Trump Administration Moves to Rewrite and Erase the Government's Record of January 6

Details

Beginning on his first day back in office and continuing through 2026, President Trump and his administration have taken a series of actions to revise and ultimately erase the government's official account of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The effort has two parts: an account promoted by the administration—most visibly an official White House webpage published on the fifth anniversary that describes the assault as a "peaceful demonstration"—and the removal of the underlying record, including the mass deletion in May 2026 of Justice Department releases documenting the prosecutions. Together, the actions have removed much of the government's documentation of the prosecutions from public view while advancing an account that describes the charged defendants as patriots and faults Capitol Police for the violence; roughly 140 officers were injured in the attack. By the summer of 2026, the January 6 effort had also come into focus as one front in a broader administration campaign over how American history is officially told—alongside a White House report attacking the Smithsonian, the president's fact-checked retellings of the American past, and the vice president's reframing of Watergate—developments covered in a later section.

A Multi-Front Campaign

The effort began with clemency. On January 20, 2025, Trump granted clemency to roughly 1,600 people charged in connection with the riot—full pardons for most and commutations for 14 members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys—and the Justice Department shut down the public database that had tracked every defendant and charge. The Trump administration then fired or pushed out prosecutors who had worked the cases, disbanded the U.S. Attorney's Capitol Siege Section, and closed active investigations into assaults on police.

It also paid nearly $5 million to settle a wrongful-death suit brought by the family of Ashli Babbitt, a rioter shot by police while trying to breach a barricaded door near the House chamber—a shooting the department had earlier deemed justified—and hired Jared Wise, a former FBI agent and January 6 defendant captured on body-camera video urging rioters to "kill" officers, as a senior adviser on alleged "weaponization" of law enforcement. The actions described below—the anniversary webpage, the deletion of Justice Department records, the move to vacate the most serious convictions, and a new compensation fund—escalated that campaign in 2026.

The White House Website

On January 6, 2026—the fifth anniversary of the attack—the Trump administration published an official government webpage titled "January 6: A Date Which Will Live in Infamy" that recharacterizes the violent assault as a peaceful demonstration turned to chaos by Capitol Police. The page describes pardoned rioters as "patriotic Americans" and claims Democrats "staged the real insurrection by certifying a fraud-ridden election."

White House communications director Steven Cheung promoted the page on social media, then later implied it was a troll job, writing on X that critics had fallen for a trap.

Key Claims on the Website

The webpage makes several claims that contradict established facts and court records:

On the rioters: The site describes the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with January 6 as "patriotic Americans prosecuted for their presence at the Capitol—many mere trespassers or peaceful protesters treated as insurrectionists by a weaponized Biden DOJ." Department of Justice data shows that over 600 individuals were convicted of or pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement officers. Courts convicted leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys of seditious conspiracy—a charge requiring proof of a plot to overthrow the government.

On Capitol Police: The website accuses officers of escalating tensions and claims their tactics turned a peaceful demonstration into chaos, asserting that police removed barricades and waved attendees inside. This contradicts extensive video evidence showing rioters violently breaching barriers, smashing windows, and assaulting officers in what the Justice Department documented as one of the largest mass attacks on law enforcement in U.S. history.

On the 2020 election: The page claims Democrats staged "the real insurrection" by certifying a fraud-ridden election. This contradicts rulings by more than 60 courts—including many with Trump-appointed judges—that rejected claims of widespread fraud.

On deaths: The website claims no law enforcement officers lost their lives on January 6. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick died from strokes the day after being assaulted while defending the Capitol, and the D.C. medical examiner said the events of that day influenced his death. Four additional officers died by suicide in the months that followed.

The Nancy Pelosi Claim

A central theme of the website is that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi bears responsibility for security failures and spent years and millions of dollars to fabricate an insurrection narrative. The site uses footage from an HBO documentary in which Pelosi says she takes responsibility for not having the Capitol better prepared as evidence that she admitted fault for the attack.

Multiple fact-checkers have rated claims that Pelosi blocked the National Guard as false. As CNN, Snopes, and the Associated Press have documented, the Speaker of the House does not control the District's National Guard, which reports to the president; Capitol security is overseen by the Capitol Police Board; and former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund testified that Pelosi was not involved in pre-attack Guard decisions. A spokesperson for Pelosi responded that out-of-context clips do not change the fact that the Speaker is not in charge of Capitol security.

Contradictions With Trump's Own Words

The website contradicts statements Trump himself made in the days after January 6, 2021. In a recorded address on January 8, 2021, he told the rioters they had "defiled the seat of American democracy." The site's timeline also omits portions of his January 6 speech in which he repeatedly urged supporters to fight.

