The Bulwark Live, with Michael Fanone

Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. It’s Friday, Hinge folks. We’ve got an actually very special Bulwark podcast today. This episode is from our first live show that we taped in DC in front of a live audience on Thursday night. We had a packed house.

It was great meeting many of you it really was an opportunity for us to connect with lots of folks, and the whole bulwark team was there. And I have to say that it was a reminder about how important what we do and what you do is for the future of democracy. Bill Crystal was the master of ceremonies. We had standing room only. The tickets were sold out in just two days.

And the Bulwark is planning more live shows all around the country. So sign up to become a bulwark member today, and you’ll get advanced notice on ticket sales for those events. If you weren’t able to make last night, we will have more opportunities. And I have to tell you that based on the experience last night, you’re going to want to be there. And if you’re already a bulwark Plus member, you can also catch Tim Miller, Amanda Carpenter, and Sarah Longwell’s amazing panel conversation, which was also part of our live show last night.

So enjoy.

Shall we begin? Okay. Bill Crystal, editor at large of the Bulwark. I keep this and help out a little bit. Jonathan Last, Adam Kuiper, Charlie Sykes, Tim Miller.

All the work. Many other people actually who are here, some of them who are here as well, Sarah Longwell is the publisher, but I get to introduce everything and I’ll be very brief because we wanna have very much wanna hear from Charlie Sykes and officer Fernown, and then from our panel of Amanda Sarah and Tim and then end at nine, so we can spend an hour mixing and mingling and talking with each other. I just want to thank you all for everything you’ve done for us. I mean, it really is wonderful to see so many of you in person. We started this less than four years ago.

The weekly standard was closed. It was closed by our wonderful odors the week before Christmas, which is, you know, much as I’m a defender of capitalism in corporate America, there are a few things that they do that make the sympathetic to the notion that maybe the workers should have a little more consideration sometimes. But anyway, But we assembled what are we gonna do next in January, right, the beginning of January in the conference room in Sarah Longwell’s office and Charlie was there and Jonathan Last, Jim Swift, Hatter Yoast, Ben Parker, a couple of others of us, and we decided to well, let’s try to website that will work. Let’s see what we can do with that. And here we are less than four years later.

And we couldn’t have done it without you, obviously, and we appreciate so much your reading and your contributions and your civil discussion and on the livestream and on various other newspiders and supporting us to build world class. So and thank you for coming to tonight. We thought we’d try this. It’s obviously he may heard that there was a pandemic for a couple years, so we couldn’t do things like this. And we felt this would be a nice change or pace.

And we really appreciate you’re all coming and this thing frankly sold out in about two or three days we could have, I suppose, had a larger venue at retrospect, but it’s actually great that it’s the size because now we can from nine to ten, you actually mix and angle and talk, and it won’t be too much of a mob scene. And it’s an inappropriately hip space. For the full work that you think, you know. My kids are very impressed that I’ve here. You know, I was like, really, wow.

I I spent a lot time here I say. You know, usually the later part of the evening, actually. Yeah. Okay. So the schedule is very simple.

Conversation between Charlie and officer Michael Fanone. Yes. We should give And then the panel, and then we’ll adjourn as I say right about nine and and stay here for about an hour, and you’re invited to have drinks, obviously, a little bit to eat. And I’ll say a word about officer Fernown. I I don’t I haven’t known personally, but I want to say to him and I know he’s accompanied by his colleague.

Such a canal and maybe one or two others for all I know. Here. I really this wasn’t I really before you get to the conversation, just wanna say on behalf of all of us at the Bulwark and think all of us here and on behalf of many, many tens of millions of us in America. Thank you for what you did, what you’ve done throughout serving the country, especially on January sixth. Obviously, thank you for what you did at the capital.

Thank you for what you did defending the congress and defending the constitution.

Well, welcome to the Bulwark podcast. We are doing something obviously very, very different. We are doing this live in one Washington DC before a standing room only crowd. I don’t think that I need to give a lengthy introduction to our guests today. Michael Fanaan is a former vice officer with the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington DC for twenty years.

