Did the Department of Justice delete President Donald Trump's pardons from its website? No, that's not true: The list of pardons and commutations on the "Clemency Grants" page of the Office of the Pardon Attorney on the Justice Department website was missing for hours, if not more than a day. The list was not on the site starting sometime between Sept. 20 and Sept. 21, 2026, and returned on Sept. 22, 2026, according to the Internet Archive.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) by the @MeidasTouch account on Facebook on Sept. 22, 2026. It read:
🚨 Trump's Department of Justice just removed every single one of Trump's pardons from their website. Unfortunately for them, we saved them all before before [sic] they did. [list follows]
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @MeidasTouch on Facebook.)
Lead Stories used the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library that operates the Wayback Machine, which allows users to view more than 800 billion archived web pages, to document the approximate timeframe when the list of presidential clemency grants was not on the Department of Justice (DOJ) website.
Snapshots of the Office of the Pardon Attorney webpage show when the list was last recorded on the site, when it was missing, and when it returned online:
List on the website: Sept. 20, 2026, 15:40:34 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)
List off the website: Sept. 21, 2026, 19:41:41 UTC
List back on the website: Sept. 22, 2026, 15:40:25 UTC
Because snapshots are not continuous, the exact times the list disappeared and reappeared remain unknown.
This is what the screenshot of the archived page from the DOJ looked like when the list was not published:
(Image source: Internet Archive.)
This is what a screenshot of the DOJ website looked like at the time of writing:
(Image source: justice.gov.)
Lead Stories reached out to the DOJ for an explanation, but did not receive an immediate reply.
