Trump Justice Department Deletes Thousands Of Its Own Press Releases Documenting Jan. 6 Prosecutions, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That The Government Still Kept A Record Of Crimes The President Had Pardoned

The Filing

WASHINGTON. The Department of Justice confirmed this week that it had quietly removed thousands of press releases from its own website documenting the charges, guilty pleas, convictions, and sentencings of those who attacked the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, resolving a long-standing concern that the federal government was still maintaining a written account of crimes the President has already forgiven.

The releases, which once formed the public record of the largest criminal investigation in the Justice Department's history, vanished in batches over a period of days. After a journalist noted that the documents appeared to be disappearing, the department's rapid response account confirmed the deletions, describing the prosecutions as the product of "weaponization" under the previous administration and the announcements of them as "partisan propaganda." Officials offered no plan to preserve the material, noting that the events it described had already been addressed by roughly 1,500 presidential pardons.

The purge produced the unusual circumstance of a government deleting the evidence that its own employees had successfully done their jobs. Each removed release had recorded a defendant who was charged, who in most cases pleaded guilty or was convicted by a jury, and who was sentenced by a federal judge, a sequence the department now characterizes as an embarrassment rather than a result. Among the releases scrubbed were those describing assaults on the police officers who defended the building, a detail the administration has repeatedly asked the public to set aside.

"These were never crimes, they were love," said a source familiar with the department's thinking, adding that the releases had given Americans the false impression that anything had happened. The department emphasized that a small number of announcements remained online, including statements about Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders who had pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy, an oversight officials indicated they were working to correct.

Because the federal government no longer wished to keep its own files, the task of preserving them fell to outside parties. By early June, the legal outlet Lawfare had rebuilt a public database of more than 5,700 of the deleted documents, restoring to the internet the account of January 6 that the Justice Department had decided the country was better off without.

At press time, the department had announced it would shortly review its remaining records for any further evidence that the law had once been enforced.

Who Benefits

§Donald J. Trump, who removes from the government's own website the official record of the attack he was impeached for inciting and of the roughly 1,500 people he pardoned, leaving fewer public traces of either the crimes or the clemency.
§The roughly 1,500 pardoned January 6 defendants, whose documented charges, guilty pleas, convictions, and sentences disappear from the federal account that once described them.
§Justice Department leadership and its rapid response messaging operation, which reframes the largest investigation in the department's history as Biden-era "weaponization" and "partisan propaganda" rather than law enforcement.
§The administration's effort to recast January 6, which advances each time the violent specifics, including the assaults on police, become harder for the public to locate.
§Future officeholders and their associates, who gain the precedent that an incoming administration may delete the Justice Department's record of crimes it would prefer the country forget.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment