Prosecutors

Interim US attorney conducts late-Friday firings of more than two dozen Jan. 6 prosecutors

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January 6 2021 Capitol Building

Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Edward R. Martin Jr. was involved in the planning and financing of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, rally that preceeded the riot at the U.S. Capitol Building. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)

Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Edward R. Martin Jr. on Friday dismissed about 30 federal prosecutors who have worked on Capitol riot cases over the past four years, undertaking a housecleaning of the top prosecutors office in Washington, D.C., while preparing to extend the office’s scrutiny to top Democratic leaders and former Justice Department officials, people close to Martin said.

The prosecutors were on probationary status after being converted to full-time from shorter term positions after Election Day under circumstances the Trump administration is investigating, according to documents from Martin and Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove that were emailed at about 5 p.m. and viewed by The Washington Post.

In his first 11 days in office, Martin, 54, has moved quickly to shape the office so that it is more in line with President Donald Trump’s political views—and drawn significant criticism in the process. Since being appointed on Jan. 20, Martin has ordered top supervisors in the office to investigate their colleagues’ handling of the Capitol riot prosecutions in the wake of Trump’s mass pardons and threatened subordinates who disclose or criticize his actions.

And he appeared to set his sights on scrutinizing a top Democratic lawmaker, sending what he called a “letter of inquiry” to Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York), about Schumer’s quickly walked-back statement in a March 2020 rally that two of President Trump’s recently nominated Supreme Court justices, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh, would “pay the price” for a vote against abortion rights. “We take threats against public officials very seriously. I look forward to your cooperation,” Martin wrote Schumer in a Jan. 21 letter obtained by The Post.

Martin’s actions are likely to be welcomed by Trump and allies, who assert they were unfairly targeted by the past administration. But career prosecutors who have served under presidents of both parties say Martin is politicizing the office and potentially breaking with 50 years of Justice Department policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations. They warn that an exodus of veteran prosecutors will threaten public safety and national security, leaving a more pliant institution that could enable Trump’s avowed desire to punish his foes in a second term.

Notifications went out at about 5 p.m. Friday to the people being terminated who served in the office’s now-disbanded Capitol siege prosecution section, according to four people and a document viewed by The Post. The cuts amount to about 8 percent of the office’s prosecutors. Combined with a recently announced freeze on hiring and promotions, the openings will have impacts across the office’s civil, appellate, Superior Court and violent crime divisions, where some prosecutors had been previously reassigned.

In a memorandum dated Friday, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove directed the termination of the prosecutors, characterizing their hiring as a “subversive” action by the Biden administration that hindered Martin’s ability to staff the office and “to faithfully implement” Trump’s agenda.

“I will not tolerate subversive personnel actions by the previous Administration at any U.S. attorney’s office,” Bove said, adding that it would be appropriate to redirect personnel resources for new hires.

An email sent by Martin at about 5 p.m. included the memo and notified recipients to retain all documents relating to “personnel decisions regarding attorneys hired to support casework” regarding the Capitol riot, which the memo said is now under investigation pursuant to Trump’s executive order targeting the “weaponization” of law enforcement and intelligence agencies against him.

The dismissals came after James R. McHenry III, the acting attorney general, earlier this week fired members of special counsel Jack Smith’s team who prosecuted Trump; meanwhile, the FBI is considering a mass purge of agents involved in investigations of Trump and the Capitol riot. Separately, Martin has ordered an internal review of prosecutors’ handling of some Jan. 6 prosecutions, focusing on one of the most heavily litigated counts in the investigation that Trump has called a “witch hunt” against him.

“Politics above all, that’s what this Department of Justice is about,” former assistant U.S. attorney Ashley Akers told MSNBC after resigning last week. “The message it sends is, ‘Adhere to the president and the will of the president or you’ll be fired.’ And second, it shows a lack of independence at the Department of Justice.”

Martin is the first D.C. U.S. attorney in at least 50 years not to have served as a judge or federal prosecutor. Though that is not a requirement for the job, his team, which had about 350 prosecutors before Friday, is responsible for investigating current and former members of Congress and the executive branch, prosecuting key national security and international crimes, and enforcing all D.C. felony laws.

Martin’s affability and zeal, along with his combustibility, were evident to those who previously worked with him.

“He is one of the hardest-working candidates I’ve ever seen in my life,” John Hancock, who would later take over as Missouri GOP chairman from Martin, said in 2010.

“I like Ed,” former state Democratic Party chairman Michael Kelley said in the same Martin profile. “But working with Ed is like working with a lit firecracker. It’s going to explode; you just don’t know when.”

Martin has long found himself at the center of political controversy. In 2007, Martin abruptly resigned without explanation as chief of staff to then-Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt (R). The office was entangled in a secrecy dispute, denying that its emails were subject to the state’s open records law and claiming some emails didn’t exist.

But backups surfaced. And they showed Martin using his state email account to urge political allies to attack Blunt’s opponent in the governor’s race and to criticize a judge nominated by Blunt to the state Supreme Court.

A staff lawyer Martin fired for advising Blunt’s staff their emails were public records later sued and won a judgment for defamation and wrongful termination, costing taxpayers $2 million in legal expenses. Blunt dropped his reelection bid.

“There was not a guiding set of principles behind anything Ed Martin pursued, because it became apparent he would lie, cheat and steal, and destroy me and others to try to get away with an obvious illegality with erasing those public records,” the staff lawyer, Scott Eckersley, told The Post this week. He called Martin “a dangerous man who is really governed by emotion and by whatever he wants in that moment.”

