Trump DOJ Proudly Rewrites History By Deleting January 6 Insurrection Press Releases

from the ministry-of-truth-back-on-its-bullshit dept

History is written by the winners, they say. But it can also be written by losers.

Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. In response, he told everyone the election had been rigged, if not actually stolen. He said some of this to his faithful MAGA followers the morning the election results were to be certified. The rest is, as they say, history. His supporters stormed the Capitol building for the sole purpose of preventing the election from being certified. They broke into the building, assaulted police and federal officers, forced the Senate into hiding, and walked off with whatever souvenirs they could.

Many of these insurrectionists were ultimately arrested, charged, and convicted for their crimes. When Trump was elected president for a second time, one of the first things he did was issue pardons to the people who broke the law on his behalf back in 2021.

As awful and self-serving as that move was, it wasn’t the end of it. Playing both sides of a lawsuit, Trump managed to secure a revenge fund via a “settlement” by the IRS over the leaking of his tax files years earlier. Trump claims it’s an “anti-weaponization” fund meant to soothe the nerves of supposedly politically persecuted members of his MAGA flock with cash rewards for criminal acts.

Of course, he didn’t say exactly that, but everyone knows how this $1.776 billion slush fund is going to be used. The court handling the lawsuit seeking to dismantle the fund knows it as well. Whether or not it can find a way to shut it down remains to be seen. There’s not a whole lot of precedent on transparent self-dealing by a sitting president, mainly because most presidents (and their cabinets) are generally a little more careful to obscure their true motives.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is continuing to erase history it doesn’t like. This project started far from the White House, forcing national parks to take down anything that presented America as anything less than perfect. This effort, however, takes place on the administration’s home field. Rather than simply allow history to exist, the DOJ is proactively deleting evidence of the agency’s past actions.

A review by NBC News found that the vast majority of press releases pertaining to Jan. 6 defendants have been removed from the DOJ website as of Friday evening.

The move to wipe hundreds of press releases from the official government site is the latest attempt by the Trump administration to reframe the Jan. 6 siege and to paint the rioters who participated in it as victims.

It’s not like the DOJ or administration gave anyone a head’s up that this purge would be happening. It took regular people noticing it for the government to respond. And respond it did, as only this administration can: by gleefully admitting it was engaging in the sort of memory-holing we used to condemn foreign autocracies for doing.

Washington Post journalist Meryl Kornfield pointed out the “quiet” disappearance of January 6 indictment press releases from the DOJ’s website. The DOJ’s “Rapid Reponse” X account jumped in immediately to gloat about its destruction of the public record:

Nothing “quiet” about it.

We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration. We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.

There it is: yet another middle finger to Americans from an administration that claims no one loves America as much as it does. Sure, press releases may contain statements from government prosecutors that contain as much opinion as facts, the rest of the releases generally just state the facts as dryly as possible so there’s little room for interpretation.

The question is where the DOJ goes from here. Is it willing to start destroying court records and/or placing these under seal where they’re inaccessible to the general public? Will it deliver a fresh set of non-facts to replace all of the history it’s erasing?

While this makes it more difficult to trust the DOJ to maintain its own records, it doesn’t change the fact that most things on the internet are forever, whether you want them to be or not. What’s been deleted has already been archived. Even if this government is willing to block sites like the Internet Archive from preserving history as it happens, it can’t keep dozens of other people from preventing this administration from simply wishing all of its wrongdoings into the internet cornfield.

Lawfare is just one site that’s making sure the permanent record remains permanent since this administration is objectively opposed to letting its history speak for itself. The results of its ongoing efforts to prevent Trump, et al. from simply pretending this never happened can be accessed here.

What’s detailed in the deleted documents isn’t evidence of “partisan propaganda” or “DOJ weaponization.” What happened actually fucking happened. The DOJ is supposed to handle federal crimes and it did exactly that. The truth is that Trump supporters committed several crimes in an effort to undermine — if not actually destroy — the democratic process. This was one of the darkest moments in American history. It should never be minimized, much less discarded just because it makes the people in power (and the people who support them) look as awful as they actually are.

These are the acts of a dictator and his enablers. It’s the antithesis of the independence that’s going to be celebrated by the same people who are busy destroying everything this country is supposed to stand for. It’s not something to be tolerated. And it should never be forgiven.

Filed Under: doj, donald trump, election denialism, erasing history, evil, insurrection, january 6, trump administration