Erasing history: Trump Justice Dept. deletes all Jan. 6 files

WASHINGTON—In another case of President Trump’s erasure of history, the Trump regime’s Justice Department has deleted all the files—documents, e-mails, reports, and everything else—about the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol invasion and insurrection from its website. And bragged about it.

Not only that, but on May 22, the DOJ won a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling dismissing 12 relevant cases against January 6 Trump-backing “invaders” with prejudice, making it difficult, if not impossible, to reopen them in the future.

DOJ announced its decision at approximately 5:30 p.m. on May 25, at the end of the three-day Memorial Day weekend. Such timing is routine for announcements, from any administration, of news that it generally wants to  have ignored. 

Those announcements are usually timed for late Saturday afternoons, after newspaper deadlines and network and cable news and talk shows have already set their agendas and guest schedules.

But independent news sites on the web, followed by NBC and CBS, picked up the January 6 whitewash announcement anyway.

In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a constitutional law professor on leave who led the House impeachment prosecutors at Trump’s second U.S. Senate trial—about his aiding and abetting the insurrection—wrote, “It is still very much January 6 in America.

“Five years after Jan. 6, 2021, we are still caught up in a struggle between forces who are willing to use authoritarian violence outside the Constitution to take and wield power and those who stand up nonviolently for our Constitution in the streets and in the polling places. Neither side can claim victory yet,” Raskin added.

DOJ stripped the evidence from the pro-Constitution side. But it’s still present on Capitol Hill, in the files of the former House Select Committee, which investigated the insurrection, and which then transmitted its voluminous reports, plus copies of the backup material, to the Justice Department.

Calls and e-mails to institutions expected to comment on DOJ’s erasures went unanswered, but the Brennan Center for Law and Justice at New York University anticipated, more than three years ago, that something like this would occur.

“Efforts to pressure the DOJ to help overturn the 2020 election were part of a longstanding pattern–and there is no guarantee a future attempt won’t succeed,” its analysts said then.

“One way to prevent future abuse of power” by the  Justice Department is to hold individual bad actors accountable. But Congress also needs to do much more to establish durable guardrails against abuse going forward to prevent the politicization of federal law enforcement.”

One news commentary, though, put the deletion in stark terms. “The DOJ Just Deleted The Entire Paper Trail of January 6th,” its headline read.

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but apparently it can be deleted,” the online publication added.

“Not archived. Not reclassified. Deleted, and then, when a journalist noticed, the DOJ’s rapid response account said there was ‘nothing quiet about it’ and announced the department was proud to have done so.

“Among the records scrubbed were those concerning seditious conspiracy cases against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. The DOJ had already moved to vacate those convictions and dismiss the cases. Now, the documentation the prosecutions ever existed is gone too.” 

In his first debate in 2020 with then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Trump ordered the Proud Boys, one of the two groups that later led the invasion and insurrection, to “Stand back and stand by” for his orders.

It was those orders, after Trump lost the electoral vote to Biden, that led directly to the insurrection, the Select Committee and Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith found. 

Results and details of Smith’s other investigation, of Trump’s removing classified and secret documents to his Mar-a-Lago mansion after his first term ended in January 2021, were permanently blocked by Trump-named U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in West Palm Beach, Fla. She ruled Smith couldn’t get—or release—them because he was illegally appointed.

On May 19, Trump’s DOJ asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. to throw out the lower court convictions of 12 Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who led the insurrectionists after Trump ordered the crowd to march on the Capitol.  With no opposition from the invaders’ attorneys, the appellate court panel tossed the convictions “with prejudice” three days later. The decision makes it difficult, if not impossible, for a future Justice Department to re-indict the 12.

 “In the executive branch’s view, it is not in the interests of justice to continue to prosecute this case or the cases of other, similarly situated defendants,” a court filing signed by Jeanine Pirro, the Trump-named U.S. Attorney for D.C.

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