Ed Martin, a right-wing activist and podcaster installed by President Donald Trump as Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, is running interference for Elon Musk’s rampage through federal agencies. He has also begun a purge of Justice Department officials who investigated and prosecuted the criminals pardoned by Trump over their role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, while apparently setting the stage for further ideological retribution.
On Feb. 3, Martin vowed in a letter to Musk that he would take legal action against anyone who “impedes your work or threatens your people.” Meanwhile, House Republicans are also doing their bit to protect Musk from congressional oversight.
A few days later, on Friday, Feb. 7, Martin wrote to thank Musk and his deputy Steve Davis for making referrals to him and stating, “If people are discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them and we will chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable.”
“Noone is above the law,” Martin, added, in bold type, a seemingly hypocritical claim from someone who aggressively promoted Trump’s efforts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. Last year, Martin gave an "Eagle Award" to John Eastman, an attorney who has faced serious legal consequences for his efforts to help Trump stay in the presidency after that loss.
Martin is “a shocking choice, even by Trump standards,” wrote journalist Adele Stan, adding that “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,” Stan notes. “Just don’t expect him to abide by the rules of fair play.”
Indeed, as Interim U.S. Attorney, Martin signed a motion asking a federal court to dismiss a charge against a Jan. 6 defendant who Martin was still representing. Reuters noted, “Lawyers generally are prohibited from taking both sides in the same case and U.S. Justice Department regulations require lawyers to step aside from cases involving their former clients for at least a year.” According to ethics experts consulted by Reuters, Martin “likely violated a swath of ethics rules.”
Who is this guy? An Ed Martin Timeline
Martin is a longtime religious-right activist who worked with the late right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly and engaged in a bitter struggle for control of her organization and political legacy. The conflict was resolved with him in control of a group called the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles.
Schlafly was one of Trump’s early backers, and Martin was part of Trump’s 2016 “pro-life advisory council.” He is a devoted Trump cultist who once published an adult coloring book of Trump tweets, claiming that “the true meaning of covfefe”—a typo tweeted by Trump—“is love.”
In 2016, Martin and Schlafly co-authored “The Conservative Case for Trump,” which argued that the U.S. was being harmed by allowing immigration from non-European countries. That year, Martin told a Tea Party rally, “You’re not racist if you don’t like Mexicans. They're from a nation. If you don't think Muslims are vetted enough, because they blow things up, that's not racist."
In 2017, Martin was hired by CNN as a pro-Trump commentator, which provoked the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to describe “Shameless Ed” as a “disgraced chief of staff to Gov. Matt Blunt” who will “say almost anything”—a habit that got him fired from CNN a few months later after he called fellow panelists “black racists.” (He would later denounce CNN reporters as “traitors to America.”)
A few years later, in 2019, Martin expressed outrage that congressional Republicans finally took action against Rep. Steve King after the representative’s long track record of racist and nativist rhetoric.
Martin seems to have strange ideas about what does qualify as racism. In 2022, when President Biden announced his intention to name a black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court, Martin ranted, “I’m not sure we’ve ever seen such a racist, sexist, despicable thing as a leader that we saw Joe Biden do with this pick.” Strangely enough, Martin did not seem to be bothered by Trump’s vow to name a woman to the court to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Martin opposed reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which offers protections to victims of violence and has improved the criminal justice response to domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking in the United States. It also provides funds for women’s shelters and hotlines, among other services. Its passage in 1994 marked the first time federal law acknowledged domestic violence and sexual assault as crimes. In 2019, Martin claimed that it was not “pro-family” because he said the law’s provisions “break up families far too often.” The Act was most recently reauthorized in 2022.
MAGA Loyalist and Conspiracy Theorist
In 2019, Martin ran for a seat on the Fairfax County board of supervisors in Virginia, losing by about 30 percentage points. That year he denounced the Federal Reserve as part of the deep state for not letting Trump dictate its monetary policies, and called for Trump to give political dirty trickster Roger Stone a pardon and the Presidential Medal of Freedom for refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation.
In May of 2020, when the Trump Justice Department decided to drop its criminal case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Martin was among MAGA activists who called for retribution against those who had prosecuted Flynn. "Let's keep going: we must identify and remove all those agents of the Deep State globalists who are fighting from within to destroy American leaders of integrity,” he said. Now he’s in position to contribute to Trump purges.
During protests against the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, Martin repeatedly told his followers that America was “at war” against people who want to “destroy this country.” He called for “massive force” against perpetrators of violence, adding that anyone out after curfew was by definition not a peaceful protester. “We have to be ruthless,” he said. Martin called Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two people during protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a hero and claimed that the mainstream media coverage of Rittenhouse’s trial was intended to prompt “race riots” and benefit from the big ratings they would generate.
