The Dictatorship
Spencer Pratt is looking at the MAGA in the mirror
Spencer Pratt doesn’t approve of all the Trump comparisons.
The former reality TV star gets them a lot these days. He’s a celebrity — best known for his breakout role on MTV’s “The Hills” two decades ago — who is now running for mayor of Los Angeles. He doesn’t have much experience in politics or city government, but he comes with an A-list Rolodex and a built-in fanbase that includes more than five million followers across X, Meta and TikTok. He’s bombastic, confident and has a habit of rambling his way through speeches that veer into conspiracy theory. And, by his own admission, he has harbored an absurd, borderline toxic obsession with money since he was a teen.
Pratt, 42, is a registered Republican, but rejects the notion that he is aligned with MAGA or following in Trump’s footsteps. In February, while gathering signatures at an early campaign event on Ventura Boulevard in Encino, he joined the livestream of celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton to give his elevator pitch to be mayor. When Hilton asked about claims he’s a MAGA candidate, Pratt pushed back.
“I’m not a political person — I’m somebody with basic expectations of our tax money and our quality of living,” he told Hilton.
Pratt’s primary motivation for the career pivot, he said, stemmed from the Palisades fire that ravaged his neighborhood last January, destroying his family home and killing a dozen of his neighbors. He blames Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom for the devastation, which he believes was preventable were it not for the “corruption” in city government.
Talking about the fires on Hilton’s show, Pratt began to ramble, meandering through allegations of deceit and misconduct at the hands of a mysterious “they” who he said were misappropriating fire recovery funds and purposefully “increasing homelessness” in LA to defraud taxpayers.
This election, Pratt said, is a matter of good versus “evil,” and he’s waging “spiritual warfare” on behalf of his future constituents, who, in Pratt’s telling, have fairly simple requests.
“They just want to go on TikTok, have their Wi-Fi working, and be able to not step in human poop or a fentanyl needle on the walk to get their matcha. That’s who I represent,” he said.
As a Republican in a deep-blue city, Pratt was a longshot candidate on day one of his campaign. He’s also a career entertainer with no experience running for office, let alone running a city of 3.8 million people. And he has earned support from MAGA loyalists, establishment Republicans and even Trump himself, making him a tough sell in a city and state the president casts as a leftist “trash heap.” Pratt, too, seems to prioritize sparring with his political opponents and railing against quality-of-life issues on social media over laying out detailed policy plans for voters.
But Trump’s formula for politicking, while radical, has been successful for him. And whether Pratt is intentionally following that formula or not, his celebrity and social media savvy are giving him real momentum in the race. Several polls have him in second place behind Bass; an Emerson College poll from May 13 put him at 22%, a 12-point surge from March that leaves him eight points behind the incumbent.
And this week, his growing success drew the attention of the president.
“I’d like to see him do well,” Trump told reporters. “I heard he’s a big MAGA person.”
Pratt is a bellwether of sorts for the national Trump-era GOP. His success or failure on June 2 — or, if no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, in a November runoff — will test the effectiveness of running a Trump-like populist candidate in a deep-blue jurisdiction where Democratic voters are wavering on the party establishment. Democrats face a litmus test as well, with Democratic Socialist City Councilmember Nithya Raman running to the left of Bass, her former mentor. Pratt seeks to position himself between them as a moderate alternative to both.
To Pratt’s supporters, he’s a “breath of fresh air” who could shake the city from the Democrats’ grip, as Roxanne Hoge, chair of the LA County GOP, put it.
“We’ve been under one-party rule,” Hoge told MS NOW. “And it has destroyed what should be paradise.”
To critics, Pratt’s mayoral campaign is more evidence of MAGA’s ineptitude. The movement’s backing of Pratt “means that they are not a serious governing party, and it means that there’s no desire to even attempt to be,” said Mike Madrid, a California-based Republican strategist and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project.
But to Pratt, all the MAGA talk is a distraction campaign mounted by his opponents.
“They say I’m MAGA to try to stop me,” Pratt told Hilton, “because my message exposes their corruption.”
Pratt’s team declined multiple interview requests from MS NOW, and did not respond to specific allegations mentioned in this story.
***
Pratt’s early daysleading up to and during his time on “The Hills,” were marked by a relentless fixation with money — amassing it however he could, and then throwing it away as soon as it arrived.