And you all know who is, because you remember the pictures from January sixth. You know who he is because you’ve seen the body cam footage as have a number of federal courts more recently. And you also remember his dramatic testimony before the January sixth committee where he said this. What

makes the struggle harder and more painful is to know so many of my fellow citizens, including so many of the people I put my life at risk to defend or downplaying or outright denying what happened. I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them and the people in this

room.

But too many are now telling me that hell doesn’t exist. Or that hell actually wasn’t that bad. The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful.

And

that was an emotional moment for you. When you realized even then that there were Americans who did not appreciate what happened on January sixth or what it meant.

And

it got worse, Michael. Because after that testimony you got this phone call. Someone left this voicemail for you.

You’re so full of shit, you little faggot, bunker, You’re a little pushy, man. I can slap you up to the side of your head or back in and knock you out. You little faggot. You’re a pump faggot you’re a lion fuck. How about all that schy black fucking scum for two years destroyed in our cities and burning them and stealing all that shit out of the stores and everything?

I buy back a smoking cost and killing people. I buy back a fucking fucker. That was shit on the goddamn platform. I wish they woulda killed all you scumbags because you because you people are scum. They stole the election from Trump and you know that you scumbags and you fucking too bad.

You didn’t beat that shit on you more. You’re a pizza shit. You’re a little bag. You’re fucking scumbag.

So

Michael, your new book is hold the line, the insurrection in One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul. So let’s start with this. How’s the battle for the soul going?

I

mean, I wish I could say that I thought we were we’re winning, but I don’t know. I think there’s a we’re liking the dead heat between those that recognize Donald Trump and

his

supporters for what they are, and those that obviously ally themselves or allow themselves with Donald Trump. And then I see the vast majority of Americans that are just in different to to either shot. So in many ways, it

you’re one of the most unlikely guys to be sitting here having this conversation. Because you’re a longtime cop. You voted for Donald Trump back in twenty sixteen. So let’s start there. Who were you back then?

Why did you vote for Donald Trump back in twenty sixteen? Twenty

sixteen, it was simple. I was a single issue voter. And my issue was law enforcement. My career in law enforcement began just after nine eleven. I think, like thousands and thousands of Americans.

I saw what happened at the World Trade Center and and in Washington DC at the Pentagon, and I filled a call to serve. I joined the US capital police where I stayed for about a year and I quickly realized that while I love the career of law enforcement, U. S. Capital police was not the place for me. And so I left in lateral to the Metropolitan Police Department here in Washington, DC.

Which for those of you don’t know is the more traditional law enforcement agency. Essentially, if you call nine eleven, we’re the ones

that pick

up and and respond. But in the wake of police shootings in Ferguson, Missouri and and other places in the country, I saw a rhetoric that was being utilized by members of the Democratic Party that I saw as one incredibly harmful to the relationship between law enforcement and the communities that were charged with protecting.

And I’m

not gonna sit here and say that law enforcement is above approach and that there aren’t reforms needed. But I saw this violent rhetoric resulting in the assassination style killings of police officers throughout this country. And I attended many of those officers’ funerals. In Dallas, Texas, Louisiana, New York City, And I saw the effect that it was having on my coworkers. I saw the effect that it had on our families.

And I heard Donald Trump and his pandering towards law enforcement, and I bought it hook line and sinker.

So you thought Donald Trump and the Republicans were the party of law and order that they backed the blue.

I did.

When did you start to change your mind? What changed?

Well, I guess, for those of you, they’ve gotten to to know me or knew my personality. I mean, I was definitely attracted to Donald Trump’s bombastic approach to politics. I didn’t have the highest opinion of American politicians prior to Donald Trump taking office, and and I liked the the way that he handled them. That being said, I I thought it was a schtick, and I thought eventually that he would settle about to handling himself in a more presidential manner. Unfortunately, that that day never came.

And shit only got worse. So Wait. And shit

got really worse. On January sixth. You had not been planning to be at the capital. You were working vice. You were working on another case.

