Bill Pulte and Ed Martin's shitposting legal strategy
It's backfired so spectacularly that now *they're* the ones being investigated.
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The end of the Jim Comey and Letitia James cases was a humiliation for the Justice Department. It was also an object lesson in the danger of relying on incompetent nitwits.
After weeks of watching Florida insurance lawyer Lindsey Halligan flail around like a toddler trying to teach calculus, the cases canceled out to a big fat zero. In some sense, this was a blessing, since it spared Halligan the ignominy of watching some of the best attorneys in the country dissect her hilariously botched prosecutions.
And it should serve as a warning about the perils of crowdsourcing legal research to literal randos on the internet. But it won’t.
Garbage in
Two of those self-appointed crowdsourcers are Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte and Justice Department hack of all trades Ed Martin.
Pulte is the nepobaby of a homebuilding empire whose own family has been loudly distancing itself from him for years. His latest fumbles involve sharing confidential mortgage pricing data between Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — two agencies he purports to lead simultaneously — and talking the president into supporting 50-year mortgages, an idea so unpopular that the administration immediately memory-holed it.
At 37, Pulte has no experience in the mortgage industry, and it shows! But that’s not really relevant, since Pulte’s main job appears to be pawing through confidential financial documents to invent crimes to pin on Democrats. With his access to mortgage records of virtually every American, his spelunking has led him to make “criminal referrals” of longtime Trump foes Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff, Federal Reserve Board Member Lisa Cook, and Rep. Eric Swalwell.
Real criminal referrals are made to the Justice Department confidentially, but Pulte prefers to post his on X.
Despite his performative menace, though, none of Pulte’s allegations have led to criminal prosecutions. After James’s lawyer Abbe Lowell publicly dogwalked Pulte’s flimsy claims about his client, Halligan charged James in connection with an entirely different property in Virginia.
The efforts to indict Schiff have come up empty, as well, with federal prosecutors in Maryland pointedly refusing to charge the California senator with the mortgage fraud Pulte trumpeted. US Attorney Kelly Hayes reportedly expects to be fired for failing to deliver the required political scalp, as was Halligan’s predecessor Erik Seibert in Virginia.
Pulte’s trusty sidekick for this retribution roadtrip is Ed Martin, a lawyer so patently unstable that the Republican Senate refused to confirm him as US attorney for DC.
Martin refers to himself as “Eagle Ed” after a disastrous association with Phyllis Schlaffly’s Eagle Forum that led to a schism that pitted the doyenne of bigotry against her own children. After a brief stint as interim US attorney in the nation’s capital, he was shunted off to Justice Department headquarters and given several titles, including United States Pardon Attorney, Special Attorney for Mortgage Fraud, and Associate Deputy Attorney General Director of the Weaponization Working Group.
Martin’s calling card is a vaguely menacing threat letter posted to X citing “requests for information, clarification, and official comment” and demanding that the recipients confess to various crimes against woke. Recipients include Georgetown Law School, Chuck Schumer, and a medical journal of pulmonary disorders called CHEST. He once threatened Wikipedia’s tax exempt status for corrupting AI models by leaving biased information where ChatGPT might scrape it.
“Hey @Wikipedia: you can run but you can’t hide!” he tweeted gleefully.
(As this newsletter was being finalized, Anna Bower of Lawfare noted that Martin used his X account earlier this month to boost a conspiracy theory accusing a woman who turned out to be innocent of being the J6 pipebomber.)
In August, Martin sent AG James a letter saying he would take it as “an act of good faith” if she would resign from office for the good of the nation. He also showed up outside her Brooklyn home for a photoshoot with the New York Post. James’s lawyers mocked him for sporting an “Inspector Gadget-inspired beige trenchcoat, in the middle of an August summer day,” although he seems to be aiming for TV detective Columbo instead.
Martin and Pulte have been cagey about the source of their investigative leads. Pulte mumbles darkly about whistleblower protections, although his agency maintains a tipline where anyone can submit accusations.
Martin’s letters allude cryptically to unnamed members of the public demanding answers. But it turns out that their sources may be even bigger cranks than they are.
Garbage out
Pulte and Martin featured prominently in James’s motion to dismiss for outrageous government misconduct. She suggests that the FHFA director “relied exclusively on a single fringe blogger’s ‘evidence’” and then went rummaging through her private financial records to support his claim.
That blogger is Sam Antar, the convicted felon who masterminded the spectacular fraud inside the Crazy Eddie’s appliance chain. He’s now refashioned himself as a forensic accountant helping to ferret out fraudulent schemes. His post on Roger Stone’s “Stone Zone” in March contained many of the allegations that wound up in Pulte’s referral letter. And he’s very PLEASE DON’T PUT IN THE PAPER THAT I GOT MAD about being called “fringe.”
Martin and Pulte’s source for “dirt” on Schiff appears to be a California realtor and longshot Republican congressional candidate named Christine Bish. ABC reports that FBI investigators reached out to Bish, who “expressed confusion about why federal investigators sought to speak with her again, telling agents that she had repeatedly spoken with a man she believed worked for the Department of Justice as Ed Martin’s lead investigator, sources said.”
According to ABC and MSNOW, Bish has messaged with Pulte over X, as well as with two men who represented themselves as Justice Department employees working with Martin. One is Robert Bowes, who appears to work in the Office of Personnel Management; the other is Scott Strauss, a former federal prosecutor who left the government in 2020. Neither has any authority to investigate Schiff, and yet both have spoken to Bish extensively about her allegations. Indeed, Bowes has reportedly accessed grand jury information and discussed it on right-wing LindellTV.
Bish confirmed to the Washington Post that she supplied the highlighted Schiff mortgage document posted by Trump in July.
“I’m the author of the report that initiated the DOJ referral, and I’m the key witness. I would know if this case was going nowhere,” she tweeted on November 16. “I’ll be in Maryland next week to lock down the key points.”
At least part of that is true. Bish was indeed in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Thursday discussing the Schiff case — but not in precisely the manner she’d hoped. Because all this freelancing by people who are not part of the investigative team is distinctly unhelpful if you’re actually trying to build a federal case. Those communications have to be disclosed to the defendant during discovery, after which they tend to appear in motions to dismiss for selective and vindictive prosecution and/or prosecutorial misconduct. The Guardian reports the grand jury is now investigating the potential illegal disclosure of grand jury materials.
So instead of her star turn as accusatory witness, Bish found herself answering questions about her communications with Pulte and Martin and their associated goons. Plus she got a fun party favor to take home with her.
It’s a subpoena requesting all her communications with the DO UR OWN RESEARCH crew, as well as any communications with the FHFA inspector general. By sheer coincidence — or not! — Pulte just fired the FHFA inspector general, along with multiple ethics officials at Fannie Mae who questioned the legality of their boss rummaging through the financial records of the president’s enemies.
Multiple media outlets have reported that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is overseeing the inquiry into Pulte and Martin’s antics. Turns out having two high profile cases fall apart on the same day makes the DOJ a little jumpy about unqualified goobers mucking around in their cases.
And meanwhile, Rep. Eric Swalwell celebrated his entrance into the California gubernatorial race by suing Pulte in federal court for violating privacy laws and the First Amendment.
There is no universe in which this Justice Department prosecutes administration officials for leaking grand jury materials. But if these 4chan escapees wind up boning the DOJ’s political persecutions, it will be some minute measure of justice.
That’s it for today
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It's hard to tell which is greater. The aky- high level of this administrations vindictiveness or their monumental incompetence. How on earth did these malicious clowns get into government??
I am so appreciative of your use of adjectives that make reading about current events bearable.