They got caught erasing history so they can rewrite it

After abruptly clearing his weekend travel schedule and missing his own son's wedding, the President of the United States has once again locked himself away inside the White House. And while much of the country remains focused on his continued threats of war, a story was published this morning that every major news outlet in America should be covering as breaking news. The Trump administration has begun quietly and deliberately scrubbing prosecution records tied to the January 6th insurrection from the Department of Justice website.

Based on the events of 5-23-2026

The Breakdown:

• Washington Post reporter Meryl Kornfield exposed the deletion of January 6th prosecution records from the DOJ website
• When asked about it, the DOJ Rapid Response account responded with five chilling words: "Nothing 'quiet' about it. We are proud"
• They said they were proud even after being reminded the records included a man facing child solicitation charges
• Among the records pulled: the prosecution releases for the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, convicted of seditious conspiracy
• The arc: a federal appeals court vacated those convictions Thursday, the DOJ moved to dismiss the cases Friday, then began scrubbing the press releases Friday
• How authoritarian regimes have always seized control of the past, from Stalin erasing faces from photographs to the Nazis rewriting textbooks
• Orwell: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past"
• Trump's pardons released more than 1,500 January 6th defendants from the restitution they owed for the damage they caused
• The full cost of that day to taxpayers was estimated at $2.7 billion. Only about 15 percent of the rioters' restitution was ever repaid, and now even that is gone
• How the $1.776 billion fund completes the arc: erase the record, erase the debt, then hand taxpayer money to the people who committed the crime
• Even Republicans are struggling to defend it. Mitch McConnell called it "utterly stupid" and "morally wrong"
• The six-story bunker being carved beneath the new White House ballroom, with a drone base and a military hospital
• Why this bunker increasingly feels less like emergency preparedness and more like insurance against accountability
• Why we need to keep our own records: screenshots, archived pages, videos, and evidence
• The advantage we have that people resisting past authoritarian takeovers did not: cameras and publishing tools in our pockets
• What we watched with our own eyes on January 6th, and what Congresswoman Madeleine Dean saw when she walked back in
• Cassidy Hutchinson's sworn testimony: "As an American, I was disgusted. It was unpatriotic, it was un-American"

They are betting that if they erase enough pages, pay off enough loyalists, and bury enough of it six stories underground, we will get tired and let it go. We cannot do that. They cannot delete the entire internet, and they cannot erase the people who lived through it. The men and women who built their careers around his protection will, one by one, eventually decide they would rather save themselves. And when they do, there is no website to scrub and no fund large enough to buy back their silence.

