The U.S. attorney who Trump installed in Washington, D.C. to end Jan. 6 prosecutions has spent the past several years outside of government pushing for exactly that.
Trump appointed Ed Martin, a longtime fixture in Missouri Republican politics, as interim top federal prosecutor in D.C. on Monday. Since then, Martin seems to have mainly done one thing: inform D.C. federal judges that the Justice Department is withdrawing charges against Jan. 6 rioters whose cases remained in the pretrial phase.
Martin brings a deep involvement in Jan. 6 denialism to the job: He’s spent the past several years as a vocal advocate for freeing Jan. 6 defendants. He served on the board of the Patriot Freedom Project, a nonprofit that held fundraisers for Jan. 6 defendants, sometimes featuring President Trump. He’s also spread a popular right-wing conspiracy theory about the attack, accusing the FBI and “Antifa” of playing a role in storming the Capitol amid Trump’s attempt to block his 2021 departure from power. On the day of Jan. 6, surveillance footage released by House Republicans shows Martin approaching the Capitol grounds, giving him full view of the unfolding insurrection. Around the same time, he posted on social media that he was “at the Capitol.” “Rowdy crowd but nothing out of hand. Ignore the #FakeNews,” he wrote. There’s no evidence to suggest that Martin crossed into a restricted area or into the Capitol itself.
Now, Martin is in the unique position of being able to effectuate his project of the past several years by implementing Trump’s blanket pardon and bringing the prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters to an end. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. didn’t return TPM’s request for comment.
It’s an odd position for Martin to be in: Though he is an attorney in good standing, he does not appear to have worked as a prosecutor. And though he has cast himself as representing Jan. 6 defendants, he downplayed his role in one February 2024 podcast appearance. “I’m not a great criminal attorney,” he told host Michael Savage. On that same appearance, Martin blamed the attack in part on “federal agents” and “Antifa types.”
“Some of these defendants are not exactly Mensa members,” he said, adding: “And so when you say to them — and they make fun of them – ‘do you realize that the Electoral College count was disrupted?’ And they say, ‘I don’t know what that is.’ They mean it.”
Martin was a face of the Stop the Steal movement long before the DOJ began its investigation into the Capitol insurrection. He heeded Trump’s call after losing the November 2020 election, and, according to the House Jan. 6 committee, helped plan the events in D.C.; he spoke at a Jan. 5, 2021 rally where he exhorted followers to work until their “last breath” to “stop the steal.” Later, when subpoenaed by the House committee, he did not appear for a deposition.
In June 2023, he appeared at a hearing put on by Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-GA) alongside former DOJ official Jeff Clark, a key figure in Trump’s coup attempt, and Brandon Straka, a now-pardoned Jan. 6 defendant. At the hearing, Taylor-Greene said she wanted to file articles of impeachment against Martin’s now predecessor, former U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves.
Following his Stop the Steal work, Martin has become a rising star in MAGA world. In May, the RNC hired him to help build the GOP’s platform. In December, Trump nominated him to serve as chief of staff to Russell Vought, the incoming head of the Office of Management and Budget. It’s not clear how long his stay as interim chief at the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office will last.
Apart from his advocacy for Jan. 6 insurrectionists, Martin brings a bizarre array of baggage to the role. In Missouri, Martin was ahead of the times: he lost a House race to a Democrat during the GOP wave year of 2010, conceding only after initially blaming his defeat on voter fraud. He had at least two more failed attempts at electoral politics: In 2012, he lost a race for Missouri attorney general to Democrat Chris Koster; in 2019, he ran for the humbler position of Dranesville, Virginia county supervisor and lost.
“He was playing the Trumpish game before there was a Trump,” one Missouri political operative told TPM.
Martin managed to establish himself as a figure in GOP politics, in part, not by winning any election, but rather by becoming a close associate of famed right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly, who died in September 2016. Martin became involved in a schism among Schlafly’s children that continues to manifest itself in litigation to this day. Her daughter, Anne Cori, called Martin a “liar” in a phone interview, and pointed TPM to a $180,000 defamation judgment she won in Illinois against him and another defendant, partly over claims that Martin and the other man defamed her by saying she was pro-choice. Martin continues to contest the case in court; the judge has yet to rule on post-trial motions, an attorney for Martin told TPM.
Cori told TPM that she was seeking to enforce the judgment and collect Martin’s assets; in separate lawsuits, she and others accused him of influencing Schlafly in her final years.
Brandon Straka, the now-pardoned Jan. 6 defendant who appeared alongside Martin at the hearing with Gaetz and Greene, told TPM that he has an “appreciation for the fact that he was speaking up that day,” and said that he believed there should be “restitution” and criminal investigations into people who spent the past four years trying to hold the Jan. 6 Capitol attackers to account.
When asked if he would give information about the FBI agents and DOJ prosecutors who investigated him to the Trump administration, Straka only partly demurred.
“I’m going to see what my options are at this point in terms of getting information put forward to people who are now going to be taking over the FBI and DOJ,” he told TPM.
