The home of the mother of Michael Fanone, a Washington DC police officer who nearly died in the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol, was “swatted” on Tuesday night.
An unnamed person who had written a manifesto seen by NBC falsely claimed they had killed Fanone’s mother and would go to Fanone’s old high school on Wednesday and shoot people. The manifesto listed Fanone’s mother’s address in Virginia.
Fanone’s father was also targeted in the manifesto but was out of the country at the time. He called swatting calls like the one aimed at his parents “incredibly fucking dangerous”.
Fanone told NBC News: “How dangerous is it to send law enforcement to an address in which you essentially are describing an active shooter, in which the only person present is a 78-year-old fucking woman.”
Fanone spoke of how horrified his mother was that night to open the door and be met with Swat team officers while in her nightgown.
Fairfax county police assisted in an investigation into the swatting call.
Fanone said the swatting incident likely happened as a “direct result” of the public appearances he makes speaking out against Donald Trump.
Speaking at a Biden campaign event earlier on Tuesday outside the courthouse where Trump’s hush-money trial was taking place alongside the Capitol police officer Harry Dunn and the actor Robert De Niro, Fanone said Trump was an “authoritarian who answers to and serves only himself”.
Fanone voted for Trump in 2016 but has since thrown his support behind Biden, and blames the Capitol attack on “Trump’s lies”.
At the Tuesday press conference, Fanone said: “These supporters were fueled by Trump’s lies and the lies of his surrogates, lies that the 2020 election was stolen. Those same lies have been spewed by Donald Trump and his surrogates about what happened to me and so many other police officers on January 6, 2021 – that day, I was brutally assaulted.”
Recounting the attack on the Capitol during which he was on duty, Fanone said he was pulled by the “violent mob” and beaten, almost stripped of his firearm and tasered on his neck.
He was assigned a desk job for his safety after leaving the Metropolitan police department later in 2021.
The swatting incident involving Fanone’s mother is one of several targeted at high-profile individuals in politics. Others have been aimed at the former UN ambassador and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, the House Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Florida senator Rick Scott, the Maine secretary of state Shenna Bellows, and the former House Republican from Wisconsin Mike Gallagher, who stepped down because of the threats against him and his family.
Amid the spike in these types of threats, Merrick Garland, the US attorney general, said in January: “These threats of violence are unacceptable. They threaten the fabric of our democracy.”
