Republican efforts to rewrite the history of the Jan. 6, 2021, 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.
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 former House Speaker 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.”
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 sentences) 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.”
In case that weren’t quite enough, around the same time the Justice Department scrubbed its website, purging accurate information about accused and convicted criminals politically aligned with the White House, federal prosecutors in the nation’s capital also filed motions to formally dismiss criminal cases stemming from Jan. 6. As The New York Times reported, this included cases “that involved leaders and members of far-right groups who were tried and convicted on charges of seditious conspiracy.”
The same article added, “The motions to dismiss the sedition cases against a dozen members of the far-right groups the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers was another step toward wiping away the vestiges of what had been the most significant criminal proceedings arising from the Capitol attack. While all of the men were pardoned or had their sentences commuted by Mr. Trump, the full dismissal of their charges would represent a further symbolic victory, and would allow the veterans among them to reclaim military benefits that were terminated after their convictions.”
It’s unlikely that the timing was coincidental. Just days earlier, the Trump administration announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund, condemned by Democrats and even some Republicans as a legally dubious “slush fund,” which would likely benefit those who attacked the Capitol and violently clashed with law enforcement personnel on Jan. 6.
In order to justify sending taxpayer-financed checks to many convicted felons, the Republican White House and its partners have to go beyond wildly unpopular presidential pardons. They have to fundamentally replace the reality of what transpired with a new counternarrative that frames rioters as victims worthy of reparations. Friday’s developments, in other words, were part of a systemic war against the recent past.
That said, deleting online information and formally dismissing criminal cases won’t change what actually happened, and probably won’t change many attitudes among the American mainstream.
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