Since his return to power, Donald Trump has launched a barrage of lawsuits against US media companies and tech firms, securing tens of millions of dollars in settlements.
With his threatened $5bn defamation suit against the BBC over its edit of his speech on 6 January 2021, broadcast on Panorama last year, the president has now gone global in his campaign against the press.
But the latest suit serves another purpose: since returning from the political wilderness, Trump has been obsessed with trying to rewrite the history of the fatal riot at the Capitol and the stain it left on his reputation.
On the president’s orders, a new Republican-led committee has launched a second House investigation into January 6, revisiting the findings of the original panel that recommended criminal charges against Trump in 2022. Echoing the president, House Republicans have argued that the previous Democratic-led investigation was biased. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said the new panel will “uncover the full truth that is owed to the American people”.
“I think the original committee did some of the same type of editing that the BBC did, where they tried to enhance certain things and downplay or disregard others,” Virginia congressman Morgan Griffith, one of the Republicans on the new panel, told The Observer.
“You start off with a stacked deck, as we might say, a jury that has been tainted right from the get-go,” he added. “I believe they set out to tell a narrative, to tell a story … that it was all President Trump’s fault.”
On his first day back in office last January, Trump pardoned some 1,500 people charged in connection with the Capitol attack, including leaders of far-right militias the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. In the weeks that followed, prosecutors and agents who worked on January 6 cases, including the Trump investigation, were purged from the Justice Department and FBI. Earlier this month, the president pardoned scores of allies indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election, including his former lawyer Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
In a proclamation, Trump said the pardons would “end a grave national injustice” and “continue the process of national reconciliation”. Piece by piece, the largest criminal investigation in American history is being dismantled and erased.
Trump supporters breach US Capitol security on 6 January 2021
Aided by allies in Congress and the conservative press, Trump’s team has also waged a relentless campaign against perceived media bias in the reporting of January 6. Ahead of the inauguration, Karoline Leavitt, now the White House press secretary, claimed that “the mainstream media still refuses to report the truth about what happened that day.”
The BBC has thereby handed Trump an open goal. Panorama’s error in splicing together separate excerpts of the president’s speech to create the impression that he had explicitly called for violence at the Capitol, only fuels the White House narrative that the history of the riot, which played out on global television, was prejudiced from the outset. But for a heavy snowstorm that blew into Washington on the eve of his inauguration in January, Trump would have taken the oath of office on the very steps of the Capitol where his supporters fought hand-to-hand with police four years earlier.
Hundreds of rioters stormed Congress in a last-ditch effort to halt certification of Joe Biden’s victory. The violence erupted into an armed siege at the doors of the House of Representatives where one woman was shot dead. About 140 police officers were injured. One died the next day. Four more took their own lives in the weeks that followed.
In the wake of the riot, Trump’s political career appeared to be over. Over nine blockbuster hearings in 2022, a congressional inquiry laid out evidence of a sprawling conspiracy by Trump and his associates to subvert US democracy with false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
In testimony from Trump’s White House staff, the committee heard the president refused to act for hours as the Capitol was breached, his supporters calling for his vice president, Mike Pence, to be hanged.
“The central cause of January 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed,” the committee said in its final report, recommending criminal charges against him. “None of the events of January 6 would have happened without him.”
‘I believe the original panel set out to tell a narrative, to tell a story … that it was all President Trump’s fault’
Morgan Griffith, Republican member of new investigation
It was not until August 2023, however, that special counsel Jack Smith brought a federal indictment against Trump for the attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat and his involvement in the Capitol attack. By then, the former president was already the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.
As he mounted his extraordinary political comeback Trump leaned into the narrative that had emerged among his Maga base. Rioters who were filmed beating police officers and marauding through the halls of Congress were now cast as political prisoners, martyrs for the cause. The Washington detention centre where hundreds were held in sordid conditions behind walls topped with razor wire became a place of vigil.
“I call them the ‘J-6 hostages’, not prisoners. I call them the hostages … and it’s a shame,” Trump said at a rally in Houston in November 2023.
As his own legal troubles mounted, Trump cast himself and the rioters as victims of the same weaponised justice system. His conviction on 34 felony counts over hush money payments to a porn star, becoming the first US president to be convicted of a crime, only cemented that bond.
While the federal court in Washington continued to jail his supporters, many claiming in their defence that Trump had incited them to violence, the Republican nominee for the White House inverted the history of January 6 on the campaign trail, declaring it “a day of love”.
Like the “Russiagate” affair that consumed his first presidency and the scandal surrounding his ties to Jeffrey Epstein that has plagued his second, the riot at the Capitol was now brushed off as “a hoax” invented by his political enemies.
“January 6, what a lot of crap. And most of this country knows it,” he said at one rally. “And you know who else knows it? The Democrats. It's another con job … This was made up by Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, a total fake story.”
Since taking back the White House, Trump has set about using the power of the presidency to whitewash the history of January 6 and take retribution on his enemies.
‘It’s all an attempt to erase this black mark or shade people’s memory of what happened – something we all watched happen with our own eyes’
Michael Gordon, former prosecutor
Fifteen junior DoJ prosecutors who had worked on Capitol cases were fired on inauguration day, followed soon after by a dozen members of Smith’s team who had investigated the president himself. In a deliberate act of humiliation, three veteran DoJ officials were demoted to posts far below their station at the end of February, including Greg Rosen, the head of the January 6 task force.
“It's all an attempt to erase this black mark or shade people’s memory of what happened – something we all watched happen with our own eyes,” said Michael Gordon, a former prosecutor who brought cases against some of the most notorious rioters and was fired in June by Pam Bondi, the attorney general.
“January 6 is the blackest mark among a sea of black marks on President Trump's leadership. Nothing like that has ever happened in our history. That is and should be a source of great shame, and I think the president and his followers want to absolve themselves of all responsibility.”
Gordon and two other former DoJ staffers have sued the Trump administration for wrongful termination. He said the president’s pardons for rioters who his team had put behind bars, including members of neo-Nazi groups, were “an absolute punch to the gut, the head, the heart for all of us”.
He is incredulous that in the new reality being built around January 6, members of the Proud Boys who were convicted of seditious conspiracy, have sued the government for $100m. In the lawsuit, the far-right militants claimed they were the victims of “political persecution” for being “allies of President Trump”.
Gordon laments that the DoJ, now haemorrhaging talent in the face of Bondi’s purge, has become a tool of Trump’s retribution, as the president orders investigations of his opponents via social media.
“The Department of Justice has become not only an entity that I don’t recognise, but one I’m scared of,” he said. “The test no longer seems to be what do the facts and the law require, but rather, what does the president want? That is the stuff of third world dictatorships.”
The BBC controversy has been noticed on Capitol Hill as the new House committee gets to work, however.
The broadcaster has apologised to the president, conceding that the Panorama edit gave “the mistaken impression that President Trump had made a direct call for violent action”. But it has refused to pay compensation, adding that it “strongly disagrees there is a basis for a defamation claim”.
Trump advisers have claimed the previous panel destroyed evidence, prompting the president to argue that lawmakers on the first committee should be jailed.
Griffith said the first committee, with only two Republican members, was “so biased against President Trump they really weren’t in a position to actually investigate. I believe a fair amount of the information was at the very least obfuscated, if not destroyed. I know there’s things out there that have not yet been put on the table.”
“I don't want to write a different narrative,” Griffith insisted. “It is my goal that we put it all out there … so that history can judge.”
Photograph By Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images, Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images