The Department of Justice said it has removed from its website news releases describing criminal cases linked to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, framing the deleted materials as political messaging. In a statement relayed through the department’s “rapid response” account, the DOJ said there was “nothing ‘quiet’” about the removal, after a journalist publicly noted on X that releases tied to the Capitol assault appeared to be disappearing.
The AP reported that the department described the purged information about prosecutions as “partisan propaganda.” The DOJ said the removals were part of a broader effort associated with the Trump administration’s return to office, following pardons, commutations, or vows to dismiss a large number of criminal cases stemming from the assault on the Capitol, when hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the building in an attempt to stop the congressional certification of the 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden.
According to the reporting, Trump’s Justice Department began removing the releases that documented criminal charges, convictions, and sentencing tied to the Jan. 6 riot. The AP described the purge as part of an effort to “rewrite the history” of the Capitol attack, an accusation that the department addressed directly in its social media response by rejecting the “quietly” characterization and saying it was doing the removals deliberately.
The reporting also tied the removals to the department’s parallel move to create a compensation program. The Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund aimed at compensating Trump allies who say they were unjustly investigated and prosecuted, and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the AP reported, had not ruled out that people convicted of violence in the riot cases could be eligible for payouts—an outcome that drew bipartisan anger in Congress.
After the journalist’s observation on X, the DOJ responded through its rapid response account, saying it would “do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes.” The post added that the department would accomplish that goal by “stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda,” according to the AP.
The AP said that among the releases removed were those related to seditious conspiracy cases involving members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. The reporting said the Justice Department, in an unopposed motion filed last month, asked a federal appeals court to vacate seditious conspiracy convictions, and that the appeals court granted that request on Thursday; on Friday, the department moved to dismiss the cases against group members.
As part of the same set of actions, the AP reported that the department also confronted questions raised about specific cases referenced in removed releases—describing, in its account, that the journalist’s observation included an example of a Texas man who pleaded guilty to assault and also faced separate state charges involving solicitation of a minor. In the DOJ’s rapid response on X, the department said there was nothing “quiet” about the removals, asserting that it was instead actively reversing what it characterized as politically motivated enforcement.