Justice Department erases Jan. 6 records, deepening whitewash criticism

The Justice Department has begun stripping its own public account of Jan. 6, removing news releases about criminal cases tied to the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and recasting years of prosecutions as “partisan propaganda.” The purge cuts away records that documented charges, convictions and sentencings, narrowing what the public can easily see about one of the most consequential political violence investigations in modern U.S. history.

The move follows Donald Trump’s Jan. 20, 2025 clemency order, which granted full pardons to most people convicted in Jan. 6 cases and commuted the sentences of 14 named defendants, including Stewart Rhodes, Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Thomas Caldwell, Jessica Watkins, Roberto Minuta, Edward Vallejo, David Moerschel, Joseph Hackett, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, Dominic Pezzola and Jeremy Bertino. The proclamation left little of the punishment structure intact for people convicted in connection with the assault.

In April 2026, the administration went further in court, moving to clear some of the last remaining Jan. 6 convictions involving figures from the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. That effort intensified criticism that the federal government was not just forgiving the attack, but actively erasing the criminal record built around it.

Those records mattered because the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation had spent years assembling a case file that, by early 2024, had reached nearly 1,500 Capitol riot cases. Public filings and releases described how the mob disrupted Congress’s joint session to certify the 2020 election results and how officers from the U.S. Capitol Police were assaulted in Washington, D.C. The deleted material had helped preserve the scale of the attack, from conspiracy cases to individual sentences, in a way that ordinary political rhetoric could not.

Critics and Democrats have long described Trump’s Jan. 6 messaging as a whitewash, and these latest steps give that accusation new force. By removing records from the Justice Department’s own website and pressing to undo remaining convictions, the administration is redefining what the federal government is willing to investigate, preserve and publicly defend when political violence is aimed at the democratic transfer of power. That shift sets a precedent that future administrations could invoke, not to clarify history, but to compress it.