President Donald Trump has nominated Ed Martin, the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, to serve permanently in the role, claiming he has been “fighting tirelessly” to “make our Nation’s Capital Safe and Beautiful Again.”
Trump announced the nomination Monday in a post to Truth Social, the latest step by the president after he vowed on the campaign trail to revitalize and rebuild Washington so “there is no longer a nightmare of murder and crime.”
Martin took over as interim U.S. attorney minutes after Trump took office. His selection caused a stir, particularly due to his resume — he had never been a prosecutor — and his connections to Jan. 6, 2021, defendants. He, like Trump, has echoed false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and, according to the New York Times, was outside the U.S. Capitol that day in the crowds that later turned into a mob.
He is already a target of Democrats. House lawmakers sent a letter to the Justice Department’s inspector general expressing worry that Martin has “clear and disqualifying conflicts of interests.”
Since taking over as acting U.S. attorney, Martin has dismissed a series of Jan. 6-related cases and called for an internal report on the office’s use of a federal obstruction charge against nearly 250 defendants. He also oversaw the office when top Justice Department officials fired prosecutors who worked on the Jan. 6 cases, and he praised Trump’s pardons of anti-abortion activists prosecuted by the attorney’s office before his appointment.
“Since Inauguration Day, Ed has been doing a great job as Interim U.S. Attorney, fighting tirelessly to restore Law and Order, and make our Nation’s Capital Safe and Beautiful Again,” Trump wrote. “He will get the job done.”
Martin has already cemented himself as a strong defender of the president and his associates. He said in a statement at the beginning of February that his office was cooperating with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies handling threats made against employees of Elon Musk‘s Department of Government Efficiency. At Musk’s recommendation, he also opened an inquiry into unnamed people and networks that may have stolen government property or threatened federal employees.
The nomination of Martin to a full position within the Justice Department comes during a wave of mass resignations from prosecutors in New York and Washington involved with the federal corruption case against Democratic New York Mayor Eric Adams.
The departures occurred after Attorney General Pam Bondi and acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove ordered the charges against Adams to be dropped. Justice Department chief of staff Chad Mizelle said in a statement last week that the dismissal of Adams’s indictment signals that the DOJ will stop pursuing “politically motivated witchhunts,” a phrase used by Trump and his supporters when discussing his four criminal cases.
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Hagan Scotten, one of the lead prosecutors in the case, said in a 350-word resignation letter that Bondi and Bove seeking to dismiss the case “without prejudice” would allow them to restore the charges at any moment — such as if Adams decided to stop complying with the Trump administration on immigration guidelines, per NBC News.
“No system of ordered liberty can allow the Government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives,” Scotten wrote. “Our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way.”