Michael Fanone reflects on January 6 as Trump’s return looms

Four years ago, then-outgoing President Donald Trump stood on the Ellipse on the National Mall and proclaimed to his supporters that “they were not going to take back their government with weakness” and that they must “fight like hell” or else they would be defeated. “We are no longer going to have a country.”

Shortly after, when the mob attacked the legislators who were certifying the results of the 2020 elections, won by Joe Biden, Michael Fanonethen an officer with the Metropolitan Police of the District of Columbia, would be brutally attacked while defending the United States Capitol. he was they applied electric shocks to his neck with a Taser gun; They kicked and hit him. They tore the radio from his body; They took his plate. The group of men who attacked him pounced on him five at a time. Fanone suffered a heart attack and lost consciousness. At one point during the assault, he pleaded with the Trump supporters who were clawing at him to consider his children.

Shortly after the January 6, 2021 insurrection, Fanone left the police force. He has spent much of the last four years warning the public that indifference to the insurrection would mean the death of democracy as Americans know it. He set about spreading this warning as he watched, like many others, as one legal attempt after another to hold Trump accountable for his alleged role in the events of January 6 evaporated.

The experience has left Fanone without trust in his fellow police officers, the judicial system in general or the American public.

“I have no doubt that he got away with inciting an insurrection, defrauding the American people and attempting to subvert democracy,” Fanone told HuffPost during a phone interview just before the fourth anniversary of the Capitol riots. .

“I don’t believe we live in a democracy anymore,” Fanone said. “I think democracy in this country is dead, and it died when the Supreme Court granted the president of the United States immunity for official acts and then didn’t define what the fuck official acts are.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States in July determined that as long as something could be considered an “official” act, prosecution was off the table.

the failure erased key parts of the criminal charge brought against Trump in the Jan. 6 case by then-special prosecutor Jack Smith. And Trump’s victory in November means he will likely never face federal charges.

Shortly after the presidential election, Smith dismissed the case without prejudice (meaning it could theoretically come back to life one day), but Fanone’s faith in the justice system is already shattered. He called Attorney General Merrick Garland an “absolute coward.”

“Listen, people say I’m naive or I don’t know how these things work, but I was a cop for 20 years. Not only was he a cop, but he was a cop in Washington, DC. Our prosecutors were federal prosecutors. I worked with the (Department of Justice) every day for 20 years. I know exactly how that institution and organization works. The decision not to conduct an investigation into Trump was entirely political,” Fanone said. “The investigation should have started on January 7, 2021.”

The Justice Department declined to comment, but prosecutors were working on the investigation of Trump allies almost immediately after the insurrection and spent months and years fighting over executive privilege with Trump insiders and trying to crack the phones. ciphers of key actors. Even after Smith’s appointment in November 2022 and his impeachment of Trump in August 2023, the president’s legal team worked tirelessly and successfully to delay the process.

Fanone considers all of this irrelevant and argues that even Smith’s appointment was unnecessary “apart from optics.”

“If you want to maintain the credibility or restore the credibility of the Department of Justice, you do it by doing your job and not by playing politics. “Garland played politics and lost, and he will go down in history as the man who failed to prosecute a president who incited an insurrection that we all saw unfold on television,” he said. Trump’s victory in November, he said, felt like a referendum on and about Jan. 6.

“This election, at least in part in my opinion, was a referendum on January 6, and it was a referendum on me, my outspokenness, and the things I’ve said. And the American people said, ‘We don’t care,’ and I mean, they don’t care,” he said. “The American people don’t care and therefore the media doesn’t care, because these days the media for the most part (I’m not going to describe everyone in broad strokes) is only interested in the stories that people are going to read. . Nobody cares about January 6th. “They just don’t care.”

Fanone said it seems like the only people who are focused on January 6 today are those who are part of the “tinfoil hat brigade” who argue that the insurrection was “a huge government conspiracy.”

“I don’t think there are many Americans, but there are crazy people out there,” he said. “But the vast majority of Americans say, ‘If it didn’t affect me, I don’t care.'”

Fanone has traveled all over the country for the past four years. “That was my experience in each city,” he said.

“People were not informed about what happened on January 6, which I found disconcerting. Listen, I didn’t watch cable news before January 6, but I assumed that a massive attack on the Capitol would at least be recorded by all Americans. But it wasn’t like that.”

Trump has promised that once he returns to the Oval Office he will pardon the January 6 rioters, but he has not made clear whether he will grant blanket pardons or grant them on a case-by-case basis. potentially pardoning only those who were not violent or committed minor crimes.

The thought of the January 6 rioters now receiving pardons gives an already exasperated Fanone pause.

He has already paid a personal cost for his candor and fears that pardoned insurrectionists could threaten his family. Fanone’s mother was crushed in her house in May, just hours after he made critical comments about Trump. She has received so much harassment that she stopped reporting it to the authorities. He has lost faith.

“I’ll be honest with you, I spent 20 years and the last four years (especially the last four years) caring intensely, and now I just don’t care. But I am concerned by the fact that many of those incarcerated, specifically those for committing acts of violence, have directly threatened me, and I know from past experience that the Department of Justice, the FBI, and local authorities do not monitor those threats. and I don’t give a damn.

“My experience with law enforcement over the past year has been atrocious. The threats against my family and me have mostly gone uninvestigated to the point where I don’t even report them. “I don’t want to have anything to do with the police, nor do my family members.”

Someone threw a brick at his mother’s house a little over a month ago, he said. Fanone said there was another incident where his mother was raking leaves in her front yard and a man “stopped and threw a bag of shit at her.”

At the end of the day, Fanone said his experience as a police officer has taught him that accountability is what really keeps people in line. The threat of jail time, he said, or the threat of monetary fines can be significant deterrents.

But now, he said, “we have a situation where, openly, a political party says: ‘If you are with us, there is no responsibility.’ This is demonstrated by these promises of pardons. Just be a Trump supporter and ‘we’ll have your back,’ Fanone said. “Well, that’s not law and order.”

The country’s justice system was in trouble long before Trump and long before Jan. 6, he said.

“I always felt like I was classist. You are more likely to come out of an incident successfully if you have the resources to defend yourself. Shit, look at Donald Trump: he can litigate things for eternity. But this is the first time I’ve seen someone so openly mock this system, so for people who oppose Trump and what he represents, as an individual, that threat of accountability is still there. But for those who don’t oppose him, who knows? said.

Today, Fanone said he is looking for work and is often told that he is a hero and that he is loved.

But, he said, potential employers also tell him they don’t want “possible workplace distractions” or “consequences” and worry that they, too, will be attacked simply because they employ him.

Regarding the future, Fanone said that “I don’t have such a high opinion of myself that I can impart any life lessons to the American people,” but that he could share, without filters, what he has learned in the last four years.

“I no longer believe in American exceptionalism. I certainly did before January 6th. I don’t do it anymore. I think there are many decent Americans (I’ve served with them in the police department, I’ve met them in the military and other areas) who are deeply dedicated to this country and the Constitution and just being decent human beings. But I don’t think those are the predominant characteristics of the average American. “I think the average American is cowardly and selfish.”