The Michael Fanone Show

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com A man once looked Donald Trump dead in the eye, called him a race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot, and told America to send him to hell. Then he spent the next ten years turning himself inside out to win that same man’s approval. That man is Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. And here’s the part that...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com There’s a simple tell when someone’s lying about why they quit a job. The reason keeps changing. Hold that thought, because I need to back up to the gold. A senior CIA officer named David Rush — seventeen years at the agency, served two administrations, one of each party — got arrested after the FBI found more...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Outside Delaney Hall in Newark, you’re watching the federal government act like it owns the streets. Tear gas in a residential neighborhood. Flash bangs going off like it’s a war zone. People getting tackled, sprayed, and beaten on camera. Families inside the facility saying conditions are so bad their loved o...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com A South Carolina jury watched the video: a 14-year-old kid running away, then getting shot in the back. And they cleared the shooter. The kid was Cyrus Carmack-Belton. The man who shot him was convenience store owner Rick Chow. Chow said he thought Cyrus had stolen water. But surveillance footage showed the wa...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com DOJ leadership tried to slam the door on the January 6 payout scheme with one of those courtroom words that’s supposed to end the conversation: “Period.” Acting AG Todd Blanche told Rep. Grace Meng the so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” wasn’t moving forward — and that it was never going to happen. That laste...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com A roster tied to Patriot Front leaked out, and it paints a picture that should make everybody stop pretending this is some fringe problem. Hundreds of members. Spread across basically the entire country. And the part that matters most isn’t the number on the page — it’s the pipeline behind it: how a movement l...

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com They kicked in the door of a house in Ashburn, Virginia and found a literal Bond-villain stash: 303 gold bars , $2 million in cash , and 35 luxury watches — most of them Rolex. The guy sitting on it? A senior CIA officer , David Rush. And the gold wasn’t “his.” It was U.S. government property . Here’s the part...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Here is the story you have been told about American politics: trust is gone, both parties have failed, and the Washington Post calls it a symmetrical crisis of confidence in the system. The polling backs them up. Americans really have lost faith in Republicans and Democrats alike, and more people now identify...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Sponsored by Ground News An 82-year-old woman took Donald Trump to court, twice, and beat him in front of two juries. Then he ran it up to the appeals court, twice, and six federal judges looked at the whole thing and sided with her every single time, with not one of them writing a word in his favor. She did e...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Imagine, for a second, that a foreign military blew up a small boat off the coast of Florida and killed three Americans. They never told anyone who the dead were. They never produced any evidence the boat had been doing anything wrong. They posted a 19-second video of the explosion to social media and walked o...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com When six inmates died at Cook County Jail in Chicago in 2023, investigators initially had nothing. No needles. No pills. No powder. Nothing you’d recognize as contraband. What they eventually found in the cells — the thing they eventually traced back to the overdoses — was rolled-up paper. Ordinary paper. The...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com My grandfather Tony came to this country from Italy to escape fascism. He worked the steel mills of western Pennsylvania for decades. When the mills closed, he opened a restaurant. When that wound down, he started a landscaping business. My father worked those same mills in the summers before going on to becom...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Ninety dollars. That is how much Congresswoman Julie Johnson of Texas says she made on her Palantir stock trade. Not nine thousand. Not nine hundred. Ninety bucks. A nice dinner for two if you skip dessert. I do not care about the ninety dollars. Neither should you. What I care about is that a sitting member o...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com The Trump administration is quietly dismantling six decades of federal firearm law. Donald Trump Jr. stands to profit. And Americans will pay for it. This story is about making it easier for the wrong people to get guns, and making sure the right people get rich off it. I want to be clear about where I am comi...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com I don’t do politics like a fan club. If you’re delivering, I’ll say it. If you’re screwing the people who put you in office, I’ll say that too. And I’m going to say it louder when it’s a Democrat — because right now Democrats are the only party in this country that still acts like representative government is...

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelfanone.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation, just took his entire family on a free vacation. Ten states. Snowmobiles in Montana. Water parks. Fancy dinners. Hotels. Rental cars. Seven months of it. And the people who paid for it? Boeing. Toyota. United Airlines. The exact same companies he is supposed to be re...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Bill Cassidy just came in third in his own Republican primary in Louisiana. Third. He got 24% in the party he’s spent the last five years kissing the ring of. And the craziest part is how simple the reason is: one vote. The vote to convict Trump after January 6. That’s it. That’s the whole story. Cassidy wasn’...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com I spent years as a cop. I worked with plenty of good ones, and plenty of bad ones. I will tell you exactly what the bad cops had in common. They were guys nobody else wanted. They couldn’t make it on the regular force. They had disciplinary letters in their files. They washed out of the military or never quali...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com You know what’s funny about Jared Polis? He spent his whole career building a reputation as the cool, independent, doesn’t-bend-to-anybody Democratic governor of Colorado. Turns out all you had to do was pick up the phone. On Friday, Polis commuted the sentence of Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk who...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com The Justice Department of the United States is now suing the people whose job it is to hold lawyers accountable. Read that again. The agency that’s supposed to enforce the law is in court trying to stop other people from enforcing the law on its own employees. This happened yesterday. Acting Attorney General T...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com This administration just announced a fund—framed as an “anti-weaponization” payout—built to compensate the people they claim were wronged by the last administration. But let’s not play dumb about what this really is. This is a patriotism-themed slush fund for Trump’s political universe, wrapped in the year 177...

I joined Anderson Cooper 360 today to talk about the Trump DOJ’s new “anti-weaponization” fund — a $1.776 billion program that would pay out money to people the administration claims were targeted by the previous Justice Department. Former federal prosecutor Jeffrey Toobin called it exactly what it looks like: a slush fund . And as I said bluntly, nobody should be surprised. Jeffrey’s point was si...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com Kash Patel walked into a Senate oversight hearing and somehow turned the FBI into a national punchline. A sitting U.S. Senator confronted him with reporting that raised serious questions about whether Patel is fit to lead the Bureau — including allegations about impaired episodes at home. Patel denies it, and...