How did you end up at the Capitol? Are you self deployed? How did that happen?

So I remember that morning well, I remember the day vividly outside of the time that I was unconscious. But I remember that, you know, I woke up. My day

started just

like any other day and probably like late morning, I started getting some phone calls from my partner at the time Jimmy Albright. And Jimmy was telling me that he was hearing from officers that were already on duty at the capital or I’m sorry, at the ellipse where the stop, the steel rally was taking place. And the officers were reporting armed individuals, individuals who were in, you know, possession of semiautomatic handguns AR fifteen style rifles and arrests that were being made at that rally.

And

then I remember him telling me that, hey, I just heard that a large group has broken off from the stop the steel rally and they’re headed towards the capital.

At

that

point, it was probably shortly before one PM I remember turning on my police radio and, you know, getting my gear together. My shift was supposed to start that day at about two thirty. And shortly after one, I I heard the first reports of the police lines being breached at the Capitol. And officers being assaulted.

That

was when I made the determination that, you know, I was not gonna be buying heroin that day as part of a narcotics operation, but that y’all was gonna be going to the capital. And I remember pulling into the first district parking lot and walking up to our office and Jimmy was sitting at his desk and he looked at me and he was like, what are we gonna do? And I said, we’re gonna go to the

Capitol. You

could

not possibly have imagined that what actually happened was going to happen.

Oh, hell no. I mean, I listen, I I I heard the distressed calls coming out. I knew that it was bad. But all I could do was reference experiences that I had throughout my career. I had no idea what like how bad bad could really be.

And that was as bad as it’s ever been in in my twenty years. When when

you showed up and you saw who was there. Did you think Okay. I know who these people are. Did you did you recognize them? And who did you think you were confronting?

No.

I remember when I was testifying before the select committee, Liz Cheney asked me a similar question to what you’re saying. And politics played no part in it. All I knew was my colleagues were at the capital and they were being

brutally

beaten. And I was going there to help other cops. Listen, I I get the fact that it’s a capital building and you know, Congress is there and and the the certification of the election is taking place, but that shit couldn’t have been further from my mind. All I heard was distressed calls from cops, and I’m a cop, and I’ll be damned if I’m sitting that out. Like I’m going there and I’m gonna

help. So you and your partner go forward and and you confront what you’ve described in the book as this human battering ram. And you can describe what what happened. Somebody yells knife, you look around, and that’s when they grabbed you and pulled you in. And you heard someone say we got one.

Tell me about that. So

Jimmy and I make our way up to the capital complex. And we enter through the southern entrance to the capital, which if anybody’s ever done a tour of the building, you walk through or you walk up an on ramp And I remember Jimmy looking down and pointing and there’s just blood splatter everywhere. And that was kind of my first clue that this was it was bad. So we enter through the capital building and we’re walking through, I think it’s called the hall of columns.

We

make our way to the crypt, which is the circular area, excuse me, just below statuary hall. In the Rottanda. And I hear a distress call come out at ten thirty three for the lower West Harris Tunnel. And for those of you that may not know, the the lower West Terrace tunnel is is symbolic in the fact that that’s where the president-elect walks out to take the oath of office on an inauguration day. And the tunnel itself is probably about two hundred maybe two hundred and fifty feet long and it’s about as wide as maybe four or five adults standing shoulder to shoulder.

When I walk down from the crypt to the lower West Terrace tunnel,

The first

thing I remember seeing was a set of double doors. And there’s, like, plain glass windows, in the double doors and I could see through there and there was this kind of haze and it was the residual CS gas that was still kind of lingering in the air.

When I walked

up to the double doors, I I bumped into a buddy of mine that I had known for almost my entire career, a guy named Bill Baughner, who’s a sergeant with the Metropolitan Police Department. And Bill was an administrative guy. I mean, he’s a paper pusher. And he’s self deployed like me and like hundreds of other DC police officers did that day. And I remember looking at him and I said, you know, hey, Bill, and he kinda stretched out his hand to shake my hand and he had no idea who I was and he was telling me that he had just been sprayed in the face with with bare bare spray.

