Molly Ball reports:

It wasn’t a cop bar; that was the point. They weren’t there to meet other cops. They were there to meet girls. The three police officers took seats at the wine bar in D.C.’s trendy Navy Yard neighborhood—exposed concrete walls, leather banquettes, $13 tuna tartare—and despite its being a wine bar, despite the Wednesday night half-price-wine special, they ordered beers.

May 12, 2021, was a balmy night, and dozens of newly vaccinated young urbanites mingled out on the patio. At 10 p.m., the cops asked the bartender to put CNN on the TV.

“A true American hero, officer Michael Fanone,” intoned the host, Don Lemon. “This is difficult to watch. But it is the truth of what happened that day. The truth—not the lies that you’ve been hearing.” The screen filled with Fanone’s body-camera footage from the Jan. 6 insurrection, airing publicly for the first time. “Officer Fanone is outside on the Capitol steps on the lower west terrace,” Lemon said. “This is approximately 3:15 on that day.”

Mike Fanone—wiry, bearded, his arms and neck covered in tattoos—nursed a Modelo at the bar and took it all in again. It had been four months since the day Fanone nearly died defending the Capitol—the day a self-described redneck cop who voted for Donald Trump was beaten unconscious by a mob waving Thin Blue Line flags and chanting “U.S.A.” The day Fanone, a narcotics officer with the D.C. metropolitan police department (MPD) who’d planned to spend his evening shift buying heroin undercover, voluntarily rushed to defend the seat of American democracy and wound up in hand-to-hand combat with a horde hellbent on unstealing the election. The day Fanone was dragged down the Capitol’s marble stairs, beaten with pipes and poles, tear-gassed and stun-gunned. The day he pleaded for his life as they threatened to shoot him with his own gun, telling the rioters he had kids, until they relented and spared him.

On the TV at the bar, Fanone’s hand strained to push them away. The crush parted, and the full scene came into view: the grand terrace, the teeming crowd. Bodies upon bodies as far as the eye could see. Red hats and camo, Trump flags and American flags, all pressing forward, trying to break the cops’ tenuous hold on the central door into the building. There is a thin blue line between order and chaos, and at that moment, Mike Fanone was it. [Continue reading…]