Trump DOJ scrubs website, deletes info on Jan. 6 criminal cases

Republican efforts to rewrite the history of the Jan. 6 attack are hardly new, but more than five years after the insurrectionist assault on the U.S. Capitol, the GOP crusade is taking on new and unsettling dimensions.

This Video Is Trending Right Now →

The party’s rhetoric, predictably, continues to veer in mind-numbing directions. Republican Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, for example, claimed last week that the Jan. 6 attack was “made up” and “a staged thing.” The same day, Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama appeared on the Senate floor and declared, among other things, that House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi “spearheaded” the Jan. 6 insurrection (she did not).

But as foolish as those comments were, more important were the substantive steps taken by GOP officials in the executive branch. The Associated Press reported:

The Department of Justice is acknowledging it has removed from its website news releases about criminal cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, calling the information about the prosecutions “partisan propaganda.” […]

After a journalist on Friday observed on the social media platform X that the Justice Department was “quietly” removing news releases on its website that were related to the Jan. 6 attack, including about a Texas man who pleaded guilty to assault and also faced separate state charges of soliciting a minor, the department responded through its “rapid response” account that there was “nothing ‘quiet’ about it.”

This Video Is Trending Right Now 👇

Click here to watch the video

source WATCH THE CONTENT VIDEO

A spokesperson for Trump’s DOJ characterized prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters as Biden-era “weaponization,” adding that the online resources (documenting criminal charges, convictions and sentencings) constituted “partisan propaganda.”

The fact that the Justice Department, at an institutional level, would even make such an absurd claim in print reflects the degree to which the unraveling DOJ is confronting crisis conditions, but so does the underlying action. A related NBC News report noted, “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.”