And I told

him, you know, it’s fawnoon and and

and we had this kind of

surreal interaction, and then we ended up walking towards the set of double doors to go back out into the tunnel.

Once I

walk through those doors, the CS gas and and the the chemical irritants just like hits you like a ton of bricks.

And

I remember thinking, like, long and hard about the decision that I had made to come here and how I could just be in my office watching all of this unfold on Fox News. Although, I don’t know if they were showing it on Fox News. But he’s gonna say something snarky, Ben. Right. Yeah.

So I remember distinctly I saw a friend of mine that I had known. We were actually partners at US Capitol Police like twenty years prior. Raymond Kyle, who at at the time was a commander of our investigative services bureau me as an executive in the police department, and he also self deployed to the capital. And what I later learned was you know, he found himself commanding about forty MPD officers and maybe a half a dozen or a dozen US capital police officers, including sergeant Cannell, who’s here, who are in this tunnel that became, I guess, the the apex of of the violence at the capital that day.

I mean for

those of you who have seen the pictures or the images of what the West Terrace looked like, there’s between fifteen and twenty thousand people there and that entranceway, that tunnelway became a funnel of a of violence. It seemingly was the only entrance way from the West Terrace into the capital. And so what I saw down there was incredibly inspirational and also horrific. You had forty or fifty police officers, many of whom were severely injured, fatigued, under normal circumstances, I think, well, I know every last one of those officers would have been transported to the nearest hospital. But that wasn’t an option.

So you had guys that were, you know, triaging other officers officers that were, you know, picking themselves up, putting themselves back out on the line because we had no other option. We were literally fighting for our

lives. So

we’ve seen these pictures news photographers captured picture of you being attacked with pipes. A rider was beating you with a blue lives matter flagpole. I mean, what the fuck? Hands are fumbling for your You said it not me. Nine I figured I’d get it in first.

Right. So, you know, you try to go back into the tunnel of three percent or blocks you. There you somebody starts tasing the base of your skull there was a call to killing with his own gun and you had to say, I’ve got I’ve got kids. So I guess one of the questions a lot of people have asked and I think this is one of the most extraordinary things about January six. Why didn’t you draw your gun and use your gun to defend yourself?

Why did other cops not start shooting. So if you’re familiar

with the policies and protocols that dictate law enforcement officers in the way that we’re able to use force. You know that you can’t use deadly force unless you believe that that individual poses an imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death. To either you or to another person. And so the way that I Someone saying take

his gun and kill

him would that oh,

I mean, listen, were there individuals that rose to that level or met that threshold? Absolutely. Especially when I was out in the crowd and and encountering them. So you understand what was taking place there you could not slide a credit card between two people. And so the likelihood of me drawing my weapon and actually being successful in using it against an individual before it was stripped away from me was slim to none.

In addition to

that, I have

to account

for every round that that I fire from my weapon.

If

I’m in the midst of a chaotic crowd, and I deem that one or two or three people have met that threshold, and that I’m justified in using deadly force. Who’s to say that in the time that it takes me to draw my weapon and fire

it? They

don’t move, and then I end up shooting somebody else who may have been guilty of a crime, but that crime may have been trust passing on capital grounds or something that was not justified in using deadly force. This is not a scenario where, you know, we have a red line in the sand. And if you cross that red line in the sand, we can just open fire people lose sight of the fact that we’re American police officers and we’re dealing with American citizens. And American citizens are afforded certain inalienable rights. And I don’t want to live in a country where the police department or any law enforcement agency can just open fire willy nilly and The reason I bring it up is

is that

is that

I I I I do think this speaks to the professionalism and the restraint and the real courage of all the police officers who did not do that because we can imagine what an incredible bloodbath that would have been, you know, had that actually begun. So let’s move to the and again, people know I think The story, you know, you had a heart attack, you suffered traumatic brain injury, the skin on the back of your neck was seared, you lost consciousness. And the story was told and the body cam pictures were broadcast in those days afterwards.

