Former officer Michael Fanone appeared on CNN Monday morning to promote his forthcoming new book, Hold the Line. During the talk with Brianna Keilar, Fanone discussed the various inflammatory rumors that supporters of former President Donald Trump have spread about him in the wake of the Capitol riots, stoked, he claimed, by rhetoric from far-right and alt-right political leaders.
“Rhetoric from these politicians combined with some of the alt-right or right-wing propaganda, people believe that stuff,” Fanone said. “There have been a whole slew of conspiracies that have kind of popped up about me. The hardest thing to accept is people that have known me for, in some cases, decades buying into a lot of that crap, the idea that I work for the FBI and I’ve been a plant in the Metropolitan Police Department for two decades waiting for this moment.”
On the more outlandish side, Fanone said that one rumor suggested a strange connection between him and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
“I was somehow spawned from a Petri dish and am the love child of Nancy Pelosi,” the former officer explained. “Actually, people believe it!”
These conspiracies and rumors have reached beyond the realm of the far-right and have allegedly begun to influence some of Fanone’s acquaintances, the former officer said. Some close friends have told him that they do not believe his account of what he encountered while trying to defend the Capitol last year. Some have even accused him of faking his body camera footage from that day.
Fanone’s Hold the Line, co-written with John Shiffman, releases on Tuesday through Simon & Schuster. Its official product page describes it as part memoir detailing the former officer’s experiences on January 6, 2021, and part examination of political and cultural issues affecting the country over the last several years.
During his CNN appearance, Fanone also discussed audio he recorded of a phone call with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in which he claimed that Trump was not aware of the violence happening on January 6 as it was playing out. Evidence recently unearthed by the House select committee showed that Trump was aware, watching news coverage of the riots while resisting calls for him to tell supporters to stop the violence.
“But I’m glad I recorded it,” Fanone said. “That’s why I recorded it, was because I didn’t expect Kevin McCarthy to, number one, tell the truth; number two, recount the conversation accurately; and number three, I wanted to show people how indifferent lawmakers are, not just Republican lawmakers, but all lawmakers, to the actual American people that they are representing.”
Newsweek reached out to Representative McCarthy’s office for comment.
