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 your government with weakness” and that they should “fight like hell” or else they were “not going to have a country anymore.”
Soon after, as the mob descended on lawmakers certifying the results of the 2020 election, won by Joe Biden, Michael Fanone, then a District of Columbia Metropolitan Police officer, would be viciously assaulted as he defended the U.S. Capitol. He was electroshocked on his neck with a Taser; he was kicked and beaten. His radio was ripped off his body; his badge stripped away from him. The group of men who assaulted him came at him five at a time. Fanone had a heart attack and lost consciousness. At one point during the assault, he pleaded with the Trump supporters clawing at him to consider his children.
Shortly after the Jan. 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 spell the death of democracy as Americans know it. He poured himself into disseminating this warning while watching, like many others, as legal attempt after legal attempt to hold Trump to any account for his alleged role in the Jan. 6 events evaporated.
The experience has left Fanone with no confidence in his fellow police officers, the justice system at large or the American public.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that he got away with inciting an insurrection as well as defrauding the American people and attempting to subvert democracy,” Fanone told HuffPost during a phone interview just ahead of the fourth anniversary of the Capitol riot.
“I don’t believe we live in a democracy anymore,” Fanone said. “I believe 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 failed to define what the fuck official acts are.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States in July found that as long as something could be shaded as an “official” act, prosecution was off the table.
The ruling obliterated key parts of the criminal indictment brought against Trump in the Jan. 6 case by then-special counsel Jack Smith. And Trump’s victory in November means he’ll 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 I a cop, I was a cop in Washington, D.C. Our prosecutors were federal prosecutors. I worked with the [Department of Justice] every single day for 20 years. I know exactly how that institution and organization works. The decision not to pursue an investigation into Trump was all political,” Fanone said. “The investigation should have been launched on Jan. 7, 2021.”
The Justice Department declined to comment, but prosecutors were working on investigating Trump allies almost immediately following the insurrection and spent months and years in fights over executive privilege with Trump insiders and in trying to crack the encrypted phones of key players. Even after Smith’s appointment in November 2022 and his indictment of Trump in August 2023, the president’s legal team worked relentlessly and successfully to delay the proceedings.
Fanone views all of this as irrelevant, arguing even Smith’s appointment was unnecessary “other than for optics.”
“You want to maintain the credibility or restore the credibility of the Department of Justice, you do it by doing your job and not playing politics. Garland played politics and he lost, and he’ll go down in history as being the man that couldn’t prosecute a president who incited an insurrection that we all watched unfold on television,” he said. Trump’s victory in November, he said, felt like a referendum on Jan. 6, and on him.
“This election, at least in part in my mind, was a referendum on Jan. 6, and it was a referendum on me and my outspokenness and the things that 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 the media these days is mostly ― I’m not going to paint everyone with a broad stroke ― but is mostly only interested in stories people are going to read. Nobody cares about Jan. 6. They just don’t care.”
Fanone said that it seems as if the only people left who are focused on Jan. 6 today are those who are part of the “tinfoil hat brigade” who argue the insurrection was “some vast government conspiracy.”
“I don’t think that’s a lot of Americans, but there are nut jobs out there,” he said. “But the vast majority of Americans are in the vein of: ‘If it didn’t affect me, I don’t care.’”
Fanone has traveled the entire country in the last four years. “That was my experience in every single city,” he said.
“People were uneducated about what happened on Jan. 6, which was baffling to me. Listen, I didn’t watch cable news before Jan. 6, but I assumed that a massive attack on the Capitol would at least register with every American. But it didn’t.”
Trump has vowed that, once he returns to the Oval Office, he’ll pardon the Jan. 6 rioters, but he has been unclear on whether he will issue blanket pardons or if he will grant pardons on a case-by-case basis, potentially pardoning only those who were nonviolent or committed misdemeanor offenses.
The idea of Jan. 6 rioters now receiving pardons gives an already exasperated Fanone pause.
He’s already paid a personal cost for his outspokenness and fears pardoned insurrectionists could threaten his family. Fanone’s mother was swatted at her home in May just hours after he made critical remarks about Trump. He’s received so much harassment that he’s stopped reporting it to the authorities. He’s lost faith.
“I don’t believe we live in a democracy anymore.”
– Michael Fanone
“I’ll be honest with you, I spent 20 years and the last four years — the last four years especially — intensely giving a fuck, and now I just don’t care. But I have concerns given the fact that many of those incarcerated, specifically those for committing acts of violence, have threatened me directly, and I know from past experience that the Department of Justice, the FBI, local law enforcement, do not monitor those threats and don’t give a fuck about them.
“My experience with law enforcement over the past year has been atrocious. The threats against my family and I have mostly gone uninvestigated to the point where I don’t even report them. I don’t want anything to do with the police, and nor do my family members.”
Someone threw a brick at his mother’s home 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 “pulled up and threw a bag of shit on her.”
At the end of the day, Fanone said his experience as a police officer has taught him that accountability is what actually keeps people in line. The threat of going to jail, he said, or the threat of monetary fines can be meaningful deterrents.
But now, he said, “we have a situation where, openly, a political party says, ‘If you’re with us, there’s no accountability.’ That’s proven with those promises for pardons. Just be a Trump supporter, and ’we got your back,” Fanone said. “Well, that’s not fucking law and order.”
The nation’s justice system was troubled long before Trump and long before Jan. 6, he said.
“I always felt that it was classist. You’ve got a better chance of walking away from an incident 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 somebody so openly thumb their nose at this system, so for people that oppose Trump and what he stands for, as an individual, that threat of accountability is still there. But for those that do not oppose him, who knows?” he said.
Today, Fanone said he’s looking for work and often is told that he’s a hero and that he’s loved.
But, he said, he’s also told by prospective employers that they don’t want “potential workplace distraction” or “fallout” and are worried that they too will be targeted simply because they employ him.
Turning to the future, Fanone said he “doesn’t think so highly of myself to impart some life lesson on the American people,” but he could share, unfiltered, what he’s learned in the last four years.
“I no longer believe in American exceptionalism. I certainly did before Jan. 6. I don’t any longer. I think there’s a lot of decent Americans ― I’ve served with them in the police department, known them in the military and in other areas, that are deeply devoted to this country and the Constitution and to just being decent humans. But I don’t think those are the prevailing characteristics of the average American. I think the average American is cowardly and selfish.”
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