Conservative legal activist Ed Martin had conversations last year about potential targets for prosecution. Now, he and the Justice Department have power to bring cases.
By Spencer Hsu, WAPO, February 21, 2025
In the two years before he became D.C.’s top federal prosecutor, interim U.S. attorney Ed Martin publicly discussed investigating high-profile Justice Department officials who played a role in bringing charges against President Donald Trump and his allies.
In scores of his personal podcasts from August 2023 to January, Martin amplified Trump’s claims — not supported by available evidence — that charges against him were made to damage him politically, and that prosecutors may have violated federal criminal conspiracy laws, department policies or legal ethics rules. The conversations on Martin’s “Pro America Report” podcast and related radio show often revolved around Trump’s desire for “retribution” against current or former department prosecutors.
After one month in office, Martin appears to be following through, taking actions that have alarmed lawyers inside and outside his office who say he’s leveraging the power of the Justice Department against political opponents and intimidating career prosecutors seen as insufficiently loyal to Trump. He fired prosecutors who investigated Trump as a part of special counsel Jack Smith’s team and those who worked on the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot cases. He ordered the head of the criminal division in his office to freeze the assets of a $20 billion Biden climate change program without sufficient evidence of a crime, she claimed in her resignation letter. And he’s attempting to probe two Democratic lawmakers over critical remarks they directed at conservative Supreme Court justices and billionaire Trump adviser Elon Musk.
“What we have is a U.S. attorney in D.C. who is undermining the prosecutorial independence of the Justice Department,” said Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who served as chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. “In a democracy, whether or not you are prosecuted for a crime should not turn on whether you have the political favor of the president of the United States or others in his administration.”
A U.S. attorney’s office spokesman for Martin declined to comment about his remarks, and Justice Department spokesmen did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Those named in Martin’s podcasts may not face criminal charges or prison time, particularly given the facts and legal requirements for such a step. But “retribution” — or what Martin and others call “accountability”— could take many forms short of prosecution. Before a case reaches a jury or judge, when factual proof is required, U.S. attorneys have great leeway to conduct investigations.
“Just because you have no case,” said Randall Eliason, a former D.C. federal prosecutor and adjunct law professor at George Washington University, “that doesn’t mean you can’t make someone’s life miserable by opening a grand jury investigation if you’re willing to act in bad faith.”
Martin has been open about his views. He helped Project 2025 contributor Russell Vought prepare the 2024 Republican Party platform and was set to serve as Vought’s chief of staff overseeing Trump’s Office of Management and Budget before being named interim U.S. attorney. “We will hold accountable those who have misused the power of Government to unjustly prosecute their Political Opponents,” the platform stated.
Trump on Monday nominated Martin to serve as permanent U.S. attorney, following his 120-day interim appointment Jan. 20.
On his podcast, Martin assailed the targeting of Trump’s lawyers by the Justice Department. Several were listed in Trump’s August 2023 election interference indictment, though they were not charged federally. Martin also praised a probe by a state attorney general into Trump’s prosecution.
“You cannot criminalize opinions, especially when it comes to complicated issues around politics. It’s unbelievable,” Martin said on his show that month. “It’s an absolute disgrace that this is what’s happening, and it’s a monstrous problem for our country.”
Martin and others say they are now playing by new rules set by Democrats, who they believe turned law enforcement powers against political opponents. In several podcast shows in 2023 and 2024, Martin asked a recurring guest, influential Trump legal adviser Mike Davis, whether officials who handled prosecutions of Trump or the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot should be investigated or face internal discipline.
“What’s the reality of accountability? What would it look like?” Martin asked in a September episode.
Davis, whom Donald Trump Jr. has called the “tip of the spear” defending his father from “corrupt Democratic prosecutors,” referenced what he called a “dead-chicken strategy.” The term, he said, came from a story that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas told over lunch with Davis and fellow clerks for Justice Neil M. Gorsuch about growing upon a Georgia farm.
“When dogs killed chickens, you would wrap those dead chickens around those dogs’ necks. And as those dead chickens rotted. … Those dogs would lose the taste for chicken,” Davis said. “The Trump 47 Justice Department needs to open a criminal probe on real crimes, and Office of Professional Responsibility ethics probes and IG probes. And I think that once these Biden-Kamala Democrats lawyer-up and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money and go through this process — because as they say, ‘Nobody’s above the law’ — I think that they’re going to lose the taste for lawfare, and for … chicken.”
