At first, I was amused by the US Congress January 6 Committee created to investigate the coup/insurrection that took place on that day in 2021, as a group of zealots stormed the hallowed chambers of our US Congresspeople for the purpose of preventing the certification of the 2020 presidential election. First, this is no ‘investigation’ when the committee is simply cherry-picking their sources and, even then, editing them to ensure the narrative they desire is the only one that is heard. Second, the very idea of describing this event as a “coup” or “insurrection” is totally ludicrous. Both words have the same definition, and they mean “a sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from a government.” A renewed history teacher, University of Kentucky political scientist Clayton defines coups d’etat as “illegal and overt attempts by the military or other elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting executive.”
The J6 Committee wants us to believe that Donald Trump empowered a group of gun-toting Trump supporters to storm the building with the intent to harm or even kill lawmakers in an attempt to overthrow the government. Yet, 18 months on, not a single person has been even charged with carrying a firearm into the Capitol building that day. In fact, only four men were charged with possessing or carrying a firearm on Capitol grounds, and one of them was arrested that evening AFTER the protest ended.
And how did these protestors get into the restricted areas of the Capitol building? The FBI refuses to comment on whether they had any undercover agents or informants who were among the protestors. Even the New York Times knew that the FBI had embedded at least two informants in the Proud Boys before the Capitol Protest, and Newsweek reported that Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general at the time, summoned hundreds of elite FBI agents, including the Hostage Rescue Team, to Quantico the weekend before January 6. For some unknown reason, none of this is worthy of being considered by the ‘investigation’ being done by the J6 Committee.
Let me share a real attempted coup d’etat in our recent history — the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the electoral college vote. According to our US Constitution, Donald Trump won the election. Behind the scenes, there was a massive initiative to change that result, and we have a local presidential electoral college voter to prove it, Carol Sides.
Carol Sides, whose family owns Robert M. Sides Music Stores, has been a devoted Catholic and spent decades using her love of music to help others, especially mentally challenged children and has NAMI (National Alliance of Mental Illness) meeting monthly as well as serving as president of the NorthCentral PA chapter of NAMI. And she is a lifelong Republican Party advocate. She was tremendously honored to be selected to cast her electoral college vote in Harrisburg for Donald Trump.
It was two days after her notification that she received ten letters in her mailbox related to changing her vote in the Electoral College. The day after that, she received 32. The numbers rose each day; 85, then 150, then 300, and finally it hit 1000 in a single day. Her local postal deliverer knocked at her door and apologized that he could not fit all her mail in her mailbox. There on the doorstep sat a huge box stuffed with letters appealing to Carol to change her vote. With each passing day, the boxes got bigger. Over 3,200 pieces all totaled, some costing as much as $22.00 a piece to mail.
They came from all over the country. Carol Sides would eventually deliver five large-size trash bags full of letters to the FBI. There were also emails — the final tally was 27,860, all remarkably similar in urgency, anguish, and tone. But the worst were the phone calls. Mercifully there were few actual telephone calls, approximately twenty altogether. But each one was memorable. One man actually cried for three solid minutes begging her to change her vote to Hillary Clinton.
The question is — where did these thousands of random people get the personal address, personal email, and telephone number of an electoral college voter? Carol Sides was just one voter, but she was not alone. The pressure being put on these individuals to reverse their vote from Trump to Clinton was much, much more of a coup attempt than what we are watching from Washington DC right now. Not to mention adding insult to injury by creating a Russian Collusion Scandal (Hoax) that was the basis for Trump’s first impeachment but has since been confirmed to have come from the Clinton campaign people.
When I see a pile of poop on the sidewalk, I just step over it. So, forgive me, J6 Committee, for finding your hearings a hypocritical, despicable, disgusting display of federal authority.