What Happened

The Department of Justice has removed from its official website news releases related to the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot prosecutions. That means documentation of criminal charges, guilty pleas, convictions, and sentences — gone.

DOJ confirmed it publicly, according to AP News and ABC News reporting by Eric Tucker on May 23, 2026.

A journalist flagged the deletions on X, noting the department had quietly pulled releases — including one about a Texas man who pleaded guilty to assault and separately faced state charges of soliciting a minor. DOJ's rapid response account fired back: "There's nothing 'quiet' about it."

"We are proud to reverse the DOJ's weaponization under the Biden administration," the department posted. "This includes stripping DOJ's website of partisan propaganda."

What Got Deleted

Among the purged records: seditious conspiracy case files against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, per AP News and The Guardian.

Those weren't minor trespassing charges. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 22 years. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes got 18 years on the same charge.

Last month, DOJ filed an unopposed motion asking a federal appeals court to vacate those seditious conspiracy convictions. The court granted it Thursday. DOJ then moved to dismiss the cases Friday — the same day the website scrubbing drew public attention, according to ABC News.

The $1.776 Billion Question

On Monday, DOJ announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund — the dollar amount echoes 1776 — meant to compensate people who claim they were unjustly investigated or prosecuted, according to AP News, ABC News, and The Guardian.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has NOT ruled out that rioters convicted of violent crimes could receive payouts from this fund.

Blanche said exactly that publicly. The response in Congress was bipartisan anger, according to multiple sources. Even some Republicans are uncomfortable with the idea of writing checks to people convicted of beating police officers with flagpoles and hockey sticks.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Getting Wrong

Left-leaning outlets like AP News and The Guardian frame this as history being "rewritten" — a fair characterization, but incomplete.

They're mostly skipping two inconvenient facts.

First: The Biden DOJ did engage in prosecutorial overreach in some Jan. 6 cases. Low-level trespassers were hit with felony charges that required years of litigation to resolve. That's a legitimate grievance and the source reporting barely acknowledges it.

Second: Nobody on the left is asking why a federal appeals court agreed to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions without opposition. If those convictions were bulletproof, why didn't prosecutors fight to keep them? That question goes unasked.

Meanwhile, right-leaning coverage tends to treat every Jan. 6 defendant as a political prisoner — which ignores that over 1,500 people were charged, many for documented violent assaults on law enforcement officers caught on camera.

Both framings skip facts that complicate their narrative.

The Real Problem Here

Deleting public government records documenting criminal prosecutions isn't "reversing weaponization." It's destroying the institutional paper trail of the justice system.

Government websites aren't personal blogs. DOJ press releases are official public records that document how federal prosecutorial power was exercised — for good or ill. Scrubbing them doesn't erase the underlying court documents, but it does make it harder for ordinary citizens to access the history of what their government did.

If the Biden DOJ abused its power in these prosecutions — and there are legitimate arguments that it did in some cases — the answer is transparency, not deletion. Publish an independent review. Release the data. Make the case.

Instead, DOJ called the records "partisan propaganda" and hit delete. Deleting records doesn't solve the problem. It obscures it.

The Fund Is the Bigger Story

The website scrubbing is getting the headlines. The $1.776 billion compensation fund is the story that matters more.

That's taxpayer money. Todd Blanche hasn't defined who qualifies. He hasn't ruled out violent offenders. And the fund name — evoking the founding year — is pure political theater dressed up as policy.

Congress should be demanding specifics: Who decides eligibility? What's the appeals process? What prevents this from becoming a slush fund for political allies?

So far, the bipartisan anger has been expressed in statements. Not subpoenas. Not legislation.

Talk is cheap. $1.776 billion is not.

What Comes Next

Regular Americans — including the cops who got beaten on January 6 — deserve a government that handles this with honesty, not propaganda from either direction. Deleting records solves nothing. A billion-dollar fund with no guardrails solves nothing. And media outlets that can only see this through a partisan lens aren't helping anyone figure out what actually happened.