Lindsey Graham Snapped at Mother of January 6 Victim, Alleges Michael Fanone

Former D.C. police officer Michael Fanone's new book “Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul” is about Fanone’s experience on January 6 when he was deployed to deal with a mob of insurrectionists. Fanone was tased until he had a heart attack and beaten with a Blue Lives Matter flag. The irony did not escape him.

Fanone, who voted for Trump in 2016 and has since then become a critic of the former president after he suffered a brain injury and a heart attack during the January 6 attacks, says that Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina snapped at the mother of a police officer who died following the January 6, 2021 attacks.

Fanone’s new book details a meeting, reports Politico, between House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, Harry Dunn, and Gladys Sicknick, the mother of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick who died at the age of 42 after he suffered two strokes following an assault by January 6 rioters. Despite the fact that Sicknick died in the line of duty to protect the same country which Graham “serves,” the Republican senator snapped at the deceased officer’s mourning mother during a meeting which Fanone recounted in “cringey detail.”

Graham, writes Fanone, snapped at Sicknick’s mother, saying: “We’re going to end the meeting right now” if she continued to say negative comments regarding Trump.

Graham, who first refused to support Trump’s 2016 presidential bid and referred to him as a “jacka**”, “kook”, and a “race-baiting bigot,” became a major supporter of Trump after he was elected president. The Republican senator, who said he had “never been so humiliated and embarrassed for the country” following the January 6 riot, continued to have a close friendship with the man who incited the mob in the weeks that followed.

Sicknick’s family pleaded with lawmakers to investigate the riot which caused their son’s death, adding that if they failed to do so, it would be “a slap in the faces of all the officers who did their jobs that day.” Sandra Garza, the longtime partner of Sicknick who also advocated for an investigation, told The New York Times that she had confronted Graham for being disrespectful during one of their meetings.

"I said, 'I feel like you're being very disrespectful, and you're looking out the window and tapping your fingers on the desk,'" Garza told the outlet. Sicknick and Garza were also supporters of Trump. However, her opinion of the president since the January 6 attack has drastically changed.

Fanone’s new book, which he co-wrote with Reuters reporter John Schiffman, describes the attack on Capitol Hill, during which a mob of Trump supporters attempted to interrupt a joint session of Congress from formalizing President Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election. Fanone was diagnosed with a heart attack and a concussion after he was tased at the base of his neck by rioters. In 2021, after 20 years of service and despite being just five years away from retirement, he resigned.

“Whenever I left my cubicle, I was ostracized, treated like a leper,” writes Fanone in his new book.

“I just want people to f****** recognize what happened on January 6,” Fanone told Politico. “There’s a lot of police officers at the Metropolitan Police Department and other law enforcement agencies that participated in the defense of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, that still do not accept the reality of what January 6 was.”