D.C. Metropolitan Police Department officer Michael Fanone, who was among those defending the Capitol against rampaging Trump supporters on January 6, appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe this week, where he went after Republican leaders for their pandering. Specifically, Fanone criticized GOP bigwigs for touting their support for police officers when it suits them politically but abandoning those officers in their time of need, specifically following the Capitol riot, when scores of law enforcement personnel were brutally assaulted by Trump supporters. Prominent conservatives have openly antagonized the officers who were involved in the Capitol defense.
Fanone has made clear that, as an officer, he’s just looking for accountability, but certain Republicans remain unwilling to engage with the truth to the point of even obtaining a basic measure of such a thing. As Fanone put it on MSNBC:
‘At the same time, watching the Right handle officers who responded to the Capitol and saying that, ‘Oh, we love police, we just don’t love those police’ — I’m not stupid. Like, I see it for what it is, and it’s pandering, and I don’t want to be pandered to. I want to have an honest conversation, and I think that we’re not engaging in an honest conversation in this country with regards to a lot of things, one of them being police reform. Policing and police reform, the conversation, I look at it kind of like a Rubik’s cube. All of the stakeholders — police officers, management, politicians, the media, and the communities — all need to engage in that conversation honestly. Just like all sides of a Rubik’s cube, if it doesn’t all match and everybody is not all in, we’re just verbally masturbating.’
Watch below:
At the Capitol, Fanone was beaten and otherwise assaulted by Trump supporters to the point of suffering a heart attack — and Trump has openly excused all of what took place, saying in a public statement just last week that the “insurrection took place on November 3, Election Day. January 6 was the Protest!” Another officer involved in defending the Capitol, Sgt. Aquilino Gonell of the U.S. Capitol Police, aptly summed up the absurdity of GOP cowardice in remarks at a public hearing of the House committee investigating the riot. As he put it:
‘Even though there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including hours and hours of videos, and photographic coverage, there’s a continued shocking attempt to ignore or try to destroy the truth of what truly happened that day, and to whitewash the facts into something other than what they unmistakably reveal: an attack on our democracy by violent domestic extremists, and a stain on our history and our moral standing, here at home and abroad.’
Check out Gonell’s comments below:
