Ed Martin was in the mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, posting on social media that the violent riot that day was marked by “faith and joy.”
He has often echoed President Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged, declaring on the night before the Capitol was stormed that “true Americans” should work until their “last breath” to “stop the steal.”
He has spent the past four years raising money for — and in some cases defending — people charged with joining the mob. And when the House committee that investigated Jan. 6 sent him a subpoena, he never complied, risking criminal charges.
Now, Mr. Martin, 54, has been tapped by Mr. Trump to oversee the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington where he has been put in charge of dismantling the office’s signature project: the sprawling investigation of Jan. 6 that he has energetically opposed.
While his role, for now, is temporary — Mr. Trump has not yet chosen a full-time candidate — Mr. Martin is unlike anyone else who has run the agency that has taken the lead in charging more than 1,500 people in connection with the Capitol attack.
In his long legal career, he has never been a prosecutor, spending more time as a political operative and radio host. Moreover, he is saddled by an array of potential conflicts arising from his efforts to exonerate Jan. 6 defendants — including serving on the board of an organization that helped to pay their legal fees.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington is one of the most important field divisions in the Justice Department, which for decades has aimed to insulate itself from partisan politics. It often takes on cases of significance in the realms of national security, espionage and public corruption. In many instances, it is led by someone who has worked there.
Mr. Martin holds an obvious appeal for Mr. Trump. He is a loyal soldier and a savvy political player who has often spun untruths in a way that has favored the president. And because he oversees criminal cases in Washington, his office was just asked to join the Justice Department’s new “Weaponization Working Group,” which will turn the investigative powers of the government on several of Mr. Trump’s perceived enemies.
His new job is not the first time he has supported the president.
Ten years ago, he was a co-author of a book promoting Mr. Trump’s candidacy in the face of skepticism from hard-line religious conservatives. More recently, he has embraced debunked conspiracy theories favorable to Mr. Trump involving the supposed rigging of voting machines in 2020 and the activities of what he has called “the Biden crime family” — a topic he has discussed on at least 10 episodes of his radio show and podcast in recent years.
He has already started to imbue his work as U.S. attorney with similarly ideological projects.
His earliest focus in the job was essentially to undermine the legal architecture used to hold accountable the hundreds of people who took part in the Capitol attack.
In doing so, he moved to dismiss a flurry of Jan. 6-related cases that were still active in Federal District Court in Washington, including one against Joseph Padilla, who in a highly unusual move, he was personally representing at the time.
He also instructed his staff to compile an unusual internal report on the office’s reliance on a federal obstruction charge brought against some 250 defendants.
“Obviously the use was a great failure of our office,” he wrote in an email to his staff. “And we need to get to the bottom of it.”
He stood by as top Justice Department officials fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked on Capitol riot cases in a letter saying their continued employment would hinder him from fulfilling his obligation to “faithfully implement” Mr. Trump’s agenda. And he was an early advocate of pardoning the Jan. 6 defendants — a move Mr. Trump carried out on his first day in office.
At the same time, Mr. Martin has celebrated Mr. Trump’s pardons of anti-abortion activists who were prosecuted by his office before he arrived. And this week, at the urging of Elon Musk, he said he planned to open an inquiry into unnamed “individuals and networks” that may have stolen government property or threatened federal workers.
Just weeks into his role as U.S. attorney, Mr. Martin has struggled to win the respect of the hundreds of members of his staff. Speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, some have described introductory meetings where he made clear that he saw his job as acting on behalf of Mr. Trump. Others referred to him as a “keyboard warrior,” noting that he fires off serial emails, including one reprimanding prosecutors under him for leaking to the news media — a communication that itself leaked.
Mr. Martin did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Matthew M. Graves, his Biden-appointed predecessor, was an experienced prosecutor who had a more hands-on approach, often walked around the office, and viewed the Capitol riot prosecutions as a matter of enforcing the rule of law.
“When the announcement about Martin’s appointment was made, it signaled a maximalist approach to the normalization of vindictive justice,” said Sean Brennan, one of the Jan. 6 prosecutors fired last week. “From his first days in office, he has shown a desire to position himself not as an independent enforcer of the law, but as a tool that Donald Trump can wield.”
A ‘Bona Fide’ Conservative
The son of a lawyer and a devout Catholic from rural New Jersey, Mr. Martin graduated from a Catholic college and studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, a centuries-old religious school that has trained popes and saints. After law school in St. Louis, he became a fixture in the world of conservative Missouri politics, eventually running the state party, which he pushed to the right.
He served as the chief of staff to Matthew Roy Blunt, the state’s governor between 2005 and 2009. He later ran conservative organizations, including Missourians United for Life and the Eagle Forum Education and Legal Defense Fund, a group once affiliated with the anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly.