Did you

think that this would be a moment of unity that people would look at this and that all Americans would see the this this horrible event for what it was. I mean, did you have a window where you thought that this would make a difference?

I did. In a lot of different ways. I remember so the the first reason or my first motivation for speaking out I think that the initial interview that I gave was on January

thirteenth.

That’s when I said, thank you, but fuck you. So I remember calling my chief Robert Coddy and several other officials trying to persuade them to allow me and several other officers to speak out. And the reason for that was to counteract a narrative that We’ve come so far now from January sixth. I don’t even know if you guys remember this, but the original narrative was American law enforcement officers used a disproportionate amount of force against these protesters because they were Trump supporters. And if it had been Black Lives Matter, we would have shot them all to fucking peace.

And I was irate. First of all, because I knew that we were fighting for our lives that day, and I saw these officers use so much restraint and they are so incredibly professional and it pissed me off. I had no idea that it would, you know, as time would go on, it would warp into something completely different, which became this narrative that, you know, January six wasn’t an instruction. It wasn’t violent. It was hugs and kisses.

It was a normal tourist day, but that’s the origins of it. I mean, I wanted people to understand how brutal the fighting was how professional the officers, you know, were and and how they handled themselves. And the fact that we didn’t make a lot of arrests because we were fighting for our goddamn lives. Logistically, that was an impossibility. So you

you have been waging what you described as a one man war against Donald Trump and the fucking people that refuse to accept reality. But you’ve paid a rather dramatic price for it.

And

and I think that we started off with your comments at the hearing and then the reaction that we we heard from one of our fellow American citizens. I mean, the price you paid for waging this war, you you’ve been alienated from your colleagues in law enforcement. You lost your career as a cop. You lost your pension because you retired five years early. You became a Fox News punching bag,

but also

you become this unlikely hero of the resistance, although you gave a rather notable interview to Rolling Stone where you say you’re really done with being a hero. You’re tired of it and you’re tired of being lumped together, you know, I will read this with, you know, associated with people typically thought of as a hero that day like Mike Pence. I believe your direct quote was The motherfuckers think Mike Pence is a goddamn hero. Don’t lump me in with that fucking pathetic coward.

So how do you

feel about really,

You’re

not a you’re not a Mike Pence band. We’re gonna get wait. And by the way, let’s pace it because we’re gonna get to Kevin McCarthy in a minute. You know?

I

actually didn’t retire. I just resigned. And I did so in in kind of a knee jerk fashion. And so I found myself unemployed after twenty years of having a good government job, no pension, no retirement, no nothing. I didn’t even get to leave with a shirt on my back because I had to turn that shit into the property division when I left the department.

I had become friends with with Don Lemmon from CNN, and I reached out to him and I was like, hey man, I’m I don’t have a job.

And

next thing you know, I get hired by CNN is a law enforcement analyst, which

is

very ironic because if you knew me prior to

Like, I was a

CNN hate

her.

And I and a Fox News enthusiast, which is ironic in in his sense because I turned it, you know, Laura Ingram and Tucker Carlson two people who I enjoyed their programming thoroughly ended up, you know, shitting all over me. I

can’t even imagine what it’s like to have No, Tucker Carlson questioning your manhood. Laura Ingram calling somebody else a drama queen.

Now

and I I repeat myself, but what the fuck? You

know? No. I can’t. But I I recognized it for what it was. I mean, I had the fortune of, you know, twenty year law enforcement career.

I’ve gone against the worst that worse defense attorneys that money can fucking buy. And I know what, you know, courtroom theatrics look like, and I know why defense attorneys resort to courtroom theatrics. And normally, it’s because they’re clients guilty as hell and they don’t have a fact to stand on. So when I heard those comments, I thought it was funny. But what’s not funny is when Laura Ingram or Tucker Carlson says some dumb shit.

And then some moron takes that as fact and then they threatened my life or my family’s life. That that guy

in the voice mail. He was a Fox News listener, wasn’t he? Oh,

I mean, he literally repeated the talking points of Laura Ingram’s programming, which was that I was a crisis actor and Egonlyn, it’s a it’s a good illustration of how this stuff flows

downhill. They say this stuff, then people then begin to act out on it, and that’s what you got.

