Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Let’s build from scratch our Nightmare Prosecutor, the way kids might build their ultimate villain in an interactive, comic-universe video game.
We’ll start by sliding our subject’s prosecutorial experience rating to zero. At the same time, let’s max out his arrogance score — nothing quite like having no chops but thinking you’re Archibald Cox. Then we’ll give our creation full control of a crucial prosecutor’s office that will handle sensitive political matters so he can inflict maximum damage. Now let’s amp things up and make our Nightmare Prosecutor a political attack dog, frothing to use his shiny new badge to settle scores and please his master. As a closing touch, we’ll drag the sycophancy score all the way up; his public slobbering will be so comically excessive you’ll have to stifle a laugh — until you remember how much power he actually wields.
Welcome to the Weapon X of the Trump Justice Department: Ed Martin.
Don’t let the forgettable name fool you. The acting U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., recently nominated by Trump to the full-time post, is going to do major damage — to his political opponents, to the Justice Department, and ultimately to the Trump administration itself. Putting Martin in charge of the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office is like giving a power tool to a 6-year-old in a crowded room. He has no idea how to use it and no sense of the damage he can do, but he’s going to run wild with it and people are going to get hurt.
Martin — who had represented January 6 defendants (which is fine, everyone’s entitled to a defense) and was a vocal “Stop the Steal” proponent (which is not) — came to the job with an agenda. He quickly dismissed dozens of pending January 6 cases as he’d been instructed to do by Trump and the acting attorney general. In one of those cases, the defendant had been represented by … Ed Martin. This, folks, is what we call a conflict of interest.
Martin also fired about 30 of his own prosecutors, who had worked on January 6 cases, apparently for their unforgivable decision to prosecute cases against people who had obviously violated the law. Because retribution must be served not only cold but in heaping portions, Martin ordered some of his remaining prosecutors to investigate their own colleagues for potentially committing some unspecified crime by prosecuting the January 6 defendants in the first place.
Still not satisfied, Martin recently posted on X an article about how, toward the end of his time as special counsel, Jack Smith had received $140,000 in free legal services from a D.C. law firm (Covington & Burling, where I worked 20 years ago and have several friends). Martin snarled, “Save your receipts, Smith and Covington. We’ll be in touch soon.” What’s even the potential crime here? Smith lawyered up — wisely, given the obvious retribution headed his way — and a law firm represented him pro bono. Somebody call the cops! And if Martin had a clue, he’d know that it’s generally not a great idea to broadcast a new criminal investigation publicly. It tends to, you know, out your case and tip off the bad guys. Either Martin is a prosecutorial buffoon or he only cares about the aggro X post — could be both. (Not to be outdone, Trump himself promptly announced that he’d be seeking vengeance on Covington for having the gall to do free legal work for Smith, stripping security clearances and government contracts from the firm.)
Speaking of social media, D.C.’s top prosecutor simply can’t stop fawning over Elon Musk and DOGE. That would be fine, if mildly embarrassing, for a normal person. But Martin has seemingly enlisted his office as Musk’s personal police force. He wrote an obsequious letter to Musk, then — you guessed it — posted it on X, prefaced by a sweet personal note about how Martin would seek out those who might oppose Musk’s DOGE and prosecute “law-breaking by the disgruntled.” Ah, yes: United States v. Disgruntled, on a charge of Law-Breaking.
Days later, Martin posted on X a hysterically overwrought follow-up. “If people are discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them,” Martin frothed. Hey, rookie: prosecutors can’t indict people for “acting simply unethically.”
Then, just to show how much he meant it, Martin added, in extra-scary bold typeface: “we will chase them to the end of the Earth.” Listen, Ed. Take a breath. I know you’re brand new to this whole prosecutor thing. It’s exciting, I get it. But you need to see what actual crime looks like before you rip your shirt off and promise to tear down heaven and earth to bring to justice those folks who might’ve upset Elon Musk.
And in his most recent tantrum, Martin publicly threatened to prosecute Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Robert Garcia for … saying things about politics. Schumer infamously proclaimed in March 2020 that certain conservative Supreme Court justices “have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price” while Garcia said this month that “what the American public want is for us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight.”
Both Schumer and Garcia made stupid, irresponsible statements. But their screeds are wholly protected by the First Amendment, which applies most powerfully to political speech — a good thing, as it turns out, for one Donald John Trump, who regularly pushes the outer boundaries and has (rightly) avoided prosecution even for his inflammatory January 6 Ellipse speech. (Smith charged Trump for his pre–January 6 efforts to steal the election but not for his political speech that day.) If Martin is unhinged enough to actually seek an indictment of either Schumer or Garcia, the chances of an eventual conviction are precisely 0.0 percent.
Precious few people can rein in Martin. There’s Trump, of course, but don’t count on that. There’s also the Senate, which can and should reject his nomination, but that’s not happening either; everyone above the Gaetz line has made it through.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has chosen thus far to remain blissfully unaware of her own Justice Department’s most consequential moves. She claimed, for example, to be unaware of exactly what was happening with the Eric Adams debacle, even as the crisis boiled over publicly. Bondi’s acting deputy, Emil Bove, would technically be in position to check Martin, but Bove has embraced the same aggressively retributive tactics. Then there’s Todd Blanche, who will become the deputy attorney general once confirmed by the Senate. He’s a friend and former colleague of mine, and he has a sound prosecutorial ethic. But his loyalty to core prosecutorial principle has yet to be tested, and it won’t be easy to restore order inside the dark cloud that has enveloped the Justice Department.
Perhaps the only real check is that Martin might go so far that he inflicts genuine political damage on the Trump administration. We learned a lesson from the frenetic, runaway prosecutions of Trump himself: The American people know prosecutorial overkill when they see it, and they’ll reject it. Just as prosecutors brought ill-conceived, ineptly executed cases against Trump that backfired and provided him with political fuel, the American public will eventually take notice of Martin’s excesses, and the Trump administration will pay the political price.
But that’s an indirect cost at most, and it will take months or years, and many more abuses, to fully take hold. The cold reality is that it’s already ugly in D.C., and it’s going to get worse.
