The interim U.S. attorney in Washington said on Friday that he intended to begin an inquiry into allegations brought to his attention by Elon Musk that unidentified individuals and networks may have stolen government property or threatened federal employees.
The announcement by Ed Martin, who was installed by President Trump last month as Washington’s new top federal prosecutor, came in an odd letter he sent to Mr. Musk and then made public on social media.
The letter was unusual, not least because criminal investigations are generally not announced in a public forum, let alone before any facts or evidence have been collected.
Moreover, Mr. Martin, who never worked as a prosecutor before taking his new job, used inflammatory language to describe his plans to help Mr. Musk, who has been waging a largely unchecked war against the federal bureaucracy under the banner of President Trump’s cost-cutting effort, called the Department of Government Efficiency.
“If people are discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them,” he wrote, adding in boldfaced type that “we will chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable” and that “Noone is above the law.”
The letter did not provide any details about what property might have been stolen or which employees might have been threatened. But it did make a cryptic reference to the U.S. attorney’s office having assisted local law enforcement in “protecting” Mr. Musk’s workers at “over the past week or so.”
On Monday, Mr. Martin posted on social media a letter he had written to Mr. Musk dated that day, acknowledging that some members of Mr. Musk’s staff had been “targeted publicly” and vowing legal action against “anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.”
That letter ended on a political note that seemed both strangely misplaced and unusually shrill for a federal prosecutor.
“We will not act like the previous administration who looked the other way as the Antifa and BLM rioters as well as thugs with guns trashed our capital city,” Mr. Martin wrote. “We will protect DOGE and other workers no matter what.”
The missives to Mr. Musk could have been related to some recent reports by media outlets identifying some of the employees Mr. Musk has brought into his cost-cutting effort to scour through government data, including Treasury Department payments.
Shortly after Mr. Martin released the first of the letters to the public, the American Civil Liberties Union wrote him a letter of its own, which it made public as well.
In that letter, the A.C.L.U. urged Mr. Martin to be certain that his promise to take action on Mr. Musk’s behalf was “aimed at ‘true threats’ and other conduct unprotected by the First Amendment.”
The letter also asked Mr. Martin to ensure that his office would “enforce the law evenhandedly without regard to anyone’s political association, ideology, or viewpoint.”
Since taking over the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington — one of the Justice Department’s most important field divisions — Mr. Martin has made numerous moves that have disrupted its normal business.
He has overseen the dismissal of several criminal cases related to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — the investigation of which he has personally railed against for years. In a particularly remarkable move, he filed a dismissal motion in a case where he was still listed in the court file as the defense lawyer of record.
Because Mr. Martin now oversees the process of bringing federal charges in Washington, his critics have wondered how he might handle Mr. Trump’s repeated suggestions that his perceived enemies — many of whom live in the city — should face some sort of punishment.
On Wednesday, in fact, his office was ordered by the newly installed U.S. attorney general, Pam Bondi, to join the Justice Department’s new “Weaponization Working Group,” which will turn the investigative powers of the government on several people who have run afoul of Mr. Trump.
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