Former Washington, D.C. police officer Michael Fanone speaks to reporters in support of President Joe Biden across the street from former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York, Tuesday, May 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Michael Fanone, the former Metropolitan Police Officer assaulted to within an inch of his life on Jan. 6, 2021, after taking a stun gun to the neck, suffering a heart attack and being dragged by a mob of former President Donald Trump’s supporters, said his 78-year-old mother was swatted at her Virginia home mere hours after he delivered remarks opposing Trump outside of a courthouse in New York.
Fanone was in Manhattan attending the closing arguments of Trump’s hush-money and election interference trial on Tuesday. The former police officer, who has long been vocal about his experience at the Capitol, delivered a stark message, saying the former president’s “lies” and “the lies of his surrogates” about the 2020 election being stolen fueled were directly responsible for the violence at the U.S. Capitol.
“At the end of the day, this election is about Donald Trump and his vision for the Office of the President of the United States, not as a public servant who answers to the elected, to the people who elected him, but as an authoritarian who answers to and serves only himself,” Fanone said, according to NBC.
Within hours of those remarks, the outlet reported, a SWAT team showed up at Fanone’s mother’s house under false pretenses. A person had created a fake manifesto attributed to Fanone where the writer detailed plans to kill their mother and conduct a school shooting. Fanone’s mother’s address was left on the bogus tome.
Fanone told NBC his mother was “mortified.”
Swatting, he said, is dangerous and even more so when law enforcement are responding to what they believe is essentially an active shooter.
“This is the reality of going up against or challenging Donald Trump … These swatting calls are incredibly f—— dangerous, especially when the target is somebody like my mom,” Fanone said.
The outlet reported that it wasn’t only Fanone’s mother who was swatted, but also his father. His father was not at home, however. Police told Fanone they received dozens of calls about the swatting incident at his mother’s home.
Fairfax County Police provided a comment to Law&Crime late Wednesday confirming that officers responded to a call around for a welfare check sent to Fanone’s mother’s home.
“Officers made contact with the resident, who was confirmed to be okay, following a suspicious email that we were made aware of thanks to our partners with the Montgomery County Police Department. Detectives from our Threat Assessment Management (TAM) Unit are investigating the circumstances of this case and the swatting nature of the initial email,” a spokesperson for the Fairfax County Police department said.
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