INFODUMP: Hillsdale County’s Seditionists — Admissions and Evidence

by Josh Colletta
Published: Updated: The noose and gallows that the seditionists built on January 6th, 2021 to intimidate and possibly hang then-Vice President Mike Pence. Photo by Tyler Merbler, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Since Lance Lashaway — current member of the City of Hillsdale’s Downtown Tax Increment Finance Authority board and Vice Chair of the Hillsdale County Republican Party — is now under FBI investigation, along with unnamed others in the Hillsdale County Nazi community, for their participation in January 6th’s attempted coup, I thought it might be helpful to the FBI and anyone else who cares to look if I put together some of the evidence that will help prosecute them.

A screen shot from the “R.O.A.R. (Reclaim Our American Republic)” YouTube video documenting Lance Lashaway’s encounter with the FBI. The description of the video states, “The FBI came to Lance’s house to intimidate him, but Lance wasn’t having it. They have contacted couple others as well. What a complete waste of time, money and resources.”

I have saved these videos, screenshots, and documents to my own storage and have re-uploaded them specifically so that if any of these traitors attempts to remove the evidence, it will still exist here.  They don’t seem terribly inclined to be quiet about it, so I’m not sure they will actually attempt to do so, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.  It should also be kept for posterity simply to point out who these people are, what they attempted to do, and why they should not be anywhere close to power or authority anywhere, at all, for any purpose, ever.

Let’s start with some video from January 5th, streamed to Facebook by Penny Swan, previously a repeated candidate for Hillsdale City Council and the current Deputy Treasurer of the Hillsdale County Republican Party.

EDITOR’S NOTE 11/22/2024: Penny Swan, who did not travel to the Capitol, has since seen the error of joining that group and has denounced them.  She is now a member of the legitimate Hillsdale County Republican Party, run by neoconsevatives who won control back after the Seditionists broke the law to remain in power.  Swan is now outspoken in her opposition to the Seditionists.

This video shows Darren Wiseley — current Hillsdale County Republican Party chair and previously a candidate for the District 58 Michigan House seat — giving a brief rally speech to the riders on one of the two buses that left the Jonesville Walmart parking lot that night en route to Washington, D.C. for the attempted coup.


Here we have a series of videos from Jon Smith — currently the Hillsdale County Republican Party secretary — streamed live to his Facebook page that day from what he himself referred to as “the front lines.”  This is about 22 minutes of video that I’ve spliced together out of separate posts, which is the entirety of what he streamed to his personal Facebook page that day.  It is a full quality rendering, meaning that what went in is what came out, so any dropouts or digital artifacting that you see is what was in the original videos as they were streamed live.


Next we have another video streamed live by Penny Swan, this time of a Hillsdale County Republican Party weekend meeting, in which several people who participated in the terrorist attack detailed their involvement and what they saw (or claim not to have seen) around them.  The first account given in this video comes from Jon-Paul Rutan, current Hillsdale County Republican Party parliamentarian, self-styled justice advocate, and perennial candidate for Hillsdale County Sheriff.  He’s followed by a woman who introduces herself as Esmeralda Banners (which matches the name of someone who appears to live here in Hillsdale County; I don’t know her personally, and this could be incorrect identification), local businessman Roger Sparks chimes in, local man Josh Stout adds his account, then Lisa Sparks (Roger’s wife) speaks.  Then comes Chris Meyers (possibly misspelled; again, not someone I know personally), followed by Jon Smith, and then some general discussion.  Lashaway is seen in this video, but does not give his account verbally.  However, he gave his account to Swan to post in the video’s comments, and that screenshot can be found below the video here.


Next we have video of several Hillsdale County Republicans meeting with Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey to discuss the county party’s censure of him. I’ve gone into detail about that situation before, but of note here is that Lance Lashaway admits to having brought a gun with him to D.C. and carrying it at the terrorist attack. That admission in this video is what is widely believed to have prompted his encounter with the FBI Thursday morning.


Here we have an article from the Hillsdale Daily News in which city council members Greg Stuchell and Robert Socha admit to participating in the attempted coup… and even taking their children with them.


Here’s a similar article from the Detroit Free Press.


Here’s an article from HuffPost listing Stuchell and Socha as being among 57 state and local Republican officials to take part in the attempted coup.  Socha particularly took issue with this one, which you’ll see in a moment.  Please forgive the lack of pagination; HuffPost’s pages do not print properly, so this is a giant screenshot saved to a PDF file.


Here we have a blog post from Robert Socha doubling down and defending his participation in the attempted coup, and stating the aforementioned beef that he has with HuffPost.  Please forgive the landscape orientation; Mychal Massie’s site does not print properly, either.  For the record, mine didn’t either until I fixed it just now.


That above post resulted in a bout of words between him, myself, and Massie, in which neither Socha nor Massie acquitted themselves very well, and the two of them devolved into the very name-calling they accused “liberals” of engaging in.

Massie took issue with me daring to engage Socha and wrote what he believed to be a scathing condemnation of me… which isn’t particularly relevant to Socha’s sedition, but it amuses me all the same.  For the record, I’m politically conservative.  I’m just right of the divide, about halfway down the libertarian side of the political compass.  Socha and Massie are big-government liberals on the authoritarian side.

I took on Massie directly. In fact, in the “Illegitimate Arguments” piece, you can see that he even threatened to confront me while I announce a basketball game. I’m not particularly worried, though. If he ever shows up to cause a problem, he’ll be thrown out. Simple as that.


And that brings us to Thursday morning’s incident, in which Lance Lashaway was visited by an FBI agent and was not only so deeply fucking stupid enough to talk (presumably without a lawyer present), but to CHALLENGE the agent to their face.  This video was uploaded to Jon Smith’s “R.O.A.R.” channel on YouTube later in the day.


These are just the items I’ve gathered as they’ve taken place. If you have anything else of worth to this collection, feel free to send it my way. You can contact me via e-mail here. Your identity will not be revealed, and I will do everything within my power to protect my sources.


Update #1

And before the article is even published!

Jon Smith has claimed that Jon-Paul Rutan is one of the others contacted by the FBI, and he later added that the bureau at least attempted to contact Rutan’s daughter, as well.  Again, these are statements made by Smith, and if Rutan has confirmed this himself, I do not have the screenshots documenting it.  So while I personally lean toward taking this as truth, just know that it’s one person making claims about the experiences of other people, and that’s all it is for the time being.

When this contact is supposed to have occurred is unknown, though I would assume it took place Thursday, as well.  Rutan himself had previously told me (after my piece was published about Shirkey’s dealings with the county party) that he didn’t know of anyone being contacted by federal officials as of February 12th or 13th.  Quite a bit of time has passed since then, so I’m not at all accusing Rutan of lying to me about that, but obviously things have changed.

Mary Jacobus:
Did they contact Jon-Paul Rutan?  I want to hear that one!!!?

Jon Smith: They did, no audio of that one.
Jon Smith:
the questioned Rutan and tried to call his daughter too.  I was hoping they would stop by my house.

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