Jury Convicts Four Leaders of the Proud Boys of Seditious Conspiracy Related to US Capitol Breach.
Texas Man Sentenced For Assaulting Officers With a Dangerous Weapon During January 6 Capitol Breach.
These are just three of the hundreds of Department of Justice (DOJ) press releases stemming from the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol that the Trump administration has deleted. When the DOJ got caught removing the statements from its website earlier this year, the administration lied, claiming the releases were “partisan propaganda.” The administration pressed forward with its attempt to erase history.
This was utterly predictable. In fact, I predicted it. In early 2025, I downloaded more than 1,000 DOJ press releases pertaining to January 6 cases. I wanted to ensure that they would not be lost. Today, we’ve made those downloaded statements available to the public on a new website: The January 6 Memory Project. We won’t let this administration get away with whitewashing an unprecedented attack on our democracy. But we need your support.
Support the January 6 Memory Project, an effort of Home of the Brave and January 6 report author Tom Joscelyn:
It’s easy to see why the Trump administration is so eager to delete the DOJ’s press releases. The January 6 investigation was one of the largest law enforcement operations in our country’s history. Hundreds of DOJ prosecutors and FBI agents spent years examining the mountainous record—video footage, text messages, phone records, emails, and the rioters’ own social media posts—to identify offenders one by one. That nationwide investigation resulted in nearly 1,600 January 6 defendants being charged in a court of law.
The DOJ’s releases cover these cases. The releases also serve as a reminder that President Trump’s sweeping pardons and commutations covered the worst of the worst offenders. The president did not distinguish between violent and non-violent offenders. He granted clemency to all of them.
Many of the January 6 defendants were convicted of violent crimes, including assaulting police officers. The press releases also highlight the role played by far-right extremists. Among them were leaders and members of the Proud Boys, the group chiefly responsible for storming the US Capitol. Members of the Proud Boys and another extremist group, the Oath Keepers, were convicted of seditious conspiracy against the US government—the most serious charge levied against any of the January 6 defendants.
But on his first day back in office, Trump ordered that they all be set free, falsely portraying the January 6 defendants as victims of “a grave national injustice.”
Read the DOJ’s press releases for yourself. This is what justice looks like.
As a principal author of the House’s January 6 Committee report, released in December 2022, I spent hundreds of hours alongside my colleagues combing through the record. The result was the comprehensive 814-page report detailing the full scope of Trump’s plot to overturn a democratically held election for the first time in our nation’s history. That plot culminated in the attack on the U.S. Capitol—one of the most thoroughly documented days in our nation’s history.
I’m confident that the Trump administration won’t get away with erasing this history. There’s just too much publicly available evidence. But I wanted to make sure the administration couldn’t get away with deleting the DOJ’s press releases. That’s why I personally saved more than 1,000 original DOJ statements for posterity.
Authoritarian movements whitewash history. We won’t let them get away with it. You can’t let them get away with it. So please share The January 6 Memory Project with your friends, family, and colleagues. This record belongs to the American people.
Tom Joscelyn is president of the Civil Defense Institute and co-host of It’s Happening Here, a Home of the Brave podcast. He was a senior professional staff member on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol, and one of the principal authors of the committee’s final, 814-page report.
Thank you for your excellent work.