Interim U.S. attorney Ed Martin has apologized for praising a Nazi sympathizer last year, saying he was unaware of the person’s views.
“I denounce everything about what that guy said, everything about the way he talked, and all as I’ve now seen it,” Martin said about Timothy Hale-Cusanelli in an interview Thursday with Forward. “At the time, I didn’t know it.”
“I’m sorry,” he added.
Martin, while emceeing an awards ceremony last August at Donald Trump’s New Jersey golf club, described Hale-Cusanelli as “extraordinary.”
Hale-Cusanelli, who was handed a four-year sentence in 2022 for participating in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol but was released in Dec. 2023, spoke at the Bedminster event and at a June fundraiser at the same venue.
In court filings, the Justice Department called Hale-Cusanelli an “avowed white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer.” Prosecutors noted that he repeatedly made racist statements to coworkers at a naval weapons station, among them “Hitler should finished the job” and “babies born with any deformities or disabilities should be shot in the forehead.”
The indictment also included photographs of Hale-Cusanelli with a “Hitler mustache.”
Martin said he should have been wiser.
“But,” he added, “I certainly didn’t know all the terrible things that he said and how he had acted. I think that’s terrible, and I denounced it completely. I hate it. I hate that it happened.”
Martin, who is awaiting confirmation to be Washington D.C.’s U.S. attorney, said he has explained the issue to Senate staffers.
Martin has also come under scrutiny for having made over 150 appearances on Russian state media, which, according to The Washington Post, he did not initially disclose.
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