Okay.

So I I have to ask you about your meeting with Kevin McCarthy. So you and the other officers wanted to meet with these Republicans, and you’re really pressed for it. And there were some big questions. They didn’t wanna meet with you at first. I’m guessing they wanted you to go away.

Eventually, you did get a meeting with with Kevin McCarthy. Tell me about that because my favorite part about that is that you went into the room and you picked out the chair that you thought that McCarthy would normally sit in it. And and and you sat

in it first. Yeah. K.

That’s very right? Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I approached that meeting the same way that I did with

any interview that

I ever conducted with a, you know, criminal suspect. I I wanted to put them in an uncomfortable position And so I reverted back to twenty years of, you know, interviewing and interrogation techniques and tactics that I had learned throughout my law enforcement career. I also,

like, studied

up a little bit on Kevin. And, you know, I learned, like, some little details. The most shocking to me was I read that Washington Post article where they wrote about how he learned Donald Trump’s favorite starburst, and then he, like, assembled a jar full of Like, hand

picked

the

I think it’s the pink ones or his favorite, pink and something else. And he hand picks out of this giant bag of starburst and then puts it in a jar and flies down to Mar a Lago and gives it to Donald Trump. And I was just

like, man, If ever

there was a reason to pull a motherfucker’s man card, that was it. And this is a guy that calls himself a leader of Republicans in America.

I I

just fucking scratch my head. I I didn’t understand. Okay. Can I just read

you a paragraph that you wrote from your book that Actually, this is this is so good that it made Tim Miller jealous. He said, dude, what is the way you told Rolling Stone? I I think at night when the lights are turned off, a Lincoln and Ronald Reagan had some pretty choice words to say about the fact that they have to hang on Kevin McCarthy’s

wall. They

they they did some fucking above average things, and they’ve got to a door in the wall of this fucking Weasel bitch named Kevin McCarthy, and his fake fucking spray on tan who’s fucking claimed to fame at least in my eyes is the fact City amassed a collection of Donald Trump’s favorite flavored starbursts, put them in the Mason jar, and presented them to fucking Donald Trump.

So to

repeat ourselves, what the fuck dude? You know? So, I mean, it was so Oh.

See, Tim Tim’s

getting your standing ovation over there. This is this is this

is high praise. Seriously though,

the

reason that that meeting

came about

was

there had been a lot

of

journalists, reporters that had, you know, were asked and Kevin McCarthy, I forget what the reason was. I think it was National Police Week. Whether or not he had met with me or or any of the other officers from January sixth,

And then

at at some point, Eric Swallwell and Adam Kinzinger were tweeting about it and then Nancy Pelosi put out a press release. And so the optics, I think, became so band shamed

into it. Yeah. Absolutely.

So

it was a Thursday night.

I

find out, you know, I get an email inviting me to this meeting on Friday morning. At in Kevin McCarthy’s office. And then when I get there, I realize, like, it it’s gonna be me, Gladys cyclic, who’s the mother of officer Brian Sicknich, who lost his life as a result of the injuries he sustained from defending the capital on January

sixth. And also

one of my partners in crime Harry Dunn.

And so we

get into this meeting And,

yeah, I realized,

like, right away that, you know, Kevin was just trying to

consume time you

know, he didn’t wanna end the meeting too early and make it seem as though it wasn’t substantive or he didn’t really care. So he gave us about an hour I described

it as

a lot of verbal masturbation. But what shocked me was to how indifferent he was sitting across the mother of a dead police officer.

And how, you

know, even then, like, he couldn’t even muster up any compassion or empathy for her.

Or for what

she had experienced.

