Last week’s attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband has spawned a wave of misinformation from conservative websites and voices, including former President Donald Trump.

Early Friday morning, a man broke into Nancy and Paul Pelosi’s San Francisco home and attacked Paul Pelosi, 82, with a hammer, authorities said. The speaker’s husband was rushed to a hospital and underwent surgery to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands, a spokesman for Nancy Pelosi said. Paul Pelosi is expected to make a full recovery.

The House speaker was in Washington at the time of the attack.

The suspect, David DePape, 42, is charged with a number of state offenses, including attempted murder, burglary, assault and false imprisonment. He has pleaded not guilty. He also faces federal charges of assault of an immediate family member of a United States official and attempted kidnapping of a United States official related to their performance of official duties. 

Police say DePape entered the home asking, “Where is Nancy?” The suspect told police he planned to hold the House speaker hostage, ask her questions and break her kneecaps if he thought she was lying to him, according to the federal criminal complaint. The suspect told investigators he believed Nancy Pelosi was the “leader of the pack” of a lying Democratic Party.

But other baseless narratives that differ from what authorities have said have taken root online and been repeated by figures with massive social media followings. 

A day after the attack, the Santa Monica Observer, a website known for pushing dubious claims, published an article promoting a conspiracy theory that Paul Pelosi and Depape were having a gay tryst when the disturbance broke out.  

By Sunday, a link to the article had been tweeted out by Elon Musk, Twitter’s brand new owner, who has more than 113 million followers. Musk’s post was in response to a tweet by Hillary Clinton, who, in response to the attack, criticized Republicans for spreading “hate and deranged conspiracy theories.”

“There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” Musk wrote while tweeting the link to the article. 

Musk has since deleted the tweet, and the Santa Monica Observer has removed its original opinion article. 

Regardless, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., came to Musk’s defense Monday. 

“The same mainstream media democrat activists that sold conspiracy theories for years about President Trump and Russia are now blaming @elonmusk for ‘internet misinformation’ about Paul Pelosi’s friend attacking him with a hammer,” she tweeted. 

San Francisco County District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said Monday the attack appears to be politically motivated. 

The unfounded rumor about Paul Pelosi and DePape having an affair is based on the claim that the 911 dispatcher told first responders the speaker’s husband called DePape a “friend” during the 911 call.

According to the complaint, DePape, not Pelosi, said he was a “friend.”

“The dispatcher then asked for the man’s name and the man responded, ‘My name is David,’” the complaint says. “When the dispatcher asked who David is, Mr. Pelosi said, ‘I don’t know,’ but David said, ‘I’m a friend of theirs.’ Mr. Pelosi then confirmed with the dispatcher that he did not know the man.”

The disinformation also has included assertions that Depape was in his underwear when police arrived at the Pelosi home. That detail was originally reported by KTVU-TV in San Francisco, but the Fox affiliate corrected the story within two hours, saying in an online article: "An earlier version of this story misstated what clothing the suspect was wearing when officers found him." 

According to the federal criminal complaint, officers removed a cellphone, cash, a transit card and other cards from Depape’s shorts, which indicates he was not only in his underwear.

Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative filmmaker behind the discredited film about the 2020 election “2000 Mules,” has repeatedly tweeted the claim even after KTVU retracted it.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump Jr., the former president's eldest son, used the false information to make light of the Paul Pelosi attack by tweeting an image of a hammer and underwear with the words “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.”

Conspiracy theorists also said both Paul Pelosi and DePape were holding hammers when police arrived. That appears to have originated from San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott telling reporters Friday that police who arrived at the scene “observed Pelosi and the suspect both holding a hammer.”

Scott later clarified that the two men were struggling over the same hammer just before DePape allegedly gained control of it and struck Paul Pelosi with it.

Former President Trump joined the parade of misinformation Tuesday by claiming in a radio interview that the glass broken on a rear door of the Pelosi home appeared to be smashed from the inside.

“Weird things going on in that household in the last couple of weeks,” Trump told host Christ Stigall. “Probably, you and I are better off not talking about it. The glass, it seems, was broken from the inside to the out, so it wasn’t a break-in, it was a break-out.”

“The window was broken in and it was strange the cops were standing there practically from the moment it all took place,” he added. “So, you’re going to have to explain that to your audience, including me.”

The FBI said in charging documents that agents “observed a broken glass door to the back porch,” and DePape told investigators he broke into the house through a glass door, according to the criminal complaint.

The Washington Post, citing people familiar with the situation, reported Tuesday that Capitol Police cameras captured the suspect using a hammer to break into the home, although no one was monitoring the feed when it happened.

DePape appears to have published hundreds of blog posts in recent months with conspiracy theories from far-right personalities as well as hateful rants about Jews, Black people, transgender people, Democrats and the media.

But even his online history has become the source for more misinformation. The far-right website the Gateway Pundit suggested two websites purported to belong to DePape were fakes only created after the assault on Paul Pelosi to cover up the truth about the attacker. The Gateway Pundit incorrectly claimed the blogs did not exist before Oct. 28, citing search results from the Wayback Machine internet archive. The Wayback Machine did archive one of the sites as far back as Aug. 2, but not the other until Oct. 28.

But the Wayback Machine does not include a comprehensive history of every website. 

“Some sites may not be included because the automated crawlers were unaware of their existence at the time of the crawl,” the Wayback Machine’s information page says. “It’s also possible that some sites were not archived because they were password protected, blocked by robots.txt, or otherwise inaccessible to our automated systems. Site owners might have also requested that their sites be excluded from the Wayback Machine.”

Correction: This article was updated to clarify that the Wayback Machine did detect the existence of one of the two blogs purported to belong to David DePape before Oct. 28.