Never forget the people who made excuses for Merrick Garland

What too damn many people somehow still don’t understand is that the attack on January 6, 2021, is an open wound for millions of Americans that will never heal until the reprehensible, anti-American terrorist behind that violent attempted coup is brought to justice and jailed.

Five years later, there has not been a single day — not ONE — that has gone by when I haven’t given one of the most tragic days in American history some thought.

There are days it just rattles me — brings me to fury and tears. Count this as another one of those days ...

This is most likely called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but I prefer to think of it as love for a flawed country that I served honorably in the Navy, and the profound disappointment that America herself wasn't found worthy enough to be defended after a brutal attack.

This is devastatingly sad.

When somebody has the audacity to ask why I hate Trump so much, January 6th is the first thing out of my mouth. What follows is a salty string of condemnations like his rampant bigotry and abuse, but it all begins and ends for me on that gruesome, haze-gray winter afternoon in our Capitol five years ago today.

We all saw with our own eyes what went on during a day that has historically been a peaceful transfer of power in America. For all our differences, this is a day we are supposed to shake hands, go to our corners, and move onto the next chapter of the great American experiment.

Except as we all good and damn well know, that is not what happened.

Instead, the grotesque, red-eyed Trump showed up in town sporting his trademark hate, and spurred his weak, subservient henchmen who pathetically hang on his every word into a violent lather, before retreating to the White House to root on his attack.

Many hours later, after cops had been beaten, his vice president was threatened with hanging, politicians of all colors ran for their lives, and some semblance of order was beginning to be restored after the bloody attack had failed … Trump stumbled onto the White House lawn and grudgingly called off the attack, but not before telling his Orcs who laid siege to our Capitol that he “loved them.”

He told them that he loved them ...

This is what happened on that day. Every single person in America knows this is what happened that day because we watched it.

WE WATCHED IT.

Finally, Joe Biden was inaugurated, and the people who truly care for their country breathed a sigh of relief.

Trump was impeached for his high crimes, but wasn't barred from running for office again, because Republicans who watched exactly what you did on January 6, 2021, decided violent traitors deserved a second chance, proving yet again they are expert at double-talking about law and order, just not delivering it.

Soon the bookish Merrick Garland was nominated and confirmed as Attorney General, and my foot got to tapping. It was time for the full weight of the law to land squarely on the fat head of the grotesque man who attacked us.

Months went by and nothing happened. Then a year …

I was slowly losing my mind and my senses. Just what in the hell was going here?

I wrote, screamed, posted, called, and scratched the hair out of my head.

When was that rotten son of a bitch of a traitor going to be charged for his high crimes???

Oh sure, the ineffectual Garland went after the violent Trump toadies who carried out the attack, but never got close to laying a glove on any of the high-paid henchmen who were holed up in Washington’s stately Willard Hotel planning the attack for weeks.

In the end, every one of them were free to pack their bags, pay their bills, stiff the help, and be on their merry way toward more mayhem, and as it turns out, a second chance at wiping us out for good.

I’ll never forget the people who made excuses for Garland, who damn well should have known better.

The people who played us for fools.

The people who would hustle their way onto places like MSNBC, and CNN, and/or write know-it-all columns that Garland had a plan and was some grandmaster law-and-order expert, who was just toying with Trump.

Many were in the legal community, and they told us to cool our heels. Justice was coming.

I hoped they were right, but knew in my heart they were dead wrong, because as a lifelong journalist, I have always preferred to believe my eyes, and the facts.

Nothing was happening, and WE knew it.

I worried their partisan appeasement of the foot-dragging Garland was only making things worse. Instead of using their influence to demand better, and some damn accountability, they haughtily told us things would be OK. They weren’t holding power to account for itself and its (in)actions, they were covering for it.

Well, we all know how it went now, and just how damn wrong all those people were as their credibility, and our country, went up in smoke.

And though these days are sad enough without beating up on Joe Biden, who has been a better man for his 82 years than Trump could ever wish to be for a single minute, I am also not in a cult.

Biden’s failure to use his enormous power to do everything he could to protect us, and make good and damn sure a monster like Trump could never hurt us again was a catastrophic dereliction of duty we might not recover from.

Picking an attorney general who would make sure that everybody who had a hand in that terrible attack paid the consequences should have been Priority No. 1, because if they can get away with it once …

As all those days, weeks, months and years went by and Grandmaster Garland did nothing to get at Trump before needlessly pawning his responsibility over to Special Counsel Jack Smith, I began to wonder if the lack of serious action by the Biden Administration was a sad case of profound naivety, or if it was something far more sinister: Our so-called elite in America simply do not punish their own.

There are rules for thee, and rules for we ...

The last time I saw Joe Biden two Novembers ago, he was flashing a big smile in front of a crackling fire at the White House and literally welcoming Trump back.

Only weeks before he told us Trump was a “fascist” who fosters “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”

I get whiplash just typing that.

I picture that scene now, and the one on that terrible day five years ago, and feel like a damn fool for pouring my heart out in the defense of America, when it was clear that the people who should have cared as much as we did simply didn't.

Astonishingly, in the past few weeks, we have learned that Smith had “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” to prosecute Trump for his attack, and I have called for everything he has to be made public.

It is paramount we know what Trump was up to while he planned his attack.

NPR has done a masterful job reporting on Trump’s ongoing efforts to incinerate everything that is known about his brutal attack, and archived thousands of documents. I encourage you to read and listen to their work.

From their tremendous reporting:

“You know, the government is actively trying to rewrite this history. Five years ago, right after it happened, there was kind of a consensus. Republicans like Senator Ted Cruz called it an act of domestic terrorism. So did the FBI. Even Trump himself said the rioters, quote, "defiled the seat of democracy" and must, quote, "pay."

Pay? He has since pardoned them.

[deep breath]

I am having another one of those moments …

Had Garland acted with the alacrity an attack on America called for, there was bipartisan political will and “consensus” in place to prosecute the most dangerous man in the world. Instead he dithered, and we deserve to know why that happened.

We need to know why that happened.

Listen to me, dammit: What too many people STILL don’t understand is that millions of us will never get over what happened on January 6, 2021.

We demand justice.

Unless you are talking about bringing that justice to the traitor who perpetrated the only violent attack on our Capitol since 1812, I am not interested in a single word you have to say about anything.

In fact, I rage at you.

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.