Retired twenty year DC Police Officer Michael Fanone was brutally attacked on January 6th 2021 by Trump supporters attempting to steal the 2020 election. Over the weekend, he presented sedition hunter Forrest Rogers with the handcuffs used to arrest MAGA terrorist Danny Rodriguez, who drove a stun gun into Fanone’s neck.
“A really cool moment this weekend: Michael Fanone presenting @Forrest_Rogers with the handcuffs used to arrest #TaserPrick Danny Rodriguez (the Trump enthusiast who drove a stun gun into Fanone’s neck on Jan. 6 because he believed Trump’s lies about the 2020 election),” NBC justice reporter Ryan Reilley, author of Sedition Hunters, shared over the video.
A really cool moment this weekend: Michael Fanone presenting @Forrest_Rogers with the handcuffs used to arrest #TaserPrick Danny Rodriguez (the Trump enthusiast who drove a stun gun into Fanone’s neck on Jan. 6 because he believed Trump’s lies about the 2020 election). pic.twitter.com/jXlI8cmSpN
— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) November 6, 2023
Forrest Rogers is an American open source investigative reporter for Switzerland based NZZ news and a sedition hunter, who used skills law enforcement lagged behind in, to identify many of the 1/6 Trump terrorists. Those skills helped identify Danny Rodriguez, as part of Rogers’ work for the online Sedition Hunters group.
Ryan Reilly reported in June:
Forrest Rogers, an American living in Germany on Jan. 6, first surfaced evidence that Rodriguez electroshocked Fanone after having pored over online video frame by frame as part of his work for Deep State Dogs, one of the groups of online Sedition Hunters that popped up in the wake of Jan. 6 to identify Capitol rioters. After Rogers tweeted video of the incident, Rodriguez was identified by activists who knew the MAGA-hatted man from a protest scene in Beverly Hills, California.
Rodriguez was then identified in a February 2021 HuffPost story, and the FBI arrested him the next month. In an FBI interview, Rodriguez called himself a “f—ing piece of s–t” and said he was “not smart.” Rodriguez said he was influenced by the far-right conspiracy theory website Infowars, as well as conservative commentators like Steven Crowder, Mark Dice and the “Hodgetwins” brothers duo. Rodriguez, who believed Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election, told the FBI that Trump had “called us” to Washington on Jan. 6 and that he felt a duty to respond to the commander-in-chief.
Rodriguez, who bragged on a Trump MAGA telegram chat “Omg I did so much f—ing s— [right now] and got away. Tazzed the f— out of the blue,” was sentenced to 12.5 years in prison in June of this year for felony conspiracy, inflicting bodily injury on officers using a deadly or dangerous weapon, and more. Federal prosecutors accused him of an act of terrorism on top of Director Wray calling the events of 1/6 domestic terrorist.
Rodriguez did not apologize to Officer Fanone.
Republicans have martyred 1/6 MAGA Trump supporters even as they claim they back the blue. The judge called Rodriguez “among the most serious offenders” of the terrorist attack on 1/6.
Reilley’s June piece also recounted Fanone’s important words, “Your honor, we must all join in the fight against Donald Trump and the destructive, divisive movement he has come to represent. We must offer him no safe harbor and to his enablers — whether in business, in politics and the media — give no quarter. In the fight to preserve our Republic, there can be no spectators.”
Fanone, a former Trump voter and self-described “redneck”, has written his own book, “Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul,” which Simon and Schuster begins to describe thusly, “When Michael Fanone self-deployed to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, he had no idea his life was about to change. When he got to the front of the line, he urged his fellow officers to hold it against the growing crowd of insurrectionists—until he found himself pulled into the mob, tased until he had a heart attack, and viciously beaten with a Blue Lives Matter flag as shouts to kill him rang out.”
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