Episode Details

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.