Regardless, the Capitol Police need to provide more details on this incident and do so quickly.
