Shortly after the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, the political right spent a lot of time parsing whether the word “insurrection” was an apt description of the day’s events.
Today, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is apparently sanctioning its own prosecutors for calling January 6 a mere “mob of rioters.”
It’s difficult to fully convey just how brazen Trump’s efforts to rewrite the history of the day have become. He’s spent years trying to turn people who launched the worst attack on the US Capitol in two centuries into sympathetic figures. He even pardoned a bunch of people who assaulted police that day, despite more than 8 in 10 Americans opposing that.
But sometimes something comes along that completely drives the whole thing home.
That’s what happened this week, in the case of Taylor Taranto.
To recap: Taranto was among those pardoned by Trump for his actions on January 6. But before that pardon, he committed an unrelated crime. In 2023, he was arrested in former President Barack Obama’s Washington, DC, neighborhood with numerous firearms and materials to make explosives. He was convicted in May.
By late Tuesday, a reporter at Politico noted something interesting: Prosecutors in their sentencing memo for Taranto noted his presence in the “mob of rioters” on January 6.
“Taranto was accused of participating in the riot in Washington, D.C., by entering the U.S. Capitol Building,” the sentencing memo said. “After the riot, Taranto returned to his home in the State of Washington, where he promoted conspiracy theories about the events of January 6, 2021.”
This wouldn’t normally be surprising, mind you. It’s a factual statement that notes the defendant isn’t a newcomer to legal trouble.
But it was notable next to Trump’s own rhetoric about January 6 – and given the Trump DOJ’s efforts to force out a batch of prosecutors who tried January 6 cases.
Sure enough, mere hours later the prosecutors on the case – Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White – were placed on leave. Then their sentencing memo was pulled from the docket and replaced with a new one, signed by different prosecutors, that excised the paragraph on January 6.
And just in case it wasn’t clear that the changes were made to benefit Trump, consider another change to the sentencing memo.
The other interesting aspect of Taranto’s crime is Trump’s proximity to it. In fact, Taranto was apprehended near Obama’s home shortly after Trump reshared a post that included an alleged address for the former president to social media. Prosecutors said Taranto began livestreaming in the area shortly after promoting Trump’s post.
The new sentencing memo also removed a reference to that fact.
The US attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, declined to shed light on why the prosecutors were put on leave.
“I think the papers speak for themselves, and what goes on in this office is not something that I’m going to comment on. Thank you,” Pirro said.
We still have plenty to learn about what happened here. But it’s one of the most glaring examples of the fruits of Trump’s long-running campaign to retcon January 6 – and to turn it into anything other than a tragic day for our country and our democracy.
After the dust settled on that day, Trump and some allies in Congress began suggestively questioning how violent the day was, with one GOP congressman infamously comparing it to a “normal tourist visit.”
After Trump launched his 2024 campaign, he began featuring a music video from a choir of January 6 defendants that effectively lionized them. He began talking about the defendants as if they were ill-treated political “hostages,” often citing misinformation in the process.
Then he, on his first day back in office, pardoned nearly all of them – even the worst offenders.
But that was merely the first step.
We’ve also seen a purge of dozens of prosecutors who tried January 6 cases, despite them merely enforcing the law. Trump’s Justice Department agreed to settle a wrongful death suit for $5 million with the family of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed after breaking into a sensitive area of the Capitol, cementing her status as a martyr for some portions of the extreme right. The administration has also pressured the Smithsonian, which has in some cases softened its language about the events that day. The president and allies have continued to overhype relatively minor disclosures about the government’s actions vis-a-vis January 6, which took place while Trump was in office, as if they proved a massive conspiracy against Trump and the GOP. The House is now undertaking an investigation that appears aimed at recasting the narrative of that day.
Oh, and we recently learned Trump is reportedly seeking $230 million from his own government for alleged damages from the January 6 probe and other federal investigations. (Trump was never tried in these cases, which were dropped after he was reelected president, but nor was he acquitted.)
If anything epitomizes Trump’s attempts to turn those who fueled what happened on January 6 into victims, it’s surely that. Even if you don’t think Trump committed a crime, the people who attacked the Capitol were clearly spurred by his lies about voter fraud and the supposedly stolen election.
Trump just keeps pushing the envelope here, and we keep seeing that manifest itself in actions by his Justice Department and his administration.
The question from there is whether he’s able to actually rewrite history in Americans’ minds.
To this point, that’s been a tough slog. Trump’s pardons of violent January 6 defendants were overwhelmingly unpopular. Strong majorities of Americans still regard that day as an attack against democracy.
But we’ve also seen a steady downgrading of the right’s views on that day.
By mid-2021, a Monmouth University poll showed 62% of Republicans labeled that day a “riot,” and 33% called it an “insurrection.” Two years later, though, those numbers dropped significantly – to 44% and 15%, respectively.
In that way, the erasure of the “mob of rioters” from the memo reflects how the political right has come to view that day.
But that doesn’t mean it’s a reflection of the truth.
This story has been updated with additional details.