Almost a year after pro-Trump rioters at the US Capitol beat and electrocuted Michael Fanone nearly to death – causing him to go into cardiac arrest, lose consciousness for four minutes and become one of the most famous police officers in America – he decided to end his 20-year law enforcement career with a resignation letter written on a paper napkin.
“I wrote, ‘Go fuck yourselves,’” Fanone recalled, neck tattoos peeking from under a dark sport coat and grey-streaked beard, as he dined in one of the quieter corners of a steakhouse in Manhattan.
A friend, he said, translated his resignation into more formal English: “You know, ‘I’m grateful for the time and memories here …’ Blah, blah, blah, blah.”
While months of medical treatment had helped Fanone mostly recover from his injuries, his fury at politicians who wanted to erase January 6 from memory remained – and his desire to name and shame “sniveling weasel bitches” such as the Republican House leader, Kevin McCarthy, often and with an irreverence that was making his police career untenable.
“What continues to boil my blood,” said Fanone, a one-time Trump voter, is how the Capitol attack “has become so politicized. It’s to the point where I have this adversarial relationship with most Republicans, who I see as either indifferent to what happened or on the side of the insurrectionists.”
What also hadn’t gone away were the fellow cops who whispered behind his back or exited a room when he entered – because they were Trump supporters who resented his criticisms of the former president, or because they thought he was a showboat exaggerating his experience at the Capitol for money or attention.
Fanone, a vice officer who became one of the star witnesses of the January 6 hearings, could no longer do undercover work and was a political hot potato. After his superiors re-assigned him to IT (“I have no background in it. I type with one finger”) and he arrived to find a desk draped in plastic with no chair or computer, he decided, five years short of his pension, to quit.
Now Fanone is adjusting to a strange new life. CNN signed him as a law enforcement analyst. Learning not to curse on air has been hard – “I did get in a lot of trouble,” he has said, “for saying I thought history was going to shit on Mike Pence’s head” – so, on the infrequent occasions he actually joins a segment, he’ll bring a notecard: DON’T SAY FUCK.
He has published a memoir, Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul, written with John Shiffman, an investigative reporter for Reuters. He has friends in surprisingly high places – Sean Penn took him to dinner, and Nancy Pelosi is known to check in at 3am.
Yet his financial situation, he said, isn’t what everyone assumes. His medical and insurance bills are high. He lives in a one-bedroom outfitted with lawn furniture and he’s embarrassed he doesn’t have more space for his four daughters when they visit.
He spends as much time as possible with them. When he’s not doing that, he does quiet, solitary things. He lifts weights and most days runs six to eight miles; hangs out with his “failed hunting dog”, Buddy; takes to the woods to stalk deer and turkey; ruminates about the future of the country.
“I’m not looking to fucking make money off my experiences on January 6, outside of feeding my family,” he said. “If people have a problem with me writing a book, they can kiss my ass.”
He chewed on a steak salad and added, very deliberately: “All I want is to talk about my experience, educate a few people, maybe engage in constructive conversation about police reform. After there’s accountability for January 6, I hope to ride off into the sunset of obscurity, never to be heard from again.”
•••
Fanone speaks in a south Maryland drawl, redolent of a crab fisherman or a character on The Wire. The grandson of a steel mill worker and the son of an attorney and a social worker, he briefly attended Georgetown Prep, one of the nation’s elite schools, but it didn’t stick – after a year he was asked “not to return”.
His parents separated when he was young, so he split time between his father’s white-shoe world and his mother’s more middle-class or blue-collar one. After dropping out of high school, he worked construction and eventually earned a GED.
He started his law enforcement career with the US Capitol police but guard duty bored him. After a very public exchange of views with a colleague – “two Capitol cops in uniform brawling in broad daylight on Independence Avenue”, his memoir says – he quit to join the larger Metropolitan police department.
Fanone was full of “piss and vinegar”. A vice posting suited him fine. He spent so much time undercover or hiding in dumpsters and trees that locals called him Spider-Man. Over the years he grew less hotheaded and more focused on meticulous operations that would hold up in court – and nail traffickers.
On the grey morning of 6 January 2021, as Trump supporters converged on Congress, Fanone was supposed to be working a drug op with his partner, Jimmy Albright, and his most trusted informant, Leslie Perkins, a transgender black sex worker who has since died of illness.
The drug op never happened. Fanone had assumed the Capitol protest was under control but he began hearing unsettling radio calls. An order to don “hard gear”. A plea for munitions. An ominous request for the FBI hostage rescue team.
He drove 70mph to his station, arriving as a commander called an “officer down” on behalf of his entire unit – something Fanone had never heard in two decades as a cop. He changed into a uniform and grabbed a helmet, a decision he believes may have saved his life.
At the Capitol, he and Albright descended to the Lower West Tunnel, where they had heard the situation was dire. Fanone’s bodycam recorded footage that will probably go down as one of the most visceral documents of January 6.
Inside the tunnel, 40 exhausted officers, formed into something resembling a huge rugby scrum, were trying to stop a crowd of thousands forcing its way through a door.
