On MSNBC’s Deadline: White House (Oct. 10, 2025), host Nicolle Wallace interviewed former D.C. police officer Michael Fanone — who responded to the Capitol on January 6, 2021 — as he revisited his role in the chaos and lashed out at Donald Trump and Republicans. Earlier in the segment, Fanone claimed that he and his family will never be safe as long as Trump is president, repeating his familiar line about “defending democracy.”
Fanone, now a frequent CNN and MSNBC contributor, has built a media career around his January 6 story and the book he authored about it.
He said:
“I mean, it’s, and again, I mean, I’m one of, you know, hundreds of police officers that were assaulted that day. And there’s countless stories of, you know, police officers who overcame their trauma to participate in the criminal justice process, go testify as witnesses, testify to the extent of their injuries and to what that experience was like. And Donald Trump, you know, again, in the stroke of a pen, dismissed all of that — dismissed all the hard work of, you know, these career FBI agents and federal agents who worked these cases for months and months and months and years, many of whom now have been terminated from their positions simply for doing their jobs and having the back of their fellow law enforcement officers, which is why it’s so utterly ridiculous that this Republican Party would have the audacity to claim that it somehow supports law enforcement. Um, it’s nothing more than pathetic pandering. Um, and it makes my blood boil.”
Fanone took aim directly at Republicans, accusing the party of “pathetic pandering” for saying it supports police officers — even though Trump and Republicans have consistently backed law enforcement, raised funding for police departments, and stood by officers across the country when Democrats called to defund them.
Fanone talks about hundreds of assaulted officers, but what he leaves out is the scale of that day. Roughly 1,400 Capitol Police and close to 1,000 D.C. officers were present, with about 140 reporting injuries — most of them minor. Court filings and later reports confirmed that both undercover officers and FBI informants were present in and around the crowd that day. It’s proof that authorities had far more visibility into what was happening than they’ve admitted publicly. That raises serious questions about why they failed to stop the chaos — and how much their own actions may have helped it spiral out of control.
The real trauma came afterward — from the January 6 protesters who were hunted down, imprisoned, silenced, and ruined. While Fanone builds a brand on national television, the same media refuses to bring on January 6 defendants to tell their side of the story.
Mainstream outlets — CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS — have overwhelmingly framed January 6 through the lens of “insurrection” and “threats to democracy.” Their coverage typically features police officers like Fanone, Democratic lawmakers, or Justice Department officials, not the defendants themselves.