The Department of Justice scrubbed all information about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot from its website over the weekend, online archives show, continuing the Trump administration’s apparent campaign to reshape government web content in the new president’s image.
The removal of the content comes just days after President Donald Trump pardoned anyone for “offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
Under the Biden administration, the web hub for the Washington, D.C. District Attorney’s Office housed a repository of more than 1,200 Capitol breach cases, which included PDFs of the case filings for each defendant. The office also periodically released data on new arrests and case resolutions, and information about how to provide tips to the FBI.
As of Tuesday afternoon, this content was removed. The URL for the case database now leads to a “Page not found” placeholder.
“We are sorry, the page you’re looking for can’t be found on the Department of Justice website,” the error message reads.
Online archives show the page was junked sometime after Jan. 24, when the repository was last operable. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment on why the database no longer exists and who ordered its removal.
Since Trump’s inauguration last week, the federal government has rapidly purged content related to hot-button culture war issues. Trump shuttered the White House’s Spanish-language website and removed an otherwise innocuous accessibility disclaimer, both within his first 24 hours in office.
The Department of Health and Human Services website reproductiverights.gov, which provided legal and medical information on reproductive health, is gone. And a number of agencies have scrubbed their sites of diversity-focused content after Trump’s executive order calling for the Office of Personnel Management to end DEI programs in the federal government.
The Justice Department’s handling of the Jan. 6 attack is a sore spot for Trump, who often railed against former special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
In his recent pardon of the rioters, he called their prosecutions “a grave national injustice.”
Now, any trace of that supposed injustice is gone from the department’s website, along with the case files of notorious defendants and far-right figureheads like the “QAnon Shaman”” Jacob Chansley and former Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio.
The webmaster hasn’t deleted everything just yet, however. As of Tuesday, hundreds of press releases announcing new sentences and guilty pleas in the Capitol breach cases remain active on the Justice Department website.
Interested readers can still find the press release announcing Steve Bannon’s sentence of four months in prison for refusing to cooperate with the House Select Committee’s investigation into the attacks.
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