{"id":95,"date":"2026-05-29T19:45:31","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T19:45:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\/?p=95"},"modified":"2026-05-29T19:45:31","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T19:45:31","slug":"the-justice-department-erases-history-lawfare-restores-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\/?p=95","title":{"rendered":"The Justice Department Erases History; Lawfare Restores It"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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.<\/p>\n

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The operation started without fanfare or formal announcement and proceeded largely unnoticed. Until, that is, journalists such as the Washington Post\u2019s Meryl Kornfield took notice of certain press releases and other materials that had conspicuously disappeared from www.justice.gov.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Trump admin is quietly deleting info about the Capitol attack from the DOJ website as it prepares to give funds to J6ers,\u201d Kornfield posted. \u201cThis week, DOJ deleted a press release about one man with an ongoing child solicitation case who came to the Capitol with bear spray.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then, with typical bombast, the Justice Department responded by taking issue with one particular aspect of Kornfield\u2019s characterization. \u201cNothing \u2018quiet\u2019 about it,\u201d the DOJ Rapid Response account replied. \u201cWe are proud to reverse the DOJ\u2019s 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\u2019s website of partisan propaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n

We are not erasing history quietly<\/em>, the Justice Department seemed to suggest. We are erasing history<\/em> loudly and proudly.<\/em><\/p>\n

At Lawfare<\/em>, we have restored the vast bulk of what was deleted. We have also started to preemptively archive a raft of material that has not yet been deleted but probably will be, given its thematic relationship to the material that was 86ed.<\/p>\n

The Jan. 6 investigation was one of the largest investigations and collections of prosecutions in Justice Department history. In the FBI\u2019s Washington Field Office alone, agents and analysts worked shifts to maintain a 24\/7 posture identifying perpetrators. For more than a month after Jan. 6, there was never a time during day or night when roughly a third of the office was not investigating the insurrection or analyzing evidence.<\/p>\n

All other FBI field offices, while not dealing with the same volume as the Washington Field Office, also surged agents to help identify, investigate, and apprehend any participants who had traveled to Washington, taken part in the insurrection, and then left town. Record numbers of leads and tips were provided to the FBI, and every single one of them was examined\u2014and if merited\u2014used to predicate a case.<\/p>\n

For its part, the Justice Department stood up an entire new branch of prosecutors tasked specifically with these events. Assistant United States attorneys were also brought in from around the country to augment efforts.<\/p>\n

This is the record the Justice Department is now trying to delete.<\/p>\n

Any effort to erase history and replace it with lies warrants concerted pushback. In this case, the department has deleted a large repository of accessible public information about the storming of the Capitol and the individuals who did it. That data, unlike the court documents that lay beneath them, are in lay language. They are easily digestible by anyone interested. And they contain fair-minded summaries of evidence that\u2014in the overwhelming majority of cases\u2014was either proven in court beyond a reasonable doubt or pleaded to by defendants who ultimately conceded their truth.<\/p>\n

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There\u2019s a broad principle here, and we want to state it very clearly: If the administration purges rule-of-law-sensitive materials from government websites, we will do everything in our power to restore them on Lawfare<\/em>. The principle, as we instructed Anthropic\u2019s Claude in building the programs that recovered these statements, is that \u201cnet loss of information to the public should be zero.\u201d<\/p>\n

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