In his book, “The Guy You Loved to Hate: Confessions from a Reality TV Villain,” published in January, Pratt details the lying and hustling that brought him celebrity and wealth, and the lavish spending that followed.
Pratt grew up in the Pacific Palisades, a wealthy residential enclave of about 20,000 people sandwiched between Santa Monica and Malibu. As a teenager going to school alongside celebrities, Pratt said he stole photos of his friend with Mary-Kate Olsen and sold them to Us Weekly for $50,000. (The magazine’s then-photo editor, Peter Grossman, whom Pratt said he sold the photos to, did not respond to MS NOW’s multiple requests for comment.)
Pratt’s obsession with get-rich-quick schemes only grew after he joined the cast of “The Hills” in 2007. The MTV show, which premiered the year before, chronicled the personal dramas of a group of 20-somethings trying to build careers in fashion and entertainment in LA.
Pratt quickly assumed the role of the show’s villainover his propensity to bully other cast members, particularly women. That version of Pratt was a persona, he maintains, handcrafted by producers. The volatility of his on-camera relationship with fellow cast member — and now wife — Heidi Montag was also fake, he writes. Pratt was Montag’s bad boyfriend on the show, who fought with her family, isolated her from her friends and famously kicked her out of his car when she refused to move in with him — a scene he said producers forced them to film a dozen times, and one that he writes “still haunts me to this day.” (Several of the show’s former producers, including executive producer Adam DiVello, did not respond to MS NOW’s requests for comment.)
Fighting and breaking up proved lucrative for the couple, as did reuniting. Pratt said in 2008, he and Montag eloped to Mexico on the promise of a $400,000 paycheck from Us Weekly, all behind the backs of the show’s producers — a move they believed would make them too relevant to be fired. They staged another on-camera church wedding in LA the following year. Pratt said he considered leaving Montag at the altar if producers would offer them an extra $1 million.
The plot kept working, so they kept staging fake storylines to secure magazine deals. The whole time, Pratt writes, “the public saw chaos, betrayal, and divorce papers. But behind the scenes? Heidi and I were still thick as thieves, scheming side by side, laughing at how easy it was to keep the world guessing and the checks coming in.”
And once the money started rolling in, they blew right through it.
They amassed, in Pratt’s telling, more than $1 million worth of crystals; $500,000 worth of Hermes Birkin bags for Montag; designer suits for Pratt worth “about the same”; and $300,000 worth of guns and ammunition, purchased as they became increasingly paranoid about their safety. At one point, during the penultimate season of “The Hills,” the couple’s finances were in such dire straits that they had to move back in with his parents.
“Ever since I’d met Heidi, every dollar that came in, we’d spent right away,” Pratt writes. “That’s just how we rolled. No savings account, no backup plan, just direct deposit and vibes. Because what’s money, really? Just energy moving in and out of your life.”
Pratt’s laissez-faire approach to spending doesn’t seem to raise red flags with his local political supporters. Ariana Assenmacher, vice president of political engagement for the LA County Young Republicans, told MS NOW she sees Pratt’s admissions as proof he is “willing to admit his mistakes, and hopefully learn from them.”
She added that she has faith the city government’s “checks and balances” — including a Democrat-run city council — would help control his spending.
But some Angelenos who were on the fence about voting for Pratt told MS NOW that his financial admissions didn’t inspire confidence in his ability to manage the city’s $14 billion budget.
“Would that make me apprehensive to vote for him? Absolutely,” said Rob Jernigan, a Palisades resident and fire recovery activist, in March after hearing passages from the book read by MS NOW.
By May, though, Jernigan said he was resigned to voting for Pratt. He believed his preferred pick in a crowded field of more than a dozen candidates, tech entrepreneur Adam Miller, didn’t stand a chance.
“He’s not great,” Jernigan said of Pratt. But “compared to Karen Bass and Nithya Raman,” he added, “are you kidding me?”
***
The Palisades fire destroyed more than 6,800 structures, including both Pratt’s and his parents’ homes, and killed a dozen people in the neighborhood, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Pratt was grief-stricken in the weeks and months that followed. On social media, he posted videos of himself sifting through the rubble of his former home, where he and Montag were raising their two sons, pulling out crystals that survived the blaze.
