The office of Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) is pushing back against criticism of the congressman’s dramatic press conference Thursday in which he claimed that his Richmond campaign office was shot at — only hours before police said that a bullet had penetrated the window, but not the blinds, of the office on a downward trajectory, after someone fired into the air.
Cantor’s spokesman is now claiming in media interviews that Cantor didn’t know that the bullet was randomly fired when he revealed the incident on national television Thursday.
The incident occurred at 1 a.m. Tuesday morning — more than two days before the Cantor press conference. This afternoon, spokesmen for Cantor told CNN and the Plum Line that Cantor did not know when he gave the press conference that the bullet was randomly fired.
A spokesman told CNN that Cantor’s staff called the police half an hour before the press conference to check on the status of the investigation. They “were told the matter was under investigation,” according to CNN.
“What was known at the time was that a bullet had been fired through the window and that the investigation was ongoing,” Cantor spokesman Brad Dayspring told the Plum Line.
In an interview with TPM this afternoon Richmond Police spokesman Gene Lepley said he couldn’t say when Cantor’s office was told of the conclusion that the bullet was randomly fired. Lepley described “kind of a rolling thunder moment” of when the police realized internally that it was a random shot, and when they were willing to say that publicly. But he would not provide a detailed timeline.
While we don’t know what Cantor’s staff was told by the police, it’s worth reviewing what’s publicly known about the incident.
Just after noon Thursday, Cantor convened a press conference that seemed designed to flip the growing media narrative centering on threats and acts of vandalism against Democrats following the health care vote.
“Just recently I have been directly threatened. A bullet was shot through the window of my campaign office in Richmond this week, and I have received threatening emails,” Cantor said, citing the fact that he is an elected official, and that he is Jewish.
Cantor also directly pointed the finger at top Democrats for “dangerously fanning the flames by suggesting that these incidents be used as a political weapon.”
The news of the “shooting” was apparently first reported in a Fox “exclusive.” Within an hour of the press conference, Fox was framing the incident this way on TV: “Gunman Shoots Up Office Of Number Two Republican.”
About three hours after the press conference, the Richmond Police said in a statement that a “preliminary investigation” concluded that “a bullet was fired into the air and struck the window in a downward direction, landing on the floor about a foot from the window. The round struck with enough force to break the windowpane but did not penetrate the window blinds.”
Things looked even worse for Cantor when the Richmond Police Department today began explicitly describing the incident as “random gunfire”. But now, Cantor’s office is claiming in media interviews that Cantor didn’t know that the bullet was randomly fired when he held the dramatic press conference.
This morning, the police began describing the incident as “random gunfire” in interviews with TPM and other media.
Between the time of the press conference yesterday and the pushback this afternoon, Cantor’s office was mum on the police description of the incident as random.
