From the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, he and his administration have prioritized purging the history of Jan. 6, from his blanket pardons of Trump-backed rioters to firing agents and prosecutors who did their jobs in bringing cases against people who broke the law, including those who attacked law enforcement officers that day in 2021.
The latest example comes in the sentencing of Taylor Taranto, scheduled for Thursday. His Jan. 6 charges were dismissed due to the president’s Day 1 command, but he was convicted this year of separate crimes he committed in 2023.
Ahead of his sentencing, two prosecutors on his case filed a memorandum Tuesday that referred to Jan. 6 and Trump — after which they were placed on leave, the Justice Department withdrew their memo, and new prosecutors came in and filed a new one Wednesday without mentioning Jan. 6 or Trump.
The initial 14-page memo, signed by prosecutors Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White, recounted that “On January 6, 2021, thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol while a joint session of Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election.” It further noted that Taranto “was accused of participating in the riot in Washington, D.C., by entering the U.S. Capitol Building,” and that he later “returned to his home in the State of Washington, where he promoted conspiracy theories about the events of January 6, 2021.”
Those words are not in the new 12-page memo from prosecutors Travis Wolf and Jonathan Hornok, the latter being chief of the criminal division for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington. The D.C. office is led by Jeanine Pirro, whose name is on both documents, too.
The deleted Trump reference relates more directly to the 2023 charges for which Taranto is set be sentenced. He was found guilty at a bench trial in May by U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, of carrying two firearms without a license and unlawful possession of ammunition, and of violating a law against spreading false information and hoaxes.
The initial memo recalled that “on June 29, 2023, then-former President Donald Trump published on a social media platform the purported address of former President Barack Obama.” It further said that Taranto “re-posted the address on the same platform and thereafter started livestreaming from his van on his YouTube channel,” and that he “broadcast footage of himself as he drove through the Kalorama neighborhood in Washington, D.C., claiming he was searching for ‘tunnels’ he believed would provide him access to the private residences of certain high-profile individuals, including former President Obama.” Law enforcement swept Taranto’s van for hazardous materials and recovered two firearms and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
The reference to Trump posting Obama’s address is also not in the new memo, nor is the reference to Taranto reposting the address. Scrubbing any Trump connection to criminality required sanitizing the full narrative of Taranto’s conduct. In the new version, he appears in Obama’s neighborhood from thin air.
Both the Jan. 6 and Trump references were statements of fact. Indeed, the now-suspended prosecutors didn’t call the people at the Capitol in 2021 “insurrectionists” but rather used the tamer term “rioters.” Yet even that milder account seems to have been too much for the administration to bear. The new memo doesn’t offer a different version of that day. It deleted that day. Maybe that is the administration’s version.
An irony here is that Taranto himself sought to connect his 2023 charges to Jan. 6. He did so in a failed effort to get Trump’s Jan. 6 clemency and dismissal order to wipe out his 2023 charges, too. Notably, the Trump DOJ disagreed with Taranto about the order’s applicability to his later charges (as did Judge Nichols). Importantly, the new memo doesn’t reflect a change in overall prosecutorial strategy. It’s largely the same, aside from those glaring omissions. Like the initial filing, it seeks a 27-month prison sentence, which both memos observe is at the top of the federal sentencing guidelines range in this case. Both memos note that Taranto’s actions “caused the evacuation of a residential neighborhood and forced law enforcement agents from multiple agencies to respond to his false bomb hoax.” They both argue that the requested sentence “reflects the gravity of Taranto’s conduct, his lack of remorse, and the need to deter him and others from engaging in similar threatening conduct.” Obviously, the judge knows what happened in the case; removing that background information isn’t going to change the sentence he hands down. But the judge is only technically the audience here. The real one is the president (and perhaps any other DOJ lawyers who might be tempted to publish unflattering truths about him). The bottom-line similarity between the memos makes the revision that much more unnecessary, which, in turn, makes it that much more pathetic and concerning for apparently having been prompted by the delicacy of the president’s feelings. In the end, the attempt to rewrite history on his behalf backfires by highlighting, via their transparent omission, the facts he can’t erase. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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