Ed Martin wages war on the rule of law from within
He's turning the DC US attorney's office into a MAGA protection racket.
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There is perhaps no one so emblematic of what “justice” means to Donald Trump as Ed Martin, his nominee to be US attorney for the District of Columbia. Martin is already the interim head and has spent the first several weeks on the job being a pugnacious bully. No wonder Trump loves him.
Martin’s disdain for the rule of law is shockingly comprehensive and his relevant legal experience is egregiously limited. He’s never been a prosecutor before. Instead, he was a rightwing radio host and worked for Phyllis Schlafly, a woman who spent her career trying to make sure women don’t have equal rights. He even co-authored a 2016 book with her, “The Conservative Case for Trump,” which obsequiously praised Trump as “an old-fashioned man” who was “grounded in his two great priorities — hard work and family — and a man who in other respects has led a remarkably clean life.” (lol)
Martin’s real value to Trump is his unwavering commitment to The Big Lie. He was one of the organizers of January 6’s Stop the Steal coup rally and went on to defend three rioters. Martin’s sense of ethics is so shaky, or perhaps his knowledge of the law so limited, that he signed off, as a prosecutor, on a motion to dismiss the case against convicted cop-beater Jose Padilla after Trump’s mass pardon of J6 rioters.
One tiny problem: Martin was still a defense counsel of record for Padilla when he flipped on his prosecutor hat and dismissed the charges, and he didn’t get around to withdrawing as defense counsel until nearly two weeks after he moved to dismiss the charges. Hilariously, the court then had to inform him he wasn’t allowed to file that withdrawal because he failed to file an attorney renewal with the DC federal courts as required and therefore was not in good standing.
Needless to say, this is not how things normally work. Indeed, it’s wildly unethical. But Martin tried to handwave it away, saying he hadn’t worked on the cases for over a year, he’d taken them pro bono, and was “under the impression that I was off the cases.” Most lawyers would likely think to check whether they were still the attorney of record on a case, but Ed Martin is not most lawyers.
Martin’s ethical failure here isn’t based on some technical or difficult-to-parse rule. Every lawyer in every American jurisdiction is bound by some version of an ethics rule prohibiting them from representing clients when there is a conflict of interest. But you don’t need to be a lawyer to understand the problem here. Martin was literally on both sides of the case, using his power as a prosecutor to dismiss charges against a defendant he was simultaneously representing. There’s no more blatant conflict of interest than that, and Martin now faces a bar complaint in Missouri over it.
Martin also dismissed all the prosecutors in the office who worked on January 6 cases and is now conducting an internal probe over them, assigning two of the office’s most senior prosecutors to that nonsense task.
But Martin’s ethical issues aren’t limited to his enthusiasm for violent insurrectionists.
For Trump’s friends, everything; for his enemies, threats
Martin’s refusal to sign off on an arrest warrant for hardcore MAGA Florida Rep. Cory Mills manages to be both breathtakingly corrupt and downright disgusting, a scandal that would’ve dominated news cycles during any previous administration.
Last month, the Metropolitan DC Police responded to a call at Mills’s residence. A 27-year-old woman who is not Mills’s wife, Sarah Raviani, reported that the congressman had “grabbed her, shoved her, and pushed her out of the door” and showed the officers fresh bruises. She also let the police officers hear a recorded call between her and Mills where he instructed her to lie about how she got the bruises. Eventually, when Mills talked to the police, he admitted that “the situation escalated from verbal to physical, but it was severe enough to create bruising.”
After police informed Mills he would be arrested, the woman recanted. Sadly, this is not uncommon in instances of domestic violence. It’s also not dispositive as to whether someone should be charged. DC officers must arrest someone if they have probable cause to believe they committed an act of domestic violence resulting in injury or pain. However, they didn’t arrest Mills and instead, weirdly, issued a second police report saying it was just a “family disturbance” and there was no probable cause to arrest him. Then, they flipped again, issuing a third version of the police report that now said it was an assault and was being investigated.