He directed his anger at Bass and other city officials for what he described as a series of failures to prepare for and respond to the blazes. Bass was in Ghana at the time of the fires, and city officials kept a reservoir near the Palisades dry for y ears, despite the fact that it was intended to help mitigate a deadly fire — a fact that Newsom later called “deeply troubling.”
But Pratt has focused the majority of his attention and ire on a disproven theory surrounding the disbursement of $100 million in recovery funds raised through a pair of concerts in LA last year, organized by the Annenberg Foundation, a private family organization. In July, Pratt platformed allegations by a local blogger, who claimed the funds were being misspent by FireAid, the entity charged with disbursing them, by going to nonprofits rather than individual victims. Within days, Trump posted about it on Truth Social, alleging FireAid “LOOKS LIKE ANOTHER DEMOCRAT INSPIRED SCAM,” and Rep. Kevin Kiley, I-Calif., called for a federal investigation on the House floor. Within weeks, Pratt was in DC, having meetings at the Justice Department.
Pratt’s claims were soon undermined. Separate investigations by the Los Angeles Times and a law firm commissioned by FireAid found that while some of the money did go to nonprofits, none of the funds were misappropriated. Instead, some grants provided direct assistance to victims through cash vouchers and gift card for groceries, while others supported more long-term recovery.
But conspiracy theories have a way of outlasting the facts. Pratt has continued repeating the unsubstantiated claim that the FireAid relief effort was a “scam,” including in his book and during an interview with Joe Rogan last month, which has more than one million views. The fantastical theory left Pratt feeling, he told Rogan, like public funding “doesn’t go to solving anything or fixing it. It goes to scams.”
This isn’t the first time Pratt has dipped his toe in the conspiratorial waters, as he admits in his book.
“I come from a long line of so-called conspiracy theorists who turned out to be dead-on accurate because it’s only a conspiracy theory until it becomes breaking news,” Pratt writes. “Then, suddenly, everyone’s acting like they saw it coming all along…”
In 2009, he and Montag appeared on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ now-moribund podcast to discuss their “recent awakening” after watching Jones’ new film, “The Obama Deception,” which claimed without evidence that former President Barack Obama had been installed as a puppet president by shadowy actors to facilitate a totalitarian regime.
“I really do feel like we took the blue pill or whatever in Matrix,” Pratt told Jones at the time. “And I feel like you really did pull that little mechanical thing out of the back of my brain.”
Pratt kept taking the Matrix pills. Among the beliefs he shared with Jones were that 9/11 was “100%” an inside job; that global warming isn’t real (“We’ve all seen footage of the polar bears swimming to new pieces of ice,” Pratt said); and that fluoridated water is a government poison (“Do you know how hard it is for me to go to the market and even find a drinking water bottle that says ‘fluoride free’?” Pratt asked).
Eight years later, the couple again joined Jones and revealed that they had gone deeper down the conspiratorial rabbit hole. They said that their belief in the “New World Order” — a sprawling Cold War-era theory alleging that global elites are behind pandemics, terrorist attacks and other crises — had tanked their Hollywood careers.
***
Pratt may be coy about his party affiliation and ties to the Trump-era GOP, but Republicans are nevertheless claiming him as one of their own.
Fox News host and former White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany called him a “phenomenal model” for the party’s midterm candidates on air earlier this month.
“Wake up, congressional Republicans. Become Spencer Pratt,” McEnany said the day after Pratt’s first mayoral debate.
Assenmacher, from the LA County Young Republicans, sees Pratt as “the future.”
“We want imperfect people to step up and lead us in the right direction,” she told MS NOW.
Pratt is a flawed candidate. In addition to his track record of poor money management and belief in conspiracy theories, Pratt has been caught stretching the truth during his campaign. Pratt said he lived in an Airstream trailer on his burned-out lot in the Palisades, while reports said he was actually staying at the Hotel Bel-Air, where rooms go for at least $1,500 a night. (Pratt later told TMZ“I don’t live anywhere” — despite a viral campaign video in which he claimed to live in the trailer — and said his security team would not let him sleep in his Airstream due to death threats.)
