Michael Fanone left the courtroom on Wednesday with a groan.
Earlier that morning he had spoken for the fourth time at the sentencing of someone who assaulted him on Jan. 6, 2021. This one was the worst of the bunch — the man who repeatedly drove a stun gun into his neck as he was trapped by the angry Capitol mob, rendering him unconscious and leaving scars on his skin. Fanone said he wasn’t thinking about that man at all.
“I don’t care about Daniel Rodriguez,” the former D.C. police officer said in court before Rodriguez, 40, of Fontana, Calif., was sentenced to 12½ years in prison. “I ceased thinking about him as a person a long time ago.” Fanone said he was focused on the leader who convinced Rodriguez and his friends that the 2020 election was stolen and must be taken back by force.
“Pursue an indictment against Donald Trump,” Fanone told the roomful of federal prosecutors. “No one in this country is above the law.”
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But when Rodriguez stood up and began arguing that not all police officers are good actors, referencing the death of George Floyd, Fanone left the courtroom in disgust.
“I wasn’t going to listen to that guy ramble on about his justifications,” Fanone said outside the courtroom. In a nod to the Adam Sandler movie “Billy Madison,” he said, “We are all dumber for having listened to it.”
Only after Fanone walked out did Rodriguez spend about a minute of his half-hour speech apologizing for shocking the police officer with a stun gun. In the rest of his remarks, he explained that he had a poor and unstable upbringing in East Los Angeles: “Life has always seemed unfair to me.”
Rodriguez never knew his dad and didn’t finish high school. He worked low-end jobs and spent most of his time with his mother. His attorney said Rodriguez idolized Trump as “the father he wished he had.” In a letter to the court, Rodriguez’s mother described her son’s enthusiasm for Trump as something akin to a teenage crush, writing that suddenly he was eating little, sleeping less and constantly on the phone.
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Rodriguez said in court that he became active in political rallies to “fix the system” and that he “could not join” the side of Black Lives Matter, whose supporters he described as “young thugs” engaging in “angry acts of hate” against police.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson later noted that Rodriguez was exactly the kind of violent, anti-police agitator he claimed to be resisting — “a one-man army of hate.”
In chats in the days leading up to the rally, Rodriguez told friends to bring knives, ax handles and bear spray. He organized a van ride from California so they wouldn’t be searched for weapons. “There will be blood,” he wrote. “Welcome to the revolution.”
At the Capitol, Rodriguez joined the mob pushing against police who held a shaky line barring rioters from entering the Capitol through a West Terrace tunnel. Fanone was one of the D.C. police officers who volunteered to help reinforce the exhausted Capitol Police members guarding the building.
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Video shows Rodriguez being handed the electroshock weapon while pushing against police in the tunnel. He tests it out; a couple of times he lunges toward the officers with the device in his hand. When the officers succeeded in pushing the rioters back from the tunnel entrance and onto the Capitol steps, Fanone was at the front of the line. He was pulled down the stairs and into the mob. Rodriguez came through the crowd to shock Fanone twice on the neck as the officer was trapped in the mass of people.
“Tazzzzed the f--- out of the blue,” Rodriguez messaged his friends.
Two other men who helped attack Fanone have been sentenced to over seven years in prison.
Rodriguez went on to enter the Capitol through a broken window; he joined a pack of rioters in a series of Senate offices where they tore down a door, tried to break a glass window and riffled through papers. After stealing a gas mask, Rodriguez was chased out of the building by police. Before leaving the grounds, he took a picture of a makeshift gallows set up outside the Capitol and wrote, “No Democrats found unfortunately.”
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Later Rodriguez told Gina Bisignano, who came with him to D.C., to delete videos she’d taken during the riot. (Bisignano, a Beverly Hills beautician, cooperated with prosecutors in the case against Rodriguez but has now moved to withdraw her guilty plea.)
Rodriguez pleaded guilty in February to injuring an officer with a dangerous weapon and three other felonies. But his attorneys disputed that the device he used was dangerous or a weapon, citing an analysis by biomedical engineer Mark Kroll. Kroll, who is on the board of the company that produces Tasers, called the device a “sparkler flashlight” and said it didn’t cause Fanone’s injuries or loss of consciousness. (Kroll more often offers opinions in defense of police officers who deploy stun guns; he once said Tasers are “safer than Tylenol.”)
Jackson said Rodriguez’s quibbling over the strength of the stun gun, along with his other “ugly, shocking” excuses, made her doubt the authenticity of his remorse. She said it was obvious from Fanone’s body-camera video how excruciating the attack was: “You can hear him screaming in pain.”
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Fanone suffered a traumatic brain injury and a heart attack, losing consciousness for two minutes; he had to be pulled back behind the police line by colleagues.
From the bench, Jackson said Fanone “knows it’s not up to the court to decide” whether Trump will be charged for his “irresponsible and knowingly false claims that the election was stolen.” But whatever Trump’s responsibility is, she said, Rodriguez chose to engage in “vicious hand-to-hand combat” against police.
As part of his sentence, Rodriguez must pay $96,927 in restitution for Fanone’s medical treatment. As he left the courtroom, Rodriguez shouted, “Trump won!”
Fanone told Jackson that in any other situation, he would be laughing today with other officers about how “pathetic” his attacker was. But Jan. 6 left him not only damaged but also alienated. He left the D.C. police force at the end of 2021, saying his colleagues had turned on him for his efforts to hold Trump and Republican leaders accountable for inciting the mob that nearly killed him.
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“My career, my friends, and my faith in the criminal justice system I dedicated my life to — extinguished because I did my job and lived to tell about it,” he said in court.
Fanone has one more sentencing appearance planned, in the case of the man who stole his badge and radio. After that, he said after Wednesday’s court appearance, “I’m still holding out hope that I will be issuing a victim impact statement at the close of Donald Trump’s trial.”
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