And it

pissed me off. You recorded

this conversation. So what did he say? What what is in that recording? I

recorded a lot of the conversations, but

Kevin

said that I mean, I remember pressing him on, you know, statements that had been made by I think what I refer to as fringe members of his party. These are the the Tinfoil Hat brigade, Marjorie Taylor Green, Paul Gozar, Andrew Clyde, Louis

Gomer, These are

people that they’re not just an embarrassment to America. They’re embarrassment to humanity. And he told me that he couldn’t control the fringe members of his party. And I remember thinking myself like you’re this motherfucker that calls himself the leader of the fucking house GOP And you’re telling me that as a leader, you can’t control members of your own party from going out publicly and lying about what happened on January sixth.

I mean,

it’s not mischaracterization. And we get get away from these euphemisms that people use to describe liars.

He’s a

liar. The people in his party that talk about January six for anything other than what it was a brutal insurrection in which police officers were beaten savagely by Trump supporters If you’re saying anything other than that, you’re a fucking

liar.

And what

did he say? He told me

that, you know, again, he couldn’t control the French members of his party, and he said that he chose to

Well, there were there were a couple

other topics that I brought up. One of them was, at that time, you had seen kind of the origins of

this conspiracy theory that the

FBI

wasn’t somehow involved or responsible for

January sixth, that

it was a false flag operation that they utilized, you know, informants as instigators, which is all bullshit, And Kevin McCarthy knew it. And I asked him to address that publicly. I thought it was appropriate like you should come out against that. This is the fucking FBI. I mean, they’re not perfect, but they are and I know this from experience having worked alongside of them for more than a decade.

The premier law enforcement agency in America. These are some dedicated

people.

And, you know, he said that he didn’t choose to address these things publicly, that he would do it privately. And I I say, you know what? How

many months later? And

we saw an individual inspired by this bullshit rhetoric show up at an FBI facility with an AR-fifteen. Fortunately, he was the only one that lost his life. But that being said, you know, as the

leader of the

Republican Party, how are you gonna allow that rhetoric to be utilized? I mean, you see And what also shocks me is I was outraged when Steve’s police was shot

and so

many other Republicans were targeted just years prior,

we have members

of our party

who have been

the victims of political violence, and they fucking don’t do shit. Seeing this unfold on the capital and in the aftermath. So you also met with some other

you you mess mess about other politicals. You didn’t record it, but you also met with Lindsey Graham. And and I I I thought your description of the book was interesting that Graham snapped at Brian Cygnick’s mom, Gladys, that he’d end the meeting if she kept speaking ill of Donald Trump.

I mean,

this is the mother of a dead police officer, and that’s what Lindsey Graham was saying in private. Yeah. I mean, I I don’t know.

It wasn’t that private.

There was

you know, senator Tim Scott, who I will say this of all the senators and members of Congress that I met with from the Republican Party, with the

exception,

obviously, of the the ten Republicans that voted to impeach Donald Trump. Senator Scott was the only one that had any empathy compassion and actually took the time to speak with missus

Syknek Lindsay Graham on

the other hand was like the the opposite end of the spectrum. I I remember sitting there

Mister Sicknick

addressing him, the moment that she laid any responsibility at the feet of Donald Trump, he lashed out. He snapped. He wanted to end the meeting. He said if there’s any more talk about Donald Trump or or Donald Trump being responsible for that day that he was gonna end the meeting. And I I also remember because I had

done this with

every single member of congress that I met with, trying to play for him my body worn camera footage, which I had on my cell phone. And I showed it to him and he just couldn’t fucking be bothered. He didn’t

wanna look at it. He did not wanna look at it. He did not wanna look

at it.

Did not wanna look at it.

The only

thing

that we got him to say was he said if we give you guns, you should have shot them all in the

head. Alright. And one other politician you dealt with was Republican Andrew slide from Georgia, who was people might not recognize the name, but he was the guy who said that January six was a normal tourist visit. And and then he refused to shake your hand, but you said that when you confronted him, he folded like a fucking deck

of cards. Yeah.

Andrew Claude, man of the people. Right.

