Supported by Digital Ocean
Sponsor: Digital Ocean

Dream it. Build it. Grow it. Sign up now and you'll be up and running on DigitalOcean in just minutes.

US Mint, For Entirely Unknowable Reasons, Memory-Holes Jan. 6 Commemorative Medals

Brandi Buchman breaks this story for HuffPost

Commemorative bronze duplicates of the Congressional Gold Medal awarded to Jan. 6 police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol appear to have been removed for sale from the U.S. Mint’s website.

There’s also this apparently independent report from NBC News where the author, Ryan J. Reilly, describes the removal as:

another instance of President Donald Trump’s administration moving to take down material related to the violent episode stemming from his falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election results.

I saw this just days after I questioned if some US Mint coins this administration might deem “woke DEI” would even get minted today, so I was immediately outraged, but held off on linking to it. As tempting as it was to unleash righteous indignation on Trump for this, I didn't want my confirmation bias leading me to the wrong conclusion about a change that could have a perfectly innocuous and reasonable explanation. After all, there was only the HuffPost report (and later, the NBC one), with no indication of why or when this medal was removed. 

The why remains uncertain, but the when has a smidge more clarity: The Internet Archive’s January 9, 2025 snapshot of the US Mint’s Medals page shows an entry for “Those Who Protected the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.” I presume it’s the medal in question. That page has a “last updated on” date of November 26, 2024.

(The Medals page lists all medals available from the US Mint.)

February 22, 2025 snapshot—with a “last updated on” date of February 5, 2025—does not list the medal.

I can therefore say with some confidence that this entry—and, I presume, the medal—was removed sometime between November 26, 2024 and February 5, 2025. That’s a pretty broad window, spanning the last months of the Biden administration and the first weeks of Trump’s.

I can also say with confidence that the only change to the page was, in fact, the removal of that one medal entry.

A screenshot of two web pages, the left (Nov. 6, 2024) showing the name of the commemorative medal, the right (Feb. 5, 2025) showing it missing.
A diff of the contents of the two web pages. Left from Nov. 6, 2024; right from Feb. 5, 2025

This is not dispositive. It’s possible the Biden administration or the US Mint decided—for completely practical, pragmatic, and uncontroversial reasons—to remove this medal from the site.

The alternative is to suggest that Donald Trump—who denied the insurrectionpardoned 1,500 rioters, purged Department of Justice prosecutors and FBI agents who worked the Jan. 6 cases, scrubbed the DOJ’s “comprehensive website cataloguing the largest criminal investigation in modern department history,” and has liedrepeatedly about Jan. 6—directed the US Mint to remove a commemorative medal “Honoring the service and sacrifice of those who protected the U.S. Capitol” on Jan. 6.

It’s quite the coin flip.

⚙︎