Martin, who is Catholic, went ballistic when the Catholic Archbishop of Washington, D.C. criticized the Trump administration after it violently cleared away protesters so that Trump could stage a photo-op by posing with a Bible outside a church near the White House. The bishop’s statement had criticized the use of tear gas to “silence, scatter or intimidate” people for Trump’s photo op. Martin railed against the bishop’s “terribly destructive, terribly hateful” statement, which he dismissed as “classic American social justice gobbledygook.”
In late October 2020, Martin used a QAnon hashtag as he was boosting a social media post by Flynn urging activists to “leave it all on the field” in the final days before the election. Earlier that month, Martin had complained that social media companies had been cracking down on the QAnon movement’s conspiracy theories, writing, “Big Tech is silencing QAnon, Facebook is silencing QAnon.”
Martin and the ‘Stop the Steal’ Scheme to Keep Trump in Power After 2020 Election
Just after the 2020 election, after Trump had falsely declared victory, Martin joined far-right GOP operative Ali Alexander and other “Stop the Steal” activists to demand that election officials stop counting votes in key battleground states, and to demand that Republican elected officials back Trump’s claims. While votes were still being counted, Martin promoted the Trump claim that Biden could only win those states by “fraud.” As Stop the Steal expanded its efforts, Alexander praised Martin for his “mentorship and servant leadership.”
Martin signed a Dec. 10 letter asking state legislatures in battleground states to ignore the voting results and name pro-Trump electors. He participated in the pro-Trump rally on the National Mall at which Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes threatened bloody civil war; a day earlier he had hosted far-right Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò—since excommunicated by Pope Francis—on his weekly prayer call.
After states certified Joe Biden’s electoral college victory, Martin joined Alexander and other MAGA activists who threatened to unseat congressional Republicans who failed to object to certifying the results.
Jan. 6 and the Insurrectionists
The day before the attack, Martin gave a speech outside the Capitol, NBC reported, “starting a chant of 'stop the steal' and invoking God while accusing Trump’s enemies of stealing the election.”
“No matter what happens tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after, we still need to be in the fight. There’s no summer soldiers and springtime patriots here. There’s the die-hard true Americans,” Martin said. “We start today, go through tomorrow and every day 'til we have a last breath and go home to the Lord because we will stop the steal.”
The day of the insurrection, Adele Stan reported in The New Republic, “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.’”
Long after violence had been raging, Martin tweeted, “Like Mardi Gras in DC today: love, faith and joy.”
Martin later called the insurrection the “Pelosi hoax of January 6th.” Right Wing Watch reported in 2021:
Martin downplayed the seriousness of the attack on the Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump, calling it a protest at which some people “acted like idiots.” Martin falsely claimed that there was no evidence of anyone having been armed and falsely claimed that there has been no identified link between white nationalists and the Capitol insurrectionists. In truth, there was plenty of evidence of armed Trump loyalists and white nationalists at the Capitol, and more has emerged as arrests have been made.
According to NBC News, Martin represented at least three Jan. 6 defendants and promoted conspiracy theories about “who the real architects of Jan. 6 were.”
Martin denounced the congressional investigation of the Jan. 6 attacks as “pure propaganda” and claimed that the hearings were held “just to destroy Donald Trump.”
Trump 2.0
Martin’s loyalty was rewarded in 2024 when the Republican National Committee hired Martin as deputy policy director of the platform committee; Project 2025 architect Russ Vought—who Senate Republicans just confirmed as OMB Director—was policy director.
At the time, CNN noted Martin’s extreme positions on abortion – he favors a national ban with no exceptions for rape or incest, and has entertained the idea of jailing doctors and punishing women who have abortions. He has falsely claimed, “It’s an absolute scientific fact that no abortion is ever performed to save the life of the mother. None, zero, zilch.”
In December, Trump announced that he would make Martin chief of staff at OMB, where he would again serve under Vought. But on Jan. 20, the same day Trump announced pardons for Jan. 6 defendants, he named Martin as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, leading to this New York Times headline: "Advocate of Jan. 6 Rioters Now Runs Office That Investigated Them."
Washington Post columnist Colbert King responded to Martin’s appointment by writing that “D.C. deserves better than a political operative as its U.S. attorney, noting that most of the U.S. attorneys he covered “sought to serve the law, not partisan purposes.”
“That is what our nation’s capital needs in a U.S. attorney,” King wrote. “We don’t have that now.”
And that was before Martin so fully devoted himself to enabling Musk’s infiltration of sensitive government computer systems and staff purges, widely described as unlawful and lawless, but not by MAGA loyalist Martin.