MS NOW’s review of Pratt’s campaign finance records turned up other discrepancies. Despite Pratt’s recent claims to CBS News and in a fundraising email that he campaigns “from my heart” and without consultants or backing from billionaires, since launching his campaign in January, Pratt has spent at least $48,000 on consultants, including TAG Strategies, whose clients have included Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan and the Arizona Republican Party. (Between January and mid-April, Bass spent at least $167,000 on consultants, while Raman spent at least $27,800, their most recent filings show.)
Pratt also secured donations from billionaires, including sports executive Jeanie BussNew York hedge fund manager Dan Loeb and the Winklevoss twinsknown for their ties to Facebook. Pratt out-raised both Bass and Raman between January and mid-April, taking in more than $538,000 — just over $7,000 more than Raman raised in the same period, and about $40,000 more than Bass.
Republican voters may be willing to overlook Pratt’s imperfections on the hope of gaining a substantial foothold in city government. But whether a majority of Angelenos can accept Pratt’s shortcomings is another question — especially as the city gears up to host the World Cup this July and the Olympics in 2028, all while confronting housing and homelessness crises and a crumbling entertainment industry.
Some of the city’s electorate may be starting to sour on Bass — a UCLA poll released last month shows that 40% of the electorate is undecided in the race — but some Republican strategists are skeptical those voters’ frustrations will be enough to make them pick Pratt over Raman. In the city’s last mayoral election, Bass beat her closest challenger, billionaire Rick Caruso, a Republican turned centrist Democrat, by nearly 10 points. Pratt, meanwhile, is contending with comparisons to Trump at a time when the president’s approval rating sits at a historic low.
“This is a much more difficult partisan environment than four years ago,” Madrid, the California strategist, said.
Angelenos, Madrid added, “want a change agent who’s not part of the typical Democratic Party — it doesn’t mean [they’re] going to go vote for a Republican.”
Raman and Bass seem to be hoping the same. Both highlighted Trump’s comments supporting Pratt this week, in apparent efforts to boost their own campaigns.
But just as Trump dismisses his own critics with claims that he alone can make America great again, Pratt promises he’s the only candidate who can restore LA to its “golden age.”If he doesn’t win, Pratt told CNN this week“LA is cooked, cooked — like, done. Burnt cooked.”
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
The Dictatorship
Maricopa County official fears Stephen Miller’s group has taken over election office
Even the Republican county attorney in Arizona’s most populous locality is sounding the alarm on potential election meddling by MAGA world.
That’s the crux of a court filing submitted by Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell this week. For those unaware, Mitchell garnered national attention after Senate Republicans tapped her to question Christine Blasey Ford during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process after Ford alleged that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her as a teenager. Kavanaugh has flatly denied the allegation.
Two years later, Mitchell successfully ran for Maricopa County attorney, and she endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2024 — in other words, she is not an opponent of the MAGA movement. So it’s noteworthy that she and her legal team are accusing America First Legal, the right-wing activist group founded by White House adviser Stephen Miller, of effectively taking control of the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, which helps administer elections.
The office is led by Justin Heap, who has egged on the Trump administration’s push to acquire sensitive voter data in Arizona. And the disturbing context to all this is Trump has openly declared that Republicans should nationalize voting processes and “take over the voting” in several cities — like Phoenix, perhaps.
According to The Arizona Republic:
In a June 8 legal filing, Mitchell’s lawyers asked Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney to rein in Recorder Justin Heap’s politically connected firm, the America First Legal Foundation, which it said has undertaken “an unprecedented power grab.”
“The Recorder lacks any explicit or implicit statutory authority to hire outside counsel — let alone a partisan organization — to serve as in-house counsel on ‘all’ matters under his ‘purview,’” Mitchell’s lawyers wrote.
America First Legal is advising Heap’s office as he battles the Republican-controlled Maricopa County Board of Supervisors in an attempt to claim official powers for himself. As Democracy Docket reportedthe dispute at one point allegedly involved Heap seizing election equipment and provisional ballot envelopes while votes were being cast in a local election in March, causing county supervisors to warn about “grave chain-of-custody concerns.”
The Arizona Republic said Mitchell listed several examples of America First Legal wielding unauthorized power in Heap’s office amid the dispute with the board:
Mitchell’s request, handled by the law firm of Snell and Wilmer, identified six examples of what she contends involves America First Legal going beyond Blaney’s intended role for them: litigating the power-sharing agreement with the board.