Here’s where Ed Martin comes in. Washington DC is the only place in the country where the US Attorney’s Office handles state and local prosecutions as well as prosecuting federal crimes. So, the arrest warrant for Mills was sent to Martin, who declined to sign it.
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Regrettably, it’s unsurprising that a Trump appointee would not treat allegations of domestic violence or assault seriously. Trump himself, of course, was found liable for having sexually abused writer E. Jean Carroll. His secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has been accused of sexual assault, as has his secretary of health and human services, RFK Jr. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon is in the middle of a lawsuit over whether she and her husband, WWE head Vince McMahon, allowed an employee to sexually abuse teenage boys.
There’s also the fact that Martin doesn’t see himself as a prosecutor who works on behalf of victims of crimes. Instead, he sees himself as one of Trump’s lawyers, there to protect Trump’s interests and attack people on Trump's behalf.
Martin threatened to charge Sen. Chuck Schumer over a fairly anodyne political statement he made in 2020 saying Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh “have released the whirlwind” and “will pay the price” if they overturned abortion rights. Schumer walked the remarks back the next day, but Martin nonetheless made noises about prosecuting this five years later as a “true threat.” Martin also sent a letter to Rep. Robert Garcia threatening to investigate him over a comment he made on MSNBC about how the American public wants Democrats to “bring actual weapons to this bar fight” against the Trump administration.
The statements from Schumer and Garcia are clearly protected speech, but this isn’t the only way in which Martin’s grasp of the First Amendment is poor. While he was literally sitting in the courtroom at the government’s counsel table during the Associated Press’s motion for a temporary restraining order over Trump barring the outlet from press access over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” a statement popped up on the official X account of the DC US attorney’s office. Attributed to Martin himself, it said, "As President Trumps' [sic] lawyers, we are proud to fight to protect his leadership as our President and we are vigilant in standing against entities like the AP that refuse to put America first."
Setting aside the fact that US attorneys are not “Trump’s lawyers,” but instead represent the people in their district, Martin also essentially admitted to the First Amendment violation the AP has alleged: that the administration is retaliating against them for their protected speech. Martin’s post on X was an enthusiastic endorsement of retaliation, agreeing that the AP is being punished because they won’t use the government’s preferred name.
Besides seeing himself as Trump’s personal lawyer, Martin also seems eager to fill the same role for Elon Musk.
On February 3, Martin posted a simpering letter to Musk on X begging him to “utilize me and my staff to assist in protecting the DOGE work and the DOGE workers.” Just in case Elon didn’t get the message, Martin followed up with another letter on X four days later. In this one, he thanked Elon for referring people to him for investigation, a thing normal prosecutors do not do. He then turned the bluster up a notch, saying that if people were found to have broken a law “or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them and we will chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable.”
It’s unclear how Martin thinks a federal prosecutor can prosecute people for things Musk don’t like instead of breaking laws, much less how he could chase them to the end of the Earth. But he closed his missive by declaring that “a safe DC is a priority for President Trump and all of us.”
This is a truly deranged version of “a safe DC.” Violent J6 rioters got mass pardons, even after many assaulted law enforcement officers. But anyone who irks Elon Musk is supposed to be hounded off the planet. And when a MAGA member of Congress attacks a woman, Martin can’t even be bothered to sign an arrest warrant.
Ultimately, it doesn’t seem like Martin is very interested in DC being a safe place for anyone except Trump and his friends.
That’s it for today
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Trump has his new Roy Cohn.
The entire DoJ is ethically deficient in almost every politics-tinged case. Opposing lawyers have a duty to report ethics violations to the appropriate bar disciplinary authority. See ABA Rules of Professional Conduct Rule 8.3, generally in effect in every state.
DoJ lawyers are public officials withing the meaning of comment 7 to Rule 8.4, and have a greater duty to act ethically.
Disciplinary Boards must act promptly to protect the legal system from attack by this lawless administration. If they're afraid, they should resign and let serious people take over.