Trump’s Weaponizer

Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to be his MAGA voters’ “retribution.” Now an official at the DoJ named Ed Martin is pressing to see that pledge through.

Photo: Al Drago / Bloomberg

The book of villains in the Trump regime continues to grow. We already know many of their names: Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, Todd Blanche, Emil Bove.

Add Ed Martin to that list.

I’ve written twice before about Martin, so the name may be familiar to readers here. Martin is exactly the kind of person Trump loves having around and in charge: an election truther, a “Stop the Steal” activist, and a zealous attorney for many of the January 6 defendants.

After news of the January 6 mass pardons broke, Martin infamously posted “No MAGA left behind” on social media. And he apparently meant it. After Trump put him in charge of the pardon office, as I wrote about earlier, Martin began to free many far-right activists through eyebrow raising pardons he brought to Trump’s desk.

But Martin’s extremism around January 6 earned him suspicion from a handful of key Republican senators, so when Trump tried to elevate him permanently as U.S. Attorney for the D.C. office, they balked. Trump was forced to pull the nomination, and that position instead went to Jeanine Box-o’-wine Pirro, yet another Fox host ally of Trump.

But Martin’s part in the Trump regime wasn’t over. He’s now back, and even more dangerous than before.

A checkered history as Acting U.S. Attorney for D.C.

When I first wrote about Martin, it was in connection with a seeming cover-up involving a Republican congressman named Cory Mills (R-FL). Mills’s then mistress had called police over an alleged assault by Mills. But his visibly shaken girlfriend recanted her story after the authorities arrived.

Three different and conflicting police reports emerged out of that incident, and ultimately they issued an arrest warrant for Mills. But it wound up going unsigned for some time, perhaps, as I wondered at the time, because Martin was in charge of the D.C. Attorney General’s Office at the time and was trying to protect a very thin GOP House majority.

Interesting postscript to the Mills incident: As Michelle Goldberg recently noted in her column for the New York Times,

This week, news broke of a July police report filed against Mills by his ex-girlfriend Lindsey Langston, a beauty queen and Republican Party committee member in Florida. According to the report, Langston, who’d lived with Mills in Florida, broke up with him when she learned that he was under investigation for allegedly assaulting another girlfriend he had in Washington, a pro-Trump activist named Sarah Raviani. Langston claimed that when she tried to end things, Mills threatened to release nude images and videos of her. She also provided the police with text and Instagram messages in which Mills threatened to harm any men she might date in the future.

Rep. Mills denies it all, but he’s a real winner of a guy if it’s true, as it sure seems given the receipts. He fits right in with other well known assaulters and abusers from Florida.

But back to Martin. In addition to possibly slow-walking Mills’s arrest warrant, Martin had been busy proving to Trump that he was prepared to use his position to inflict pain and injury upon the regime’s enemies.

He sucked up to Elon Musk and issued vague threats against anyone who publicly identified members of DOGE, even though that’s not a crime to do with public officials.

Martin also threatened Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) with an investigation stemming from a statement Schumer made five years earlier, in March of 2020, that Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh would “pay a price” for unleashing a “whirlwind” on the country. Schumer had added, “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Martin decided these words comprised “threats against public officials” and launched an official inquiry over them.

No, he actually did.

He also threatened Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), now the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, with an investigation for saying the American people “want us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight” during a live interview on CNN. Martin also alleged that Rep. Garcia had called Elon Musk “a dick” and that this sounded “to some” like a threat upon Musk.

First Amendment? What First Amendment?

In keeping with his curtailing of speech, Martin even released a statement against the Associated Press which had refused to use “Gulf of America” in its reporting. Martin stated that his office was “President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers” [Narrator: They are not] and would be “vigilant in standing against entities like the AP that refuse to put America First.”

Martin’s Senate confirmation flounders

When Martin’s position as Acting U.S. Attorney for D.C. was up and Trump wanted to make his role permanent, a core set of Republican senators revolted. This group included Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), who usually doesn’t wind up standing on his stated principles.