Now, Mitchell argues, America First Legal has claimed authority over all matters relating to early voting, told election officials to disregard directives from or seek advice from Mitchell’s office, threatened prosecution over drop boxes and sent a warning letter signaling new litigation against the board.
Let’s not downplay the crisis playing out here. The GOP-controlled Board of Supervisors and the Republican county attorney overseeing the largest county in Arizona, where the majority of the state’s voters live, are calling out the pro-MAGA county recorder, who stands accused of allowing a right-wing activist group, founded by a White House official, to have unchecked power over electoral processes. (Heap’s office did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.)
The fact that even conservative officials are sounding the alarm here shows how extreme, unprecedented and potentially threatening to democracy this situation could prove to be.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
A federal judge in Washington has denied a bid Wednesday brought by a watchdog group to immediately block the Justice Department’s “anti-weaponization” fund, for now choosing to trust the department’s assertions that it is not moving forward with the fund.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled immediately, denying Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s request for a temporary restraining order that would have blocked the Department of Justice from taking steps to create the fund.
Throughout the 30-minute hearing, the DOJ reiterated that the administration was not moving forward with the nearly $1.8 billion fund, which seeks to compensate individuals who allege they have been politically targeted or victimized by the DOJ.
Andrew Block, the only lawyer present for the government, repeatedly cited Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s June 2 congressional testimonyin which he said the administration was “not moving forward” with plans to create the fund.
Leon indicated he agreed with the DOJ’s position that the case appeared to be moot, saying he was not persuaded there was an issue for the court to decide regarding the creation of the fund. He issued a stern warning to the DOJ, saying, “Don’t play possum with this court!” — meaning he does not want to be deceived.
The plaintiffs argued Blanche’s testimony did not amount to an official cancellation. Nikhel Sus, CREW’s attorney, said Blanche “refused to memorialize that rescission,” or in other words, put it in writing. Sus said that was “highly unusual.” Leon responded, “This whole case is highly unusual to say the least.”
Leon asked the government twice why they would not just rescind the order that established the fund. Block responded, “I don’t know,” and pointed again to Blanche’s public statements about the fund’s future.
Both Leon and Sus raised the issue of Trump’s continued public defense of the fund. “It can still be an important issue and also not moving forward,” Block said. “That isn’t a direction to move forward with the fund.”
Although Leon rejected CREW’s bid for an immediate block, he indicated he is still considering its request for a longer-term block against the fund.
A block order from a separate federal judge in Virginia remains in effect until at least Friday.
Fallon Gallagher is a legal affairs reporter for MS NOW.
The Dictatorship
‘Incredibly dangerous’: Capitol officer badly beaten by Jan. 6 rioters says Trump pardons absolved them
When FBI agents confronted Daniel Rodriguez about using a stun gun on a Washington police officer during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, he wept, seeming to express remorse.
“I’m sorry,” he said through tears in a recorded interview after he was arrested in March 2021. “He’s a human being with children, and he’s not a bad guy. He sounds like he’s just doing his job and he’s — I’m an asshole.”
Two years later, as he was being led away after a judge sentenced him to more than 12 years in prison, Rodriguez raised his fist and screamed, “Trump won!”
Rodriguez is now a free man. The hefty prison sentences imposed on him and four other people convicted of assaulting police officer Michael Fanone — who was dragged into the crowd and severely beaten — were all wiped away in one of Donald Trump’s first acts as president in January 2025: He pardoned almost 1,600 people charged or convicted for their involvement in the riot.
Trump has used the clemency power like no president in history, freeing fraudsters, drug traffickers and corrupt politicians.
But his pardon of Jan. 6 defendants, more than 170 of whom pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement officers, stands apart. MS NOW is spotlighting the clemency granted to Jan. 6 defendants as part of a series on Trump’s pardons, “Justice Interrupted.”
“It’s incredibly dangerous,” Fanone told MS NOW in an interview. “You have individuals who were inspired by Donald Trump’s lies to storm and assault the Capitol and try to prevent the certification of a free and fair election. Donald Trump then absolved them of all of their criminal culpability.”
Trump’s first attorney general and his FBI director each told Congress they opposed pardons for people who hurt police officers, but the president did it anyway. Afterward, even some of his biggest backers balked.
“Pardoning the people who went into the Capitol and beat up a police officer violently, I think, was a mistake, because it seems to suggest that’s an OK thing to do,” Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” after the pardons in 2025.
Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said on the Senate floor this past January, “People that harm police officers and destroy federal buildings should go to prison, and it’s a damn shame they’re out.”
Trump has never explained why he freed those rioters who violently assaulted police officers. When correspondent Peter Alexander confronted the president about his pardon of the man who shocked Fanone in the neck, Trump brushed aside the question.
“Among those you pardoned, D.J. Rodriguez,” Alexander said to Trump. “He drove a stun gun into the neck of a D.C. police officer who was abducted by the mob that day. He later confessed on video to the FBI and pleaded guilty for his crimes. Why does he deserve a pardon?”
Trump replied, “Well, I don’t know. Is it a pardon? Because we’re looking at commutes and we’re looking at pardons.” Told it was a pardon, he responded, “OK, well, we’ll take a look at everything. But I can say this: Murderers today are not even charged.”
But there was nothing, as Trump commented, to “look at.” Pardons are not reversible.
Fanone believes Trump knew exactly what he was doing: rewarding people who committed violence on his behalf.
“I know that he knows that it was violent. I know that he knows that, and I think that that was intentional,” he said.
In addition to Rodriguez, three others who attacked him were spared most or all of their prison terms:
- Albuquerque Cosper Head got 7 1/2 years for dragging Fanone into the mob while yelling, “I got one!”
- Kyle Young was sentenced to seven years, and Lewis Wayne Snoots to six, for helping to restrain Fanone during the attack.
- Thomas Sibick was sentenced to just over four years for assaulting Fanone and stealing his badge and radio.
Liz Oyer, a former Justice Department pardon attorney, said Trump has disregarded the normal tradition of presidential clemency.
“The things that the Justice Department traditionally looks for are acceptance of responsibility, remorse, rehabilitation, a significant track record of good conduct in the community before we would recommend someone for consideration of a presidential pardon,” she said, adding that few, if any, of the Jan. 6 defendants met that qualification.
“This president’s use of the pardon system is really undermining the legitimacy of our justice system,” she said.
In fact, a Lawfare analysis found that at least 97 of the roughly 1,600 people charged in the Capitol attack have been accused of new crimes since Jan. 6, 2021. At least 19 were accused after being pardoned.
One of the first rioters to breach police barricades, Christopher Moynihanpleaded guilty in February in New York to a harassment charge over threats to kill House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Moynihan was later sentenced to three years’ probation.
Zachary Alama man a judge called “one of the most violent and aggressive rioters,” was sentenced in May to seven years in prison after a jury convicted him of committing a home invasion burglary in Virginia.
Andrew Paul Johnsonconvicted of illegally entering the Capitol, was pardoned despite having been accused of molesting children. In May, he was sentenced to life in prison for the sex crimes.
Fanone wasn’t supposed to be at the Capitol that day, but he rushed there when he heard the distress calls.
He was pulled into a crowd of attackers as he was trying to keep them out of the building. He was holding on to his service weapon to keep it from being taken from him. But once he felt the excruciating, debilitating shock from Rodriguez’s weapon, he knew he was in a dire situation; in fact, he thought he might be killed.
“I knew at that point that I was not going to be able to fight my way out of this,” Fanone remembered. “I wasn’t even going to be able to maintain control of my weapon. The only solution here was that people in the crowd helped me, and when I yelled out that I have kids, it worked.”
His doctors say Fanone suffered a heart attack.
Trump supporters have wrongly called Fanone a “crisis actor,” disputing that he really was attacked. Ed Martin, who once represented Jan. 6 defendants and is now the Justice Department’s pardons attorney, called him a “fake cop.”
Fanone says his life, and the lives of his loved ones, has never been the same.
“My mother’s been the target of swatting events eight times. She had a credible bomb threat called into her home,” he said.
“She had an individual pull up to her house in a pickup truck, approach her in her front yard while she was raking leaves, and throw a bag of dog feces at her.”
In an apparent attempt to wipe the charges, convictions or sentences of Jan. 6 offenders from public knowledge, the Justice Department recently took down press releases naming them from its website, calling it “partisan propaganda.”
Anyone who tries to find the official DOJ announcements of the convictions or sentencing of the men who attacked Fanone will see only broken links.
Ken Dilanian is the justice and intelligence correspondent for MS NOW.
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