A Memorial Day Where the Government Honored the Wrong People
Memorial Day is built around a quiet promise. We remember the people who died for the country so the rest of us can keep showing up to honor what they died for. Last week, the Justice Department broke that promise in broad daylight.
While most of us were planning cookouts, the DOJ quietly scrubbed its website clean of every news release tied to the prosecution of January 6 rioters. Charges. Convictions. Sentencings. Gone. The department’s Rapid Response account on X did not deny it. According to the Associated Press, officials called years of careful prosecutorial documentation “partisan propaganda” and announced they were “proud to reverse” what they framed as weaponization under the Biden administration.
Let that phrase sit. Partisan propaganda. That was the label applied to court records about people who beat police officers with flagpoles and crutches.
According to the U.S. Capitol Police, nearly 150 law enforcement officers were injured defending the building on January 6, 2021. Five officers connected to that day are no longer alive. Officer Brian Sicknick died of strokes after being assaulted by the mob. Four others, Howard Liebengood, Jeffrey Smith, Kyle DeFreytag, and Gunther Hashida, died by suicide in the weeks and months that followed. We are supposed to spend this weekend honoring people who died serving the country. The Justice Department spent last week erasing the names of the people who attacked them.
And that was only Act One.
Act Two arrived Monday, when Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a $1.776 billion fund, according to a Justice Department press release. The number is a wink at the founding year. The fund itself is a settlement vehicle Trump arranged with himself, growing out of his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, according to reporting by Time magazine. Per the agreement, Trump and his sons receive a formal apology, no cash, and in exchange the taxpayer foots the bill for a roughly $1.8 billion pot for anyone the administration believes was a victim of “lawfare and weaponization.”
Asked Monday why taxpayers should pay the January 6 rioters, Trump didn’t dodge. According to Yahoo News, the president answered, “This is reimbursing people that were horribly treated.” Blanche has refused to rule out payouts to people convicted of violent acts that day. Separately, the Trump administration agreed to a nearly $5 million settlement with the family of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by Capitol Police while breaching the Speaker’s Lobby, according to the Associated Press.
Here is the picture on Memorial Day 2026. We are a country where the public record of an attempted insurrection is being scrubbed from federal servers. We are a country where the architect of that attempt is writing big checks to the people who carried it out. And we are a country where the same administration that calls itself the law and order party quietly vacated the seditious conspiracy convictions of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, a request a federal appeals court granted last Thursday, according to AP.
What a government chooses to remember tells us what it values. What a government chooses to forget tells us the same thing, even louder. This one is remembering the rioters and forgetting the cops. It is writing checks to one and erasing the casualty list of the other. It is asking us, on the weekend we set aside to honor sacrifice, to pretend the sacrifice never happened.
We don’t have to pretend. We can read the court records. We can say the names out loud. We can remember the actual story. That is the only Memorial Day worth keeping. Go beyond the headlines…
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