1984 ON THE POTOMACThe Justice Department Erases History; Lawfare Restores It
The Jan. 6 investigation was one of the largest investigations and collections of prosecutions in Justice Department history. This is the record the Justice Department is now trying to delete. Any effort to erase history and replace it with lies warrants concerted pushback.
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.
The operation started without fanfare or formal announcement and proceeded largely unnoticed. Until, that is, journalists such as the Washington Post’s Meryl Kornfield took notice of certain press releases and other materials that had conspicuously disappeared from www.justice.gov.
“The Trump admin is quietly deleting info about the Capitol attack from the DOJ website as it prepares to give funds to J6ers,” Kornfield posted. “This week, DOJ deleted a press release about one man with an ongoing child solicitation case who came to the Capitol with bear spray.”
Then, with typical bombast, the Justice Department responded by taking issue with one particular aspect of Kornfield’s characterization. “Nothing ‘quiet’ about it,” the DOJ Rapid Response account replied. “We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s 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’s website of partisan propaganda.”
We are not erasing history quietly, the Justice Department seemed to suggest. We are erasing history loudly and proudly.
At Lawfare, 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.
The Jan. 6 investigation was one of the largest investigations and collections of prosecutions in Justice Department history. In the FBI’s 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.
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—and if merited—used to predicate a case.
