In its Bid to Rewrite the History of the Capitol Attack, Trump’s DOJ Erases Thousands of Pages of Jan. 6 Materials from Its Website

For this president, rewriting the history of the Jan. 6 insurrection has been a sustained project: pardoning the rioters, carving out billions of tax dollars to provide them reparations for participating in a coup, and framing a violent assault on the Capitol as some sort of legitimate political protest. Now his Justice Department has moved to the next phase: deleting the official record.

Lawfare, which has thankfully archived the majority of the deleted materials, explains:

Last week, the Justice Department began systematically removing material from its web sites regarding the many indictments and convictions related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The operation started without fanfare or formal announcement and proceeded largely unnoticed. Until, that is, journalists such as the Washington Post’s Meryl Kornfield took notice of certain press releases and other materials that had conspicuously disappeared from www.justice.gov.

“The Trump admin is quietly deleting info about the Capitol attack from the DOJ website as it prepares to give funds to J6ers,” Kornfield posted. “This week, DOJ deleted a press release about one man with an ongoing child solicitation case who came to the Capitol with bear spray.”

Then, with typical bombast, the Justice Department responded by taking issue with one particular aspect of Kornfield’s characterization. “Nothing ’quiet’ about it,” the DOJ Rapid Response account replied. “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.”

We are not erasing history quietly, the Justice Department seemed to suggest. We are erasing history loudly and proudly.

For Trump, it’s not enough to pardon those who engaged in political violence on his behalf, or even to reward them financially. He needs to erase the very idea that what they did was wrong from the official record. And his Department of Justice—the federal government’s top law enforcement agency—appears all too happy to comply.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.