Reactions to the Website

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said the mob's mission five years earlier had been to overturn a free and fair election. Rep. Jamie Raskin, a former member of the House January 6 Committee, told The Hill the site doubled down on the "big lie." CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale called it an up-is-down fake-history page, and Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins described it as an attempt to rewrite history.

Not all pardoned defendants embraced the narrative. Pamela Hemphill rejected her pardon, saying that "accepting that pardon would be lying about what happened."

Deleting the Justice Department's Record

The second element of the effort was the removal of the underlying record. In late May 2026 the Justice Department confirmed that it had deleted from its website thousands of news releases documenting January 6 charges, guilty pleas, jury verdicts, and prison sentences, characterizing the material as "partisan propaganda."

The deletions surfaced on Friday, May 22, when Washington Post reporter Meryl Kornfield observed on X that case releases were quietly disappearing from justice.gov. The department's "rapid response" account replied publicly, insisting there was nothing "quiet" about it and saying it was proud to strip the site of what it called partisan propaganda. A review by NPR, which maintains the most complete public database of the prosecutions, found the purge swept in some of the most serious assaults on police that day, including the cases of Daniel Rodriguez, who drove an electroshock weapon into an officer's neck; Thomas Webster, a retired NYPD officer who attacked police with a metal flagpole; and Peter Schwartz, who sprayed officers with a chemical irritant and threw a chair.

A Case Study: Andrew Taake

The release singled out by Kornfield concerned Andrew Taake, a Houston man sentenced in June 2024 by U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols to 74 months in prison for assaulting officers with bear spray and a metal whip. As the department's now-deleted account noted, Taake was on pretrial release for a still-pending child-solicitation case in Texas at the time of the riot. The release that once described his sentencing now returns a "Page not found" error.

Cataloguing What Was Removed

The legal-affairs site Lawfare reconstructed the deleted material using the Internet Archive. Its researchers found two deletion patterns—pages removed outright and "soft-deleted" pages that still load but return an empty shell. After querying every Justice Department and FBI page captured under the relevant URL patterns and filtering for January 6 content, Lawfare identified 6,055 unique pages and recovered about 95 percent of them, including 4,163 FBI "Wanted" suspect pages, 1,144 U.S. Attorney's Office case releases, and 387 Capitol Breach database pages. Lawfare published the full archive, saying its guiding principle was that the net loss of information to the public should be zero.

Vacating the Seditious Conspiracy Convictions

In April 2026, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to vacate the convictions of 12 leaders and members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, most convicted at trial of seditious conspiracy. The group included Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and Proud Boys leaders Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola—among the 14 people whose sentences Trump had commuted, rather than pardoned, leaving their convictions intact until then.

The appeals court granted the request in late May, and prosecutors moved to dismiss the indictments with prejudice. Vacating the convictions, rather than simply releasing the defendants, removes collateral consequences such as the bar on owning firearms and the loss of military benefits. Raskin said the move sought to "vaporize the verdicts" reached by jurors, while Michael Fanone, the former officer assaulted during the riot, told the AP the defendants were "traitors to this country." Defense lawyers welcomed the dismissals, arguing protest-related clashes should not be charged as akin to treason.

The Anti-Weaponization Fund

In May 2026 the Justice Department announced a $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" to compensate people who say they were unjustly investigated or prosecuted. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said anybody could apply and placed no limit on eligible claims, and both he and Vice President JD Vance declined to rule out payments to rioters convicted of assaulting police. Pardoned rioters quickly began staking claims, one seeking $5 million, though no eligibility criteria have been set and a federal judge temporarily froze the fund amid litigation that includes a suit by two officers who defended the Capitol. The fund is examined in a separate article.

Subsequent Crimes by Pardoned Defendants

A House Judiciary Committee report released on the anniversary found that at least 23 individuals pardoned by Trump were later charged with additional crimes, including plotting to murder FBI agents, violent assault, and possession of child sexual abuse material. According to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, at least 33 pardoned defendants have been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for unrelated crimes, including six for child sex crimes and two for rape. In March 2026, Andrew Paul Johnson, who received a full pardon, was sentenced to life in prison on state child sex-abuse charges in Florida.

Efforts to Preserve the Record

Outside the government, archivists have moved to keep the material public. Lawfare published its recovered archive of more than 5,700 pages and began preemptively saving related files it expects could be removed. NPR continues to operate its database and visual archive of the prosecutions—used by prosecutors, defense lawyers, and academic researchers—and is pursuing legal action to obtain additional government video that has not been released. Both efforts draw on the Internet Archive and broader data-rescue initiatives created to guard against the disappearance of federal records.

