The Michael Fanone Show

California voters already have their ballots. Now Trump’s Justice Department wants thousands of them set aside, and Trump is threatening election officials with prison. According to DOJ’s October 15 filing, federal agencies identified roughly 20,000 “likely” noncitizens who were sent mail ballots. Likely is doing a lot of work. California’s Secretary of State Shirley Weber says the government hasn...

French high schoolers walked out because they didn’t have enough teachers. Then workers, parents, and even a mayor who put himself between cops and kids showed up. Nobody told those kids to wait their turn. So what the fuck, America? We’ve got citizens shot dead by federal immigration agents and masked men hauling people off our streets. And by tonight we’re figuring out dinner and getting the kid...

Saturday on the National Mall. Turnstile playing a free show to about 60,000 people, raising money for humanitarian relief. I was there with my daughter Piper. Then Park Police moved horses into the crowd. I heard officers say they were responding to moshing and crowd-surfing. I saw no fight where we were. What I saw was a horse backing into people, a father with his little girl on his shoulders,...

Charlotte cops allegedly had a competition to see who could pull over the most Black drivers, according to WBTV’s sources. What the fuck are you doing wearing a badge if that’s how you see the people you swore to protect? I did this job for twenty years. Treating a stop like a game makes me sick. The chief confirmed the messages showed racial, sexual and religious bias going back years. Four offic...

You’re an American citizen. You tell the agents you’re American. You ask them to check. And somehow you’re the one who has to prove this shouldn’t be happening. DHS has issued flat denials about mistakenly arresting citizens and racial profiling. Then ProPublica compiled more than 500 citizens detained during this administration’s enforcement operations, including at least 63 who were recording. A...

ICE’s own death reviews found care outside practice limits in 27 cases, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Then the reports vanished from its website. I’ve taken people into custody. You don’t get to lock somebody up, control whether they can get help, and shrug when they don’t make it. Custody isn’t a fucking waiver of responsibility. Who pulled the reports? What changed after? We need out...

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin went on a friendly podcast and said “something’s going to happen” in the Omar investigation. Then agents showed up at her door. I worked investigations for years. You build the case first. You don’t tease the target in public. And I’d want to see that affidavit. A judge signed off on the warrant, and that belongs in this story. She hasn’t been charged,...

I’ve spent a lot of time on ICE. The shootings. The bodycam footage that’s conveniently missing. The official stories that fall apart the second somebody checks them. Every time, I ask the same question: how does this keep happening without anyone being held to account? New reporting gives us the answer, and it’s bigger than any single incident. It’s a system built to protect the agency. Aggressiv...

I’m not interested in speeches about “restoring norms.” Here’s what I want to see from Democrats. Investigate this administration’s unlawful conduct. All of it. Prosecute the crimes you can actually prove, across the board, no exceptions and no favorites. Remove corrupt officials through lawful processes, not stunts. And then rebuild the system that let all of this happen in the first place. Becau...

The Associated Press looked at 102 felony-assault cases the Trump DOJ brought against protesters in LA, Chicago, Portland, and DC. Twelve had reached trial when AP published. None ended in a felony-assault conviction. Acquittals, mistrials, dismissals. Across the group, 41 percent were dismissed and 34 percent ended in misdemeanor pleas. I need to be careful here. A mistrial isn’t an acquittal. A...

Kash Patel’s FBI has commissioned a classified report examining the Bureau’s past institutional failures. I spent years working alongside federal agents, and I’ll say this: self-examination is a good thing. Every serious law enforcement agency needs to look hard at where it went wrong. But how you do it matters. An honest review starts with independence. Who’s doing the work, and do they answer to...

A new Reuters investigation lays out how Trump’s obsession with voting machines spread across federal agencies. Not one office. Multiple agencies, pulled into the same project. I spent years as a police officer, and here’s the question I’d ask any investigator: what’s the predicate? Is there evidence of a crime, a credible allegation, an actual vulnerability? Then you investigate, follow the facts...

I went on air to break down the video from the Bronx, where ICE agents allegedly shot into a vehicle with a five-year-old child inside. I spent two decades policing, and I’ve written operational plans just like this one. Plenty of mine got denied by my supervisors for exactly these reasons. 4 p.m. School’s letting out. Daycares nearby. Kids everywhere. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin called it a “t...

Election officials are now planning for a scenario that should never be necessary: federal agents showing up where people vote. I spent years as a police officer. I know there are legitimate reasons to send law enforcement to a polling place. A threat. A fight. A medical emergency. Someone who needs help. That’s public safety, and it looks like public safety. But there’s a difference between respo...

I spent years working alongside federal agents as a deputized plainclothes narcotics officer. I know what that badge is supposed to mean — the standard, the vetting, the culture that’s supposed to make the Bureau something you can actually trust. Kash Patel has been tearing that down. And now he’s out there defending it — defending lowered hiring standards at the FBI like that’s not a problem. Lik...

A Georgia National Guard member — deployed to Trump’s DC crime task force — is now facing two felony charges after allegedly pulling a loaded service weapon during an argument. Not a threat. Not a standoff. An argument about Army grooming regs. Inside a van full of armed soldiers. I went through the witness accounts, the suspect’s story — which keeps changing, by the way — and the basic firearm-sa...

The DOJ went after 102 protesters in LA, Chicago, Portland, and DC — felony assault charges, the whole show. Big numbers, bigger headlines. Then the Associated Press actually looked at what happened to those cases. Dismissed. Reduced. Rejected at trial. Over and over. I broke down what the AP found — and why this isn’t just about politics. When you overcharge cases that don’t hold up, you’re not b...

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com A mom in Texas wanted to know which corporations were making money off Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. So she did the least dramatic thing imaginable: she started digging through public records, government contracts, and corporate filings, put it all online, and handed Americans a map of exactly who was...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com I’ve heard a lot of things come out of people’s mouths mid-arrest. Two decades on the job will do that. But “I am a single white female” — screamed like it’s a legal defense — that one’s new. Here’s how it got there. Police say a grocery delivery driver reported that a woman grabbed her face, damaged her glass...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com We’re a little over two months from the midterms, and the Trump administration is trying to rewrite the rules for voting by mail. Not for 2028. Not for next year. Now. The Postal Service has finalized a sweeping new rule on mail-in ballots that could make voting by mail meaningfully harder for millions of Amer...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Here’s how the justice system is supposed to work: you bring your case, you get a judge, the judge applies the law, you win or you lose. Here’s how Trump’s Justice Department apparently thinks it should work: you bring your case and you lose. You bring it somewhere else and you lose again. You keep losing. And...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Trump has apparently decided the thing America needs most right now is a nationwide sales pitch for Donald Trump. The plan: with the midterms bearing down and his numbers in the basement, send Cabinet officials out to promote his “accomplishments,” farm some friendly local coverage, and remind voters how great...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Nancy Smith spent fifteen years in prison for a crime she always said she never committed. And when you look at how the investigation was built, this case should rattle anyone who claims to believe in the system. There was no physical evidence. Her school bus wasn’t late. The mileage showed no mystery trip. Th...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Let me get the cheap shot off the table first, because I’m not interested in it. Donald Trump has put on a good bit of weight. And no — I don’t think being overweight makes anybody a bad person, and I’ve got zero interest in fat-shaming an 80-year-old man. If Trump wants to eat McDonald’s three meals a day and...