Mother Jones illustration; Valerie Plesch/The Washington Post/Getty
In late March, Ed Martin, then the embattled acting US attorney for DC, showed up at a community meeting at a police station to tout his efforts to combat crime in the district.
Martin politely fielded questions from attendees, even answering one from a man who, citing Martin’s widely condemned description of his office as “President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers,” asked: “How do we as residents trust that you are going to have our back and not be a personal lawyer for the President of the United States, who is a felon and a racist?”
Martin’s Democrats-did-it-first rationalization for this is not just his. It is the lie justifying Trump’s broader effort to weaponize the Justice Department and turn the entire federal government into an instrument of his personal interest.
Martin responded by citing Matthew Graves, who had occupied his position under President Biden. “My predecessor” also “worked for the guy elected president, for his polices, for his vision,” Martin said. “And that was his preference. There is nothing wrong with that.”
“The president ran on an agenda,” Martin added. “The agenda includes major policy initiatives that a prosecutor has a role in. And I certainly, as you know, don’t shy away from being public about those.”
As far as I know, that is the most that Martin, whose nomination Trump pulled Thursday due to opposition by GOP senators, has said publicly in defense of his wildly controversial tenure.
It was a dishonest downplaying of his effort to make the country’s largest prosecutorial office into an instrument of MAGA retribution, but also telling.
As US attorney, Martin fired, demoted, and investigated January 6 prosecutors, threatened to prosecute congressional Democrats for hyperbolic political statements, suggested his office would investigate DOGE critics and former prosecutors faulted by Trump, and harassed medical journals, Wikipedia and Georgetown’s law school with threats to punish them over their speech.
Martin’s remarks at the community meeting justified these actions as merely the GOP-version of what Democratic prosecutors did under Biden. I don’t know if Martin really believes that, but it’s not true.
US attorneys do pursue the policies of presidents who pick them, but within legal and normative limits set by the Constitution, Congress, and longstanding practice. No US attorney, until Martin, volunteered to use his office against critics of government policies, including those who “acted simply unethically” and “chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable.” No other US attorney has reportedly attempted to present a grand jury with evidence for a criminal case against the Minority Leader of the US Senate based on five-year-old criticism of the Supreme Court. Nor has a US attorney personally attempted to use criminal investigative power to seize money from environmental groups awarded contracts by the past administration without having any evidence of a crime.
Martin’s Democrats-did-it-first rationalization for debasing his office is not just his. It is the lie justifying Trump’s broader effort to weaponize the Justice Department and turn the entire federal government into an instrument of his personal interest.
Martin, though only an acting US Attorney, got a torrent of negative press coverage in part because he loudly volunteered himself as the leader of Trump’s crusade to use the DOJ against his political enemies. As we wrote in a March: “In a new administration defined by a mixture of malevolence and ineptitude, Martin has emerged as an avatar: a typo-spewing henchman of the moment, eager to help Trump transform the Justice Department into a political tool—and unable to shut up about it.”
The evident defeat of Martin’s nomination is a loss, though by no means a death knell, for proponents of the unitary executive theory’s claim that Justice Department prosecutors are the president’s lawyers, and have always been.
With Martin, Trump tried to force GOP senators to confirm an unqualified bumbler and extremist just because he is Trump’s “favorite US Attorney.” That didn’t work. That makes Martin’s derailed nomination a defeat for Trump too.
Trump backed off the nomination after Senate Republicans said they lacked the votes to confirm him. The fatal blow came from Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), a judiciary committee member who said he would oppose Martin due to his support for January 6 rioters. In January, after initially appearing to oppose Pete Hegseth’s nomination as defense secretary, Tillis, who is up for reelection next year, buckled amid heavy pressure from Trump and supported the former Fox News host’s confirmation. Though Martin sought a lesser post, Tillis’ decision to stand against his nomination may signal that Trump’s plummeting poll numbers have diminished his power.
The rejection of Martin’s nomiation is also a sign of the limits of Trump’s effort to rewrite the history of January 6 and the lies that led to it. Martin, as Mother Jones has detailed, was a 2020 election truther who was deeply involved in the Stop the Steal organizing. In the aftermath of January 6, he claimed “antifa” was behind the attack, called it a “hoax,” referred to January 6 attackers as “patriots” and said the marauders who were prosecuted should receive “reparations.” Martin has never renounced those claims. As US attorney, he has continued to promote a conspiracy theory suggesting that the FBI helped plan January 6. He even railed against January 6 prosecutions while appearing, in his official capacity, at a March fundraiser attended by convicted seditionists and an alleged Nazi sympathizer who Martin later tried to distance himself from.
Installing Martin as the head of the office that prosecuted 1,600 people for the attack was a deliberate provocation to anyone, including Republican senators, who rejects Trump’s effort to redefine a deadly attempt to stop the peaceful transfer of power as a “day of love.” Ed Martin is a minor figure. But his defeat is a significant sign that Trump’s power to make the government accept his lies is ebbing.
