1984 ON THE POTOMACInto the Memory Hole: DOJ Is Trying to Bury the Past
The Trump administration has altered webpages dealing with climate change and vaccine policy, but removing thousands of documents relating to Jan. 6 from DOJ website is different. Here the issue is not a theory, a model, or a contested policy projection. It is the documentary footprint of a past response to a past event. To remove these documents from easy public view is not to enter a new debate or indicate a change of policy. It is to try to edit the archive, to rewrite the past.
“Who controls the past controls the future.
Who controls the present controls the past,”
George Orwell, 1984
The Department of Justice has begun erasing its own memory of January 6. In recent weeks, the department has systematically removed hundreds of press releases describing the investigation and prosecution of those who assaulted the Capitol in January 2021. The removed material was not a collection of obscure internal memos. They were the public-facing narratives—charge by charge, sentence by sentence—through which DOJ explained to the country how it was responding to the most serious attempt to disrupt a presidential transition in the history of the country.
The underlying court files still exist, buried in electronic dockets, and some archived DOJ materials remain accessible. But the story the Justice Department once told about January 6 is quietly disappearing from the place where most Americans would normally look to find it. As CBS News, NBC News, and TIME have reported, the removals cover a broad swath of charging, conviction, and sentencing announcements related to the attack.
What DOJ is doing to its own record of January 6 is not, at least so far, the destruction of evidence or the rewriting of court dockets. It is something subtler and, for a liberal democracy, just as corrosive: the deliberate erasure of the public record documenting the Biden administration’s narrative of DOJ’s Jan. 6 response, in order to align the department’s public face during 2021-2024 with the ideological needs of the current administration. The DOJ political leadership has not even tried to present this as routine maintenance. In its own public statements, it has celebrated the purge as a way to “reverse weaponization” and to strip away “partisan propaganda,” as if thousands of detailed case summaries were no more than disposable campaign messaging.
These releases did not merely explain individual prosecutions. Under the Biden administration, they functioned as a running chronicle of the federal government’s response to an assault on Congress: who had been charged, what evidence supported the charges, and how judges were sentencing those who breached the Capitol or assaulted police. Taken together, they amounted to a kind of institutional diary. Removing them does not change what prosecutors did; it changes how easy it is for the public to see what prosecutors did—and that is precisely the terrain where norms, not statutes, matter most.
