‘Devoid of shame’: January 6 cop Michael Fanone on Trump’s Republican party

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.

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.