DOJ scrubs Jan. 6 prosecution releases, erasing records of pleas and convictions

In late May 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice mass-deleted news releases from its own website that documented the federal prosecution of defendants charged in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The purged set spanned guilty pleas, jury verdicts, and prison-sentence announcements drawn from the roughly 1,600 cases brought under the prior administration — including releases on some of the most serious assaults on Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan Police officers, and on the seditious-conspiracy convictions of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders. Pages that had previously been published by the Department at the time of disposition now return "Page not found" errors.

The DOJ's rapid-response social-media account confirmed the takedown and characterized the prior releases as "partisan propaganda" from the Biden-era Justice Department, framing the deletions as part of a broader effort to "reverse the DOJ's weaponization." The deletions follow a sequence of administration actions reshaping the public record of January 6: blanket pardons for all defendants, the firing of dozens of Jan. 6 prosecutors, the hiring of a former Jan. 6 defendant into the Department, and the announcement of an "anti-weaponization" fund that could direct payouts to pardoned rioters.

What the takedowns remove is not deliberative or pre-decisional material but the Department's own contemporaneous public record of completed federal criminal proceedings — the charging announcements, plea filings, and sentencing memoranda that the DOJ itself posted at the time of disposition. Future researchers, prosecutors, defense lawyers, victim families, and the press lose the canonical government source for what was charged, pleaded, tried, and sentenced in those cases. NPR notes that its own database and visual archive of the attack — used by prosecutors, defendants, academic researchers, and the public — remains accessible, but the authoritative DOJ record of how each case was resolved does not.