A Wider Campaign Over Official History

By mid-2026, the January 6 revision effort was increasingly understood not as an isolated project but as one front in a broader administration campaign to rewrite the official telling of American history—a campaign that in the weeks around the country's 250th-anniversary celebrations extended to the nation's flagship museum, the president's own public storytelling, and the vice president's account of the scandal that produced modern government-ethics law.

The White House Report on the Smithsonian

On July 4, 2026, the White House released a 162-page report, "Saving America's Story," accusing the Smithsonian Institution—and in particular its National Museum of American History—of abandoning objective scholarship for "extreme political activism." As the Daily Beast reported, the document was produced by the White House Domestic Policy Council, led by former Trump speechwriter Vince Haley, and written by unnamed officials. It brands the museum's leadership "radical activists" who cannot be trusted to tell America's story, accuses exhibits of presenting "a radical view of American history" that undermines faith in American institutions, alleges anti-white bias, and singles out museum director Anthea Hartig for describing history as a "prime tool of social justice."

The report grew out of Trump's March 2025 executive order "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History," which directed the removal of "improper ideology" from Smithsonian museums and placed Vice President Vance on the institution's Board of Regents; the White House had launched a content review of Smithsonian exhibits in August 2025. The report also followed a May 2026 standoff in which the Smithsonian reinstated label text on Trump's presidential portrait referencing his two impeachments—text the White House had pressed to remove.

Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch, the institution's first Black leader, disputed the report in a memo to staff on July 8, saying it unfairly characterized the National Museum of American History, emphasizing "accuracy and integrity," and defending the institution's 180-year commitment to "nonpartisan and independent scholarship," as NPR reported.

Critics argued the report itself exemplified the revisionism it alleged. In a Washington Post opinion column, art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott wrote that "the only bias uncovered in the White House's Smithsonian report is its own," documenting instances in which the report relied on selective quotation—including truncating a museum wall text's question about whether the Revolution was "part of a wider, unfinished movement for liberty—deeply imperfect but with sacred aspirations open to all people" to omit the aspirational clause—and dismissed well-documented history such as the anti-Chinese sentiment behind the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Kennicott called the document "an opening salvo in a campaign not just to take over the Smithsonian, but to problematize the possibility of history," in which the standard "isn't truth, or documentary evidence" but "conformity with a single, happy narrative of American exceptionalism."

The President's Historical Storytelling

The same pattern extends to Trump's own accounts of the past. A New York Times fact-check by Linda Qiu, published July 1, 2026, found that since retaking office Trump "has spun many historical yarns that stretch the truth, strain credulity or are downright false," with American history serving as "a mirror for his preferred policies and a mine for his favored narratives." Among the examples: a claim that Andrew Jackson "cut 10 percent of the federal work force" (Jackson replaced the workers he fired and the federal workforce grew); a garbled account of William McKinley's tariffs, which McKinley himself repudiated in favor of trade reciprocity the day before his assassination; an evidence-free story that Trump's uncle taught the Unabomber at MIT (Theodore Kaczynski never attended MIT, and Trump's uncle died years before Kaczynski was identified); and a claim that Robert E. Lee said "never fight uphill, me boys" before Gettysburg, for which historians say there is no record—Lee in fact took full responsibility for the defeat.

A separate CNN fact-check found that stories Trump told in July 2026 about George Washington and the Panama Canal were "both fake." And in his July 4 "Salute to America 250" speech on the National Mall, Rolling Stone reported, Trump claimed the Declaration of Independence says "we are all made in the image of one almighty god"—language that appears nowhere in the document and is closer to Genesis.

Vance's Reframing of Watergate

The revisionist treatment of accountability history reached the vice presidency as well. Speaking at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, on June 26, 2026, Vice President JD Vance said that "if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story" and that "the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy." He recast the scandal as a story of how "the deep state took down Richard Nixon," in a manner he said was "not all that different" from actions taken against Trump during his first term. The remarks, reported by NBC News, drew pushback from commentators including Joe Scarborough, and an MSNBC opinion piece argued that Vance misunderstood both Nixon's scandal and its legacy. Watergate is the founding scandal of the modern government-ethics framework—the Presidential Records Act, statutory inspectors general, and the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section all trace to it—making a sitting vice president's dismissal of it as a minor, deep-state-driven story a notable data point in the administration's broader recasting of the historical record of official wrongdoing, of which the January 6 campaign is the most developed example.

Related Coverage

For details on the underlying clemency, see our article: "Trump Pardons All January 6 Defendants, Including Those Convicted of Assaulting Police Officers."