The episode didn’t sink Martin. After losing bids for Congress and Missouri attorney general, he chaired Missouri’s Republican Party, then led Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. In September 2016, the day after the famed conservative activist and opponent of feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment died, the pair published a book, “The Conservative Case for Trump,” launching Martin’s steady climb into the president’s orbit.

Martin and the U.S. attorney’s office declined requests for interviews this week. But he has spoken at length since 2016 as a bomb-throwing right-wing radio show host and podcaster whose shoot-from-the-lip, wrecking-ball style recalls Stephen K. Bannon or Alex Jones. Like them, Martin has methodically denigrated the investigations into Trump, extolled Jan. 6 riot defendants and attacked the criminal justice system—especially in Washington, D.C.

On his podcast, he said D.C.’s jury pool is “corrupted” by “big government plus big media plus big tech.” He suggested some D.C. federal district judges engaged in a “big lie” of “nonstop politically-motivated lawfare” and that Congress should rein in the court’s jurisdiction.

After the 2020 election, Martin was a “Stop the Steal” organizer involved in the planning and financing of Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, rally, writing that afternoon from the Capitol area, it was “Like Mardi Gras in DC today: love, faith and joy. Ignore #FakeNews.” He was issued a subpoena by the House Jan. 6 committee but did not testify. He raised money and advocated for riot defendants, representing three of them.

Martin’s work has won him powerful patrons and partners. They include Mike Davis, a Trump legal adviser who has quipped that if he were acting attorney general, he would carry out a “three-week reign of terror” firing career “deep state” employees and pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, Politico reported.

“If I were a January 6th prosecutor in the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office, I’d be looking for a new job,” Davis said. “They ruined Americans’ lives for years. They’re going to feel the consequences for it. … I want these guys to live in fear for their jobs, for their liberty, for their financial well-being.”

Martin also served as deputy policy director for the Republican National Convention’s 2024 platform committee under Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025, a conservative effort to expand presidential power and make the attorney general more loyal to the White House. The president tapped Martin in December to serve as Vought’s chief of staff on his return as director of Office of Management and Budget before an 11th-hour move to the prosecutor post.

So far in office, some of Martin’s moves have evoked Vought’s vow to make civil servants want to quit. As in past roles, Martin led with personnel changes. Some moves, such as his cleanup as chair of the troubled St. Louis board of elections in 2005, drew bipartisan praise. Others—such as when he sent packing liberal-leaning staff at the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis, lawyers at the governor’s office, and an election staffer who said he found her “not Republican enough”—prompted claims that Martin was a hatchet man.

By his second day in office in D.C., Martin told staffers he expected to serve as Trump’s permanent U.S. attorney, getting ahead of any White House announcement and contradicting his stated expectation days earlier, according to five people in attendance or briefed on the meeting.

Martin also replaced the office’s experienced top assistant U.S. attorney with a career prosecutor and supervisor who served as a GOP Senate staffer. He eliminated the Capitol siege prosecution unit and removed its chief, The Post has reported, and froze hiring and promotions.

Martin also tasked two other top leaders, the heads of its federal criminal division and of its fraud, public corruption and civil rights section, to lead a fast-tracked review of prosecutors’ handling of Capitol riot prosecutions. Ordering those senior supervisors to investigate colleagues puts them in a difficult position, and many are watching for Martin’s next moves.

Martin has suggested on his podcast that prosecutors were politically motivated to punish Trump supporters when they charged more than 250 riot defendants with felony obstruction of Congress’s certification of the 2020 election, calling them “purveyors of terror.” Those decisions began under career prosecutors and Trump’s first term-appointees, and were upheld by nearly all judges to review them before the Supreme Court. The high court ruled last June that the statute applied only to interfering with physical evidence.

Martin and other critics say prosecutors then doubled down, charging new felony counts or opposing sentence reductions for some defendants, moves they called needlessly cruel.

A devout Catholic raised in central New Jersey, Martin graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., earned a philosophy degree at Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, and earned degrees in law and ethics from St. Louis University. After a year clerking for a federal judge in Kansas City, Martin launched his legal career at a large law firm, Bryan Cave, and later opened his own firm.

In 2018, Martin moved his wife and four children to Great Falls, a wealthy northern Virginia suburb west of the capital, where he ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors.

Martin frequently posts on social media, quoting Bible verses and MAGA sound bites such as, “Blame Dems for L.A. fires,” and saying of Canada, “They are completely reliant on our subsidies and military, Trump explains. Why not make them part of the country?”

He has also emphasized violent crime. “We will be first and foremost following the president’s direction to ‘make D.C. safe again,’” Martin emailed prosecutors last week, after being invited by Trump to the Jan. 22 White House pardon-signing for two D.C. police officers convicted of second-degree murder and obstruction of justice in the 2020 death of a moped driver.

Meanwhile, Martin has threatened to investigate internal critics, and lashed out at the disclosure of his actions, emailing more than 800 prosecutors and support staff to stop talking about his emails.

“Wow, what a disappointment to have my email yesterday to you all was leaked almost immediately. Again, personally insulting and professionally unacceptable. I guess I have learned my lesson,” he emailed staff on Tuesday, the second time in a week he had made such a complaint, according to copies viewed by or read to The Post.

“If you are the person or person who leaked, feel free to contact me directly,” he wrote earlier. “Very sad. We will not tolerate this behavior.”

In this week’s note, Martin accused Akers, the prosecutor who just left the office, of “bad-mouthing our work (and me!).” Akers, who declined to speak to The Post afterward, said in cable news interviews that it was “appalling” that Martin advocated for members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers extremist groups by successfully urging a judge to undo their stay-away orders from Washington, and called his review of Jan. 6 cases a “wild goose chase.”

“We will need to make sure we have her records and emails,” Martin wrote.