Many of the rioters had come prepared, with gas masks, body armor, helmets, bear spray. Some wielded stolen riot shields. In contrast, many of the cops, like Fanone, had “self-deployed” without gas masks or other gear. There was vomit on the floor.
“Hold the line!” a commander, Ray Kyle, was shouting. “Do not give up that door! We are not going to lose that door!”
Fanone and Albright pushed forward. At the front, Fanone confronted what he describes in his memoir as a “human battering ram” – in his bodycam footage you can hear him grunting and gasping as hundreds of pounds of force presses down. Yet for a moment, despite everything, the police actually seemed to be gaining ground.
Then someone shouted: “Knife!”
As Fanone glanced to see what was happening, a rioter seized him by the neck and dragged him into the crowd, yelling: “I got one!”
A news photograph captured the moment Fanone was enveloped by the mob. He is surrounded by heaving bodies, his face grimacing in fear. A rioter is beating him with the pole of a “Blue Lives Matter” flag – meant to signify support for law enforcement.
Blows landed from every direction. Hands fumbled at his gun. Soon Fanone was 50ft from the tunnel. He tried to turn back. A Three Percenter militiaman blocked his path.
Someone pressed a taser to Fanone’s neck and repeatedly electrocuted him. He heard someone say: “Kill him with his own gun!”
“I’ve got kids!” Fanone screamed. “I’ve got kids!”
At that point some of the rioters intervened. Someone shouted: “We’re better than this!” People grabbed Fanone and bore him back to the police line.
Fanone stumbled into the tunnel and lost consciousness. He came to as his partner prepared to drive him to hospital.
•••
“No dreams,” Fanone told me. “No flashbacks.” In fact, he can’t remember anything that happened between the time he shouted he had children and when he woke up in the tunnel. The hospital diagnosed cardiac arrest and traumatic brain injury. The rioters had bestowed the sixth concussion of Fanone’s life and seared the flesh of his neck. He was in agony but, with a narcotics officer’s wariness, refused most pain medication.
Only while recovering did Fanone learn of the full mendacity of January 6: Trump’s dying Roman emperor routine; Pence’s tepid decision to do the right thing; the Missouri senator Josh Hawley’s choice to stoke the mob then flee “like a bitch”.
Later, angered by news that 21 House Republicans had voted against awarding a medal to the cops who defended the Capitol, Fanone forced a meeting with McCarthy. He was joined by a fellow officer, Harry Dunn, and Gladys Sicknick, whose son, officer Brian Sicknick, died the day after the attack.
Fanone asked McCarthy “about certain members of the GOP I call the ‘tinfoil hat brigade’ – Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert. These people have risen to the level of not just an embarrassment within the Republican party, but to humanity.”
After some “verbal masturbation”, Fanone said, McCarthy effectively admitted that he was unwilling, or unable, to control radicals in his party. Fanone secretly recorded the entire conversation – and leaked it.
It had little to no effect. Nor did Fanone’s testimony at the January 6 hearings.
“These people are devoid of shame,” he said. “There’s no way to shame them into doing what’s right. And that has a lot to do with Trump as the ultimate ‘ends-justify-means’ guy.”
The conspiracy sphere even painted Fanone as part of a false-flag operation, “like a love child of Nancy Pelosi that’s grown in a petri dish and has been quietly part of some sleeper cell that was awakened for this event”, as he put it to Rolling Stone.
A self-described redneck, Fanone said he understands Trump’s appeal, even if it’s a fraud. He voted for Trump in 2016 because he seemed more pro-police than Hillary Clinton. He came to regret it. Fanone’s ex-wife and three of his daughters are Asian American. During Covid, he was angered by Trump’s insinuating references to the “China virus”.
Fanone exudes discipline. Early in our meal he carefully removed an onion ring garnish from his salad, and did not touch the fries I ordered for the table. But his foot fluttered with nervous energy under the table.
Several cops who defended the Capitol later took their own lives. Fanone has described dark moments of his own, sitting and staring at his gun.
“There are a lot of officers suffering in silence or self-medicating with alcohol. It’s probably going to lead to more tragedies down the line.”
A waiter recognized Fanone and thanked him for what he did at the Capitol. Several diners did the same. It happens daily, he said.
“I try to always talk to them. I don’t see that as a chore. It’s part of why I’m speaking out. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make me feel better. I wish it did.”
Fanone doesn’t know what the future holds. He might return to construction. He’d also be interested in serving on a policing commission, as an intermediary, pro-cop and pro-reform. He rejects calls to defund the police – training is the first thing cut, he said – but is sympathetic to Black Lives Matter. He’s fond of saying that overthrowing a CVS drugstore is different from overthrowing the government.
That’s the only office he’d be interested in holding. Look at George Washington, he said. “When it came to the presidency, they had to drag that motherfucker – all 6ft 4in – kicking and screaming. After his term was done, he couldn’t get home fast enough.”
He added: “And don’t volunteer me. I don’t want it.”
