On Inauguration Day, President Donald J. Trump appointed former right-wing radio talk-show host Ed Martin to serve as the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. A week later, Martin, a leader in the so-called Stop the Steal movement that fed the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, announced a review of the files of all January 6 defendants (since pardoned by the president) who had been charged with obstructing a government proceeding.
The proceeding in question was the certification of the 2020 election, won by Joe Biden. Hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building for the apparent purpose of halting the certification. But last June, the Supreme Court, despite multiple decisions by lower courts affirming the appropriateness of the charges against the rioters, deemed the use of the law against one insurrectionist too broad in scope.
Now it appears that Martin is positioning himself to “investigate the investigators,” as Trump and his minions have promised, perhaps looking for words in charging documents that he can twist into a false narrative of prosecutorial malfeasance on the part of the government lawyers who charged the insurrectionists.
Coincidentally, on the same day Trump named Martin, the Department of Justice, of which Martin’s office is an arm, was having its own January 6 fun: The portion of the DOJ website devoted to a searchable database of the January 6 prosecutions was scrubbed, and all Justice Department employees who had worked on the team of Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who charged Trump with crimes stemming from the melee, were fired. (The Justice Department is currently led by acting Attorney General James McHenry, while attorney general nominee Pam Bondi, herself an election denialist, awaits Senate confirmation.)
The day of the insurrection, as MAGA thugs attacked police officers at the Capitol and spread feces on its walls, Ed Martin posted on the social media platform then known as Twitter, “I’m at the Capitol. And I was at the POTUS speech earlier. Rowdy crowd, but nothing out of hand. Ignore the #FakeNews.”
As the top law enforcement official in the District of Columbia, Ed Martin was an unexpected choice. In fact, he had reportedly been tapped to serve as chief of staff to the director of the Office of Management and Budget. But in Martin, Trump has found a kindred character who, in the past, has been willing to skirt the law for the sake of his own power. And in Washington, D.C., the local U.S. attorney has a whole lot of power, right off the bat, given that any federal crime charged in the nation’s capital is now his to prosecute—or not. Just don’t expect him to abide by the rules of fair play.
In 2007, Martin served as chief of staff to then–Missouri Governor Matt Blunt, only to abruptly quit when the governor’s general counsel alleged that Martin and the governor had fired him because he advised his colleagues not to delete their emails, so as to comply with Missouri’s sunshine statute. In a subsequent investigation, computer technicians for the governor’s office alleged that Martin had asked them to delete even the backup tapes for the emails he had already deleted from his own account—emails that would expose Martin for having run a political operation out of the governor’s office, organizing outside groups to advance the governor’s agenda.
The state ultimately settled with the former general counsel for $500,000. The investigation reportedly cost Missouri taxpayers $2 million.
During his tenure in the governor’s office, Martin sought advice from Leonard Leo, founder of the Federalist Society, who is credited with seating the Supreme Court’s supermajority of right-wing justices. When investigators recovered some of Martin’s deleted emails, correspondence between Martin and Leo surfaced, with Leo apparently pushing Martin to oppose the governor’s appointment of a state Supreme Court justice recommended by a bipartisan commission, as was customary. Martin did not prevail; Patricia Breckenridge was sworn in. “Your boss is a coward,” Leo wrote to Martin.
In 2013, he served a brief stint as chairman of the Missouri Republican Party, before assuming the presidency of the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles group in 2015. Together with Schlafly and Brett Decker, Martin co-authored a book, The Conservative Case for Trump.
In 2017, the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles conferred an award on Steve Bannon, after the former White House strategist’s ouster from the West Wing, and Martin continued to work with Bannon on various issues and projects, including the so-called Stop the Steal movement to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
I attended the 2018 annual Eagle Council gathering in St. Louis, emceed by Martin, where a gaggle of Bannon-aligned influencers and bloggers, including Jack Posobiec and Pamela Geller, appeared, and at which former White House national security adviser retired Gen. Michael Flynn, the QAnon fan, received an award. And I was there the following year when an award was conferred upon Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán, a Bannon favorite. Bannon himself showed up to witness Hungary’s ambassador to the U.S. accept the award on Orbán’s behalf, and to address the smallish crowd of 200 or so senior citizens.
There, Bannon promised that the 2020 election “will go down as the most vitriolic and nastiest in American history.” He continued: “It’s very simple. We win, we save the country. We lose, we’re gonna lose this country. Every generation, the 13 or 14 generations that have come before us, have bequeathed this to us. It’s on our shoulders. A hundred years from now, they’re gonna talk about this.”
By late 2020, the so-called Stop the Steal campaign—the organizing effort for the January 6 insurrection—was in full swing, and Martin was in the thick of it. Martin even worked with the gun-cult Christian nationalist group Rod of Iron to protest the election results in front of the Supreme Court in December 2020, organizing them for a Stop the Steal event that was part of a Christian nationalist protest called the Jericho March.
In the days and months following the attack on the Capitol, Martin served as defense attorney for three of those charged with crimes during the breach and continued to defend Trump at every turn.
At the moment, Martin’s role as U.S. attorney for D.C. appears to be focused on rewriting the story of January 6, 2021. But his office is also the perfect tool for Trump to perform a dominance display by proxy, thanks to the peculiarities of the District’s place in the republic. Unlike a state, D.C. is overseen by Congress. Although under the rubric of “home rule,” the District has its own locally elected officials, but the laws they enact are all subject to congressional review, meaning Congress can yank any of them, or impose new ones. It has done so before, for instance, when it stopped the District from using its own Medicaid program to cover the cost of abortions for poor women.
As a majority-minority city—one that is more than 40 percent Black—Washington, D.C., is the perfect stage set for performative punishment. The mayor is a Black woman; the electorate is largely Democratic. Big media is everywhere, as are the headquarters for interest groups who can turn out a crowd for their causes.
In 2017, Martin was hired as a commentator by CNN, only to be let go after complaining publicly that Symone Sanders, then campaign spokesperson for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, and reporter April Ryan were “Black racists.” Both had appeared with him on a CNN discussion panel. Martin also played apologist for Roy Moore, the Alabama state Supreme Court justice who was then running for U.S. Senate, after Moore cited the time of slavery as the greatest era in America’s existence. Martin opposes the Violence Against Women Act and has said that women who have abortions should be prosecuted. He was an early adopter of the vicious anti-trans rhetoric we hear coming out of the mouths of Trump and his yes-men.
Should Congress interfere, as I expect it will, in the District’s self-rule, it will be Ed Martin’s task to enforce the will of Congress on the brown and Black people of D.C., all before a national audience. Will abortion be banned? How about mandatory vaccinations for schoolchildren, or subsidized school lunches? Or the District’s liberal marijuana laws? Or recycling?
Will the public schools be allowed to continue advising immigrant students of their rights should ICE come to call? The elected D.C. attorney general says they can and should, but in the new administration, that may not mean much.