During his early years in Missouri, Mr. Martin was viewed as a “bona fide conservative,” said Kenneth Warren, a recently retired political science professor at St. Louis University, who has known him for years. But he appeared to change as Mr. Trump rose to prominence.
“He simply went from a reasonable right-wing Republican, a conventional, right wing-Republican, and he evolved in the Trump era into an unreasonable conservative Republican, espousing conspiracy theories and saying and doing things to please Trump,” Mr. Warren said.
A few of the early signs were there to people who knew him in Missouri. Some described him in news articles at the time as affable and friendly, but also pushing politics in a more contentious direction.
In an article in St. Louis Magazine in 2011, Kevin Horrigan, then the deputy editorial page editor for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, said, “He is capable of saying things and making them sound like fact when in fact they do not withstand any parsing at all.”
In many of the positions he has held, Mr. Martin often brought turmoil.
As chief of staff to the governor, he was involved with a plan to purge official emails in an apparent violation of the state’s open records laws, drawing a legal challenge from a former attorney on the governor’s staff.
And his leadership of the Schlafly movement led to a fight with Ms. Schlafly’s daughter, Anne Schlafly Cori, who said Mr. Martin took advantage of her mother in her old age and forced himself into the leadership ranks of her organizations.
A Loyalist From the Start
Like many Republicans, Mr. Martin grabbed on to Mr. Trump as he ascended.
In 2016, he published a book with Ms. Schlafly and another author, making the case for why conservatives should support Mr. Trump at a time when many needed convincing.
In it, Mr. Martin and his co-writers embraced early versions of what are now common hard-line positions in the Trump era.
They wrote, for instance, that Democrats were purposely inviting immigrants from nonwhite countries to “invade” the border to change the demographics of the United States to benefit their own political power — a version of the so-called great replacement theory promoted by white supremacists.
Days after the 2020 election, Mr. Martin started promoting elaborate false claims about voting machines built by Dominion Voting Systems being hacked to steal the election from Mr. Trump.
“The hackers have figured out that this thing is really rigged and you can use the algorithms, you can use back doors, you can use things to move the whole election,” Mr. Martin said on his show on Nov. 20, 2020.
His promotion of such theories catapulted him into the top ranks of the Stop the Steal movement, which organized protests on behalf of Mr. Trump and sought to pressure Congress and state officials not to certify his defeat in the election.
On Jan. 6, when he was at the Capitol, he described the scene as a “rowdy crowd but nothing out of hand.” After the riot, he turned his attention to a different set of phony theories.
He claimed that leftists in antifa were responsible for the violence that day. And he decried the “Capitol insurrection hoax,” claiming that former Speaker Nancy Pelosi had engineered it.
He also joined the board of the Patriot Freedom Project, which has raised tens of thousands of dollars on behalf of Jan. 6 defendants. He was listed as a board member on the organization’s website well after he assumed his post as U.S. attorney and was put in charge of the Jan. 6 prosecutions.
An Ideological Warrior
In his new job, Mr. Martin has turned a skeptical eye to more than cases stemming from Jan. 6.
He has moved to dismiss a case filed against Representative Jeffrey Fortenberry, Republican of Nebraska, who faced a second trial related to campaign finance violations. Mr. Trump had derided the charges as a “witch hunt.”
He also wrote a letter to Mr. Musk, saying he intended to examine allegations of theft and threats against government employees. The letter was an unusual public announcement of a criminal inquiry, made even stranger because Mr. Martin put in on social media before any facts had been collected.
All of these moves have offered a window into how Mr. Martin might deal with Mr. Trump’s suggestions that his adversaries should face some sort of punishment. He recently referred to himself as one of the “president’s lawyers” on social media and now runs the prosecutorial office that would likely handle cases brought against political figures in Washington.
Mr. Martin has in fact already shown himself willing to amplify calls for retribution.
He has said he believes that those responsible for prosecuting Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s onetime national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. during the Russia investigation, should themselves be prosecuted.
And he has declared he wants punishment for officials in the Justice Department who devised the legal theory behind the Jan. 6 prosecutions, which he considers an improper use of the system.
Last year, he said that state and federal prosecutors who had separately charged Mr. Trump had secretly coordinated in what might be an illegal conspiracy.
And this week, he posed for a photo with a top Trump ally who has pushed for retribution in a social media post with a caption reading, “Justice is coming.”
In fact, as Mr. Martin has leveled accusations against Democrats for engaging in so-called lawfare and proposing prosecution as a consequence, his comments have sometimes sounded as if he is advocating the very practice he has decried.
“We’re watching the use of the law, the legal system, in a way that we’ve never seen before,” he said on a podcast last year. “I expect better from my colleagues in the law when it comes to what we’re seeing them doing.”
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