*This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

I'm Heather Clainey Reese, and you're listening to Hope for America, where every day I bring you the truth about our politics, our country, and the forces trying to destroy them. Together, we cut through the noise, expose the lies, and stay focused on what really matters, fighting for the survival of our country. After abruptly clearing his weekend travel schedule, opting to stay in Washington, D.C., missing his own son's wedding, the President of the United States has once again locked himself away inside the White House. He has made no public appearances, and his schedule yesterday showed no meetings or events except for what appeared to be an urgent visit from Vice President J.D. Vance at 12.49 p.m. And while much of the country remains focused on Trump's continued threats of violence and war, along with the increasingly erratic posts he continues to share on social media, a story was published yesterday morning that every major news outlet in America should have been covering as breaking news. Because what was covered in that story is a warning of how dangerous the days and months ahead are about to become. Friday afternoon at 1.34 p.m., Washington Post reporter Meryl Cornfield exposed the quiet and deliberate erasure of records related to the January 6th insurrection from the Department of Justice website. But what she really uncovered was far more disturbing than a missing webpage or a deleted press release. The Trump administration had begun scrubbing prosecution records tied to the people who attacked our Capitol, including one man accused of assaulting police officers during the Capitol attack, who was also facing child solicitation charges. Cornfield shared the discovery publicly on X, the social media platform, formerly known as Twitter, and the Department of Justice rapid response account responded directly to her. Yet instead of expressing concern or acknowledging the seriousness of the allegations, including a minor, their response began with five chilling words. Nothing quiet about it. We are proud. They were proud to erase the public record, proud to help rewrite the history of January 6th, and proud to scrap information connected to people who violently attacked police officers defending the Capitol. And even after being reminded of the allegations tied to the solicitation of a child, they still said they were proud. Everything they said in their response was intentional. Proud was placed at the very beginning of the statement, and the rest of it tells us exactly how they want this moment remembered. We are proud to reverse the DOJ's weaponization under the Biden administration. That's what they wrote. We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purpose. This includes stripping DOJ's website of partisan propaganda. Every phrase in that statement should concern us all because every phrase is doing work. The persecution of people who attacked the Capitol becomes weaponization. The men convicted by juries became the persecuted. And the public record of their crimes, the sentencing documents, the charges, the evidence becomes partisan propaganda. That is the whole project in just three sentences. They are not denying what they did. They are renaming it. They are telling us that the record itself was the lie, and that erasing it is justice. This is the language every authoritarian movement eventually reaches for. The moment it stops fearing the truth and starts calling the truth the enemy. And this was not just a single page removed. Merrill Cornfield caught one example. The Houston man, Andrew Take, was sentenced to 74 months for attacking police with bear spray and a metal whip while a child solicitation case sat pending against him in Texas. But the deletion swept far wider than that one defendant. Among the records were the prosecution releases for the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers, the men convicted of sedacious conspiracy for plotting to keep Trump in power by force. And here's the part that turns this from another abuse of power by the Trump administration into something far more dangerous. On Thursday, a federal appeals court vacated those seditious conspiracy convictions. On Friday, the Justice Department moved to dismiss the cases entirely. And on Friday, that same department began scrubbing the press releases documenting those crimes from public view. Pardon them, vacate the convictions, and then dismiss the cases, and then erase the record that any of it ever happened. That's what they're doing. It's a government methodically removing evidence of the worst attack on the Capitol in more than two centuries. Not because the attack did not happen, but because they need Americans to forget who carried it out, who encouraged it and who benefited from it and what it was truly meant to accomplish. And this is only the beginning of our shared history. They intend to erase. It's the oldest tool there is for controlling a population. Before there were television networks to capture our websites to scrub, every regime that wanted to control the future started by seizing control of the past. That Salin's government, they did not just imprison people, it purged. It removed them from photographs, cut them out of history books, erased their faces from official records until it was as if they had never stood next to the leader at all. The Nazis burned the books first. We remember that. And then they rewrote those textbooks because a population that cannot remember what was true yesterday cannot resist the lie that they are told today. George Orwell put it as plainly as it can possibly be put. Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. I'm not saying that this is Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany, but what I am saying is that the move is always the same, and it always means the same thing. When people in power start deleting the past, it is always intentional. Either they plan to do again the very things they are trying to erase, or they just do not want us to remember, compare, or have proof of how things used to be done before they changed them. Either way, or both ways, they do not want us to be able to measure what they are becoming against what once existed before them. And they are not only erasing the record, they are erasing the debt. When Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people charged in the January 6th attack, he did not just set them free. He released them from the court-ordered restitution they owed for the damage they caused. The full cost of that day to the American taxpayer has been estimated by the government accountability office at $2.7 billion. Of the nearly $3 million in restitution the rioters personally owed, a CBS investigation found that only $437,000, roughly 15%, had ever been repaid. Now even that is gone. The people who smashed the windows, assaulted police officers, hunted lawmakers through the halls of Congress, and helped bring that peaceful transfer of power to the edge of collapse, walked free, owe nothing, and watched the bill land on the rest of us. And we were already being set up for the next part. The 1776, you know, that billion-dollar compensation fund or billion plus compensation fund, which unless stopped, will compensate people who claim they were wrongfully prosecuted under the previous administration. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who is, you know, Trump's former personal criminal defense attorney, refused to rule out that January 6th rioters convicted of violence could be eligible to collect from it. So we must follow the full arc of what they are building. Erase the records of the crimes, erase the debt for the crime, then take taxpayer money and hand it to the people who committed the crime while calling them victims. And make sure everyone watching understands the message being sent because you know this is the most important part. They're saying if you are willing to carry out the next order given by Trump, even if it's illegal or harms the country or turns violent, he will protect you too. January 6th was not just a pardon. It was a signal. I promise to future loyalists that if they stay faithful to the regime, the regime will stay faithful to them, both protecting them criminally and making sure they have money. This latest round of corruption is so blatant that even Republicans are struggling to defend it. Senator Tom Tillis called it bad policy, bad timing, and bad politics. Mitch McConnell called it utterly stupid and morally wrong. Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick vowed to kill it outright. And when the very people who have spent the last year defending Trump are openly calling this corruption, it tells us something important, something is starting to crack. And you know, I say that a lot. We see the cracks. But these are getting bigger. But regardless, we are up against the clock right now to preserve what they are trying to destroy before the damage becomes permanent. And while all of this unfolds, the man who set it in motion has sealed himself inside the White House and is building something beneath it that looks less like a safety feature and more like a post-presidency contingency plan. We learned this past week the details from Trump himself, who walked reporters through the construction. And I'm talking about the ballroom. Beneath the 90,000 square foot ballroom, a complex is being carved six stories into the ground. He described a drone, base on the roof, a military hospital below, and a fortification that rivals anything we've seen built for an American president before. And now as we watch his administration continue to erase and rewrite this country's history, it becomes impossible not to ask exactly what he believes he is preparing for. Because this bunker he is building could very well be where he plans to write out his years after his presidency is supposed to end, if his efforts to hollow out the Constitution are not stopped in time. We need to think about how his mind works and what he wants, not simply what is legal or constitutional, because everything they remove from the public record is a stepping stone towards whatever they plan to erase next. And the logical path this takes eventually leads to our founding documents, our institutions, and the constitutional amendments that protect all of us from his authoritarian power. He does not want to leave office. He has said it as much repeatedly, sometimes jokingly and sometimes not. And this bunker increasingly feels less like emergency preparedness and more like insurance. Insurance against accountability, insurance against unrest, and insurance against a country that may one day finally refuse to comply. And I try not to let my mind wander to these worst-case scenarios because I still hold on to the belief that our lawmakers and courts have lines that even they will not cross. But at this moment, I think it is necessary to say all of this out loud. We have to be prepared for anything, and we need to continue reminding our elected officials that this is not politics as usual. Administrations that are truly committed to protecting our country would never have done any of the things that Trump's administration is doing right now. And we need to stop playing by the same playbook they have relied on for centuries. Trump isn't. We are living through yet another day in America that should have never happened. Governments built around democratic norms do not erase public records, and they certainly do not reward the people responsible for political violence while rewriting them as victims. And as much as I would love to say that we should rest and simply gear up for November, we do not have that luxury. We need to ensure that what they delete is never forgotten. They are betting that if they erase enough pages and pay off enough loyalists and bury enough of it six stories underground, we will get tired and let it go. We cannot do that. We need to keep our own records, including the names of the people enabling this corruption. They cannot delete the entire internet. The more facts, screenshots, archived pages, videos, and evidence that we preserve and share, the harder it will be for them to finish their revision of history. Because one day this evidence may be needed not just for the history books, but also for the investigations and the accountability and eventual trials. Future generations deserve to know exactly what happened here, who enabled it and who resisted it, and how close this country came to losing itself entirely. Authoritarian movements survive by destroying evidence and exhausting the public memory. Our job is to make sure the truth outlives them. But this is the one advantage we have that people resisting past authoritarian takeovers did not have. The people who oppose regimes like Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union or Franco-Spain often relied on hidden journals, whispered testimony, underground newspapers, and whatever scraps of evidence they could smuggle past censorship before they were arrested or killed. Evidence was often formed from the memories of the survivors who lived long enough to tell the story. But now millions of us carry cameras and publishing tools in our pockets. We can preserve documents instantly, duplicate records across the world in seconds, and document abuses as they happen before they can fully disappear. And that matters because authoritarians depend on isolation and memory holes. They depend on people feeling powerless and alone, and on future generations never fully knowing what was done in their name. We do not have to let that happen here. Every record, screenshot, downloaded document, recorded statement, and shared video becomes part of a collective record that they cannot fully erase. And one day, when this period of American history is studied and investigated and judged, that record may become the difference between accountability, impunity, and stopping it from ever happening again. And maybe that is what scares them most, that even if they erase the records, they cannot erase the people who lived through it. They cannot erase our memory. We watched January 6th happen with our own eyes. We watched Trump point his supporters towards the Capitol and we watched them go. We heard them chant hang Mike Pence inside the halls and outside the walls while the vice president was rushed to safety just feet ahead of the mob. We watched them injure more than 140 police officers who stood between them and the lawmakers they were hunting. We know that Congresswoman Madeline Dean had to rip the identifying pin from her chest because being a member of Congress that day made her a target inside her own capitol. And we know what she saw when she walked back in to finish the constitutional duty she had sworn an oath to carry out. Shattered glass, splintered wood, feces smeared across the walls. They defecated in the Capitol. There was nothing American about that day. There was nothing patriotic about it. And the people closest to him knew it as it was happening. Cassidy Hutchinson, who worked as the right hand person to his chief of staff, said it under oath, with the whole country listening. As an American, I was disgusted. It was unpatriotic. It was un-American. And we were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie. And we need to hold on to her statement as proof that the loyalty around this man was never real. It never has been. The people he surrounds himself are loyal to exactly one thing. Their survival the same way he is loyal only to his. He learned that lesson the hard way in his first term, when person after person walked out and told the truth, and he swore he would never let it happen again. Yet here we are. Four members of his cabinet have already left, along with others in leadership positions. And there is a very real possibility that they too will eventually speak publicly about what is happening behind closed doors now, just like so many before have done. And he will not be able to silence them either. So even if he keeps deleting evidence, the truth still lives inside the people who witness it firsthand. Cassidy Hutchinson already showed us exactly what happens when one of them decides that telling the truth is safer than protecting his secrets. The men and women who built their careers around his protection will one by one eventually decide they would rather save themselves. And when they do, there is no website to scrub and no fund large enough to buy back their silence. And that is why I still have hope for America, and you should too. And remember, no matter how dark the days get, I will be here every single day, and together we will always find hope for America. I'll see you tomorrow.