So that

day, I found out that there were twenty one house Republicans that voted against awarding members of the Metropolitan Police Department and US Capitol Police to Congressional Gold Medal. I was pissed off,

and I got in

my truck and headed towards the capital. And I remember calling Harry

And I was

like, hey, listen, I’m gonna go, you

know, try to schedule meetings with all these members. And he’s like, oh, I’m I’m on board. And we printed out a list of the twenty one House Republicans and and started to make our way around the capital. Unfortunately, most of them, most of the members weren’t in their offices. We ended up just meeting with staffers and scheduling meetings that never came to fruition.

But I did see Andrew Claude and I recognized him and he was stepping on to an elevator. And I grabbed Harry, and I was like, come on. Let’s go. So we get into the elevator bay with with Andrew Clyde. And and I remember looking at him, and I said, hey, congressman, you know, how are you?

And I I reached out my hand, and and he kinda looked at me And I was like, are you gonna shake my

hand? And he

was like, I I don’t know who you are. And I was like, oh, I’m sorry, sir. My name is Michael Fannon. I’m DC Metropolitan Police Officer, and I fought to defend the capital and you on January sixth. And as a result, I sustained some pretty serious injuries.

I said I had a traumatic brain injury and a

heart attack. And

my hand is still outstretched. And he literally does an about face, turns, faces like the corner of the elevator, and he pulls out his cell phone. And I could tell what he was doing. He was trying to pull up like a recording app. I don’t know if you thought, like, I was gonna attack him or or maybe I’d yell some entities at him, but he sits there and he’s fumbling.

And the next floor that the elevator came to. I mean, he ran as fast as that old motherfucker could run.

You

know, Harry looked at me. I remember he said, man, if if if you had told me that

and I wasn’t

here, I would have never believed you. But it was just, you know, it’s an example of I mean, listen, we were up here talking about Republican lawmakers that are denying reality. But it’s both sides of the political aisle. People say these things on Capitol Hill in this insulated environment where no one is ever gonna confront them or actually, you know, interact with them and they feel like they can do it and they can get away with it and then they go back to their constituencies and their hailed as like a fucking hero, which I don’t know where Andrew Clyde’s constituency is. I would imagine that they, you know, have no idea what happened on January sixth or that, you know, it was anything other than what Andrew Clyde tells them it is.

But yeah. I mean, it’s it’s disgraceful.

So

this takes us full circle back to where we began.

And and this

is really a hard question, I I I think. But we’re sitting here a few weeks before mid term election that’s likely to mean that Kevin McCarthy is about to become the speaker. That these people are are not being driven out of office in disgrace, but that many of them will be promoted and millions of Americans believe all of these lies, even confronted with all of this, Everyone in this room, I think, has woken up feeling they took crazy pills, you know, wondering what is happening, what is this alternative reality we live in, but your experience seems to encapsulate it, brings it together because you are there. So I I guess, from your point of view, you know what happened, and now you see what the politicians are saying and doing about it, and they’ve convinced in misled millions of Americans. So your book is about the battle for the soul of America.

And it may have come off as a Glib question in the beginning. But I have to say that this discussion really makes I mean, you must wrestle with this. What does it say about our fellow Americans? What is this how do we win this this kind of a fight? I didn’t

say it was easy. No.

I I mean, Listen, I I think that if the the lesson that I’ve learned is and it’s become cliché, but, you know, from sitting through all of those select committee hearings. I recognize, like, how fragile democracy really is. And how as Americans, I think we’ve just become incredibly lazy. We’ve just taken for granted our own individual roles to play in this experiment that we call a, you know, democratic republic. I don’t see this overwhelming majority of Americans that buy into Donald Trump or Trumpism.

I mean, I see like a very dedicated base that he enjoys. But I see more examples of Americans that are just indifferent to either what happened on January sixth or to what Donald Trump and and Trumpism really is. Because people are just worried about what’s happening within their own bubble. If it doesn’t affect me, in the

here and

now, like, I it’s hard to to find that as, you know, important Will

Michael keep preaching, keep fighting, and thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today and

coming here tonight.

Thank you for having me. Thank you. Thank you.

And thank you all for

listening to today’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Shirley Sykes. Smooth it back on Monday, and we’ll do this all over again.

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