Martin’s nomination was doomed in part because of his connections to Stop the Steal and the January 6 insurrection and defendants. But it turned out, Martin had also appeared on Russian state television no less than 150 times, making him something of the Tucker Carlson of the Justice Department. He had failed to disclose these appearances to the Senate prior to his confirmation hearing, and that can’t have been some kind of oversight.

The Washington Post noted at the time,

Martin’s frequent appearances, reviewed by The Washington Post, drew rebukes from some national security analysts, who accused him of amplifying anti-American propaganda on Russian outlets that the State Department last year said had moved beyond disinformation to engage in covert influence activities aimed at undermining democracies worldwide for President Vladimir Putin’s regime.

The Post noted that the U.S. Attorney’s office in D.C. is the largest in the country and has “wide jurisdiction to prosecute important national security offenses,” according to former officials.

Sixteen days after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Martin even tweeted, “I’ve read that Putin is a crazy tyrant and that he’s a hero. How do you know what to believe?”

Due to objections from Tillis and other less extreme GOP senators, Trump pulled Martin’s nomination to head the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office. But he soon found another place for him where he could continue to carry out Trump’s agenda.

The Weaponizer

In addition to putting him in charge of presidential pardons, Trump put Martin in charge of the new “weaponization” working group within the Justice Department. That group is tasked with advancing Trump’s campaign of political retribution.

In an appearance on the Fox network, Martin made no secret of his intentions. He’s set his sites squarely on Trump’s political opponents and enemies, including Sen. Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James, both of whom sought to force accountability for Trump. Martin is now leading criminal investigations into both in a naked act of political vengeance.

Schiff had served on the House Jan. 6 Select Committee that documented Trump’s role in the January 6 insurrection and had led Trump’s first impeachment trial. James led a successful civil fraud case against the Trump Organization culminating in a judgment to the tune of nearly half a billion dollars.

It’s important to point out that the way Martin is going about his “investigations” is exactly backward. MSNBC legal analyst Kristy Greenberg summed up the problem:

Ed Martin said he planned to use criminal investigations into James and Schiff to “look at everything else they’vebeen doing.” That’s not how it works. A criminal investigation is not an excuse to pry, harass and threaten people about non-criminal conduct. This is dangerous.

In short, Martin is preparing an actual witch hunt.

Martin also showed up personally outside the home of James to examine her residence, shamelessly breaching Department protocols in the process.

As Ja’han Jones wrote for MSNBC,

Martin seems eager to follow the tradition of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who notoriously used his powers to stalk and harass civil rights figures like Martin Luther King Jr. Or perhaps he’s hoping to take a page out of the playbook of Russian President Vladimir Putin and other dictators Trump admires, who haven’t hesitated to put their political opponents in prison or conjure up “kompromat” that can be used against them.

Martin isn’t likely to stop with Schiff and James. To this regime, facts and law don’t matter so long as there are active investigations that put the opposition on the back foot and create a lot of smoke. It’s all meant to signal to the base, falsely if necessary, that there is actually fire where there is none.

The damage to the lives and reputations of those targeted is bad enough. But the true and long-lasting damage is to the institution of the Justice Department itself, which over time could become synonymous with partisan investigations and weaponization of prosecutorial power.

This is the horror we get from electing as President a 34-time convicted felon who repeatedly made clear he would be out for political vengeance against his prosecutors, no matter the cost and no matter the evidence or decided lack thereof. In Trump’s mind, “they” did this to him, and now it’s his turn, even though there was proof beyond a reasonable doubt of his guilt while Trump, through Ed Martin, is on little more than a fishing expedition.

Separating the trappings of justice from what justice should be will no doubt prove a challenge, especially before a public that hasn’t had to wrestle with this distinction before. Trump and Martin are counting on this in order to successfully smear and punish the political enemies of the regime. It sadly falls to us, in our collective responsibility, to call out the regime, rally to the side of those unjustly targeted, and push back on its cynical weaponization of the Justice Department.