After complimenting Davis on his “fantastic storytelling,” Martin said that bar complaints could easily be lodged against prosecutors for ethics violations, then pressed for more.
“What’s it look like? Are we talking about indictments of some of these prosecutors that did some of this stuff?” Martin asked.
“God willing,” Davis said. “Retribution is a very component of justice, right? It’s an important part of deterrence. It’s also important for the victims to get retribution.”
In an interview, Davis, founder of the Article III Project, a conservative judicial advocacy group, said he did not speak for Martin and was not advocating that Trump engage in any partisan “lawfare” beyond what he claimed the Biden administration did.
“What Ed Martin is doing is following the law,” Davis said. “And what Democrats, and the Department of Justice and different types of actors did, he intends to find out. He is not going to use the justice system to create fake crimes, and that will be the difference.”
Appointed by Trump to lead the nation’s largest U.S. attorney office with roughly 350 prosecutors, Martin has said he is focused partly on investigating any misuses of prosecutorial authority in the charging of some Jan. 6 riot participants with obstructing Congress’ certification of the 2020 election. That charge was also lodged against Trump. The review could lead to public disclosure, disciplinary actions or other measures, two people close to Martin have said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
Martin also discussed with Daviswhether prosecutors who handled investigations of Trump or the Jan. 6 riot could be held criminally liable for purportedly conspiring to deprive Americans of their civil rights to have their votes counted. It’s the same charge prosecutors brought against Trump, alleging he tried to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory by using false claims of fraud to throw the race to the Republican-controlled House.
Soon after taking office, Trump signed an executive order targeting the “weaponization” of law enforcement and intelligence agencies against him. And Attorney General Pam Bondi followed by announcing a working group to “root out corruption” and bias at the Justice Department.
Where some veteran prosecutors have balked at new leadership demands, saying they are using the department’s criminal powers as a political tool, Martin has signaled he will follow Bondi’s direction. When the department moved last week to drop corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams (D), for example, at least eight top prosecutors in the department’s public integrity section and New York offices resigned. They included lawyers with substantial conservative credentials who accused the department of rewarding Adams forsupporting Trump’s anti-immigration policies in the country’s largest, heavily Democratic, city.
Not previously well-known outside conservative activist circles,Martin, 54, was a “Stop the Steal” organizer for Trump after his 2020 election loss and an early supporter who wrote a 2016 book with anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly making the conservative case for Trump before his first term. Martin, who represented three Jan. 6 defendants, has since used social media and his other platforms to spread MAGA themes. He has derided the 2020 election result, climate change and the covid pandemic as “hoaxes” that promote government tyranny.
In one regard, Martin’s statements could create a headache for the department. Defense lawyers in politically sensitive cases brought by Martin could seek recusal by him and his office, pointing to his many public statements to argue that such prosecutions were selective or politically biased, experts said.
Martin has tried to link prosecutors involved in special counsel Smith’s investigations — which charged Trump with election obstruction in 2020 and illegally retaining and obstructing the return of classified documents after he left the White House in 2021 — to those involved in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
In shows in December 2023 and January 2024, Martincriticized prosecutors’ use of the obstruction of an official proceeding statute, referring to it by its number in U.S. criminal code, 1512. In addition to its use in Jan. 6 cases, he noted it had been brought in the past by former Biden deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco and Russia special counsel prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, whom he alleged “are really at the center of a lot of what’s happening in terms of weaponization of government.”
Talking to Trump’s longtime political confidant Roger Stone, Martin said the obstruction charge was passed by Congress but used by “viciously power-hungry prosecutors” after the 2001 collapse of the energy giant Enron, whose accountants shredded potentially incriminating documents. Weissmann and Monaco served on the Justice Department’s Enron Task Force prosecution team, supervised by Republican appointees under the administration of George W. Bush.
Weissmann declined to comment. Monaco could not be reached for comment.
Bennett Gershman, a law professor at Pace University who has long studied prosecutorial misconduct, expressed alarm at Martin’s comments given the power of the head of the largest prosecutor’s office in the federal government “to destroy people’s lives.”
“The facts of the last three weeks, the things he has said, his background, all make it plausible that he will go after individuals because of who they are, regardless of what they’ve done,” Gershman said, in contrast to principles of honest, neutral and “fair-minded” prosecution. “He’s got a list of individuals against whom it seems he is seeking retribution.”
Aaron Schaffer and Caitlin Gilbert contributed to this report.
