by Andy Kroll and Jeremy Kohler
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When President Donald Trump chose Ed Martin, the Missouri lawyer and political operative, to be the top U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., the decision came as a shock to current and former federal prosecutors as well as outside legal experts. Martin had no prosecutorial experience. He was best known as a conservative activist, the former right-hand man to influential anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly and a loyal Trump surrogate.
Since taking charge of the office in January, Martin has launched controversial investigations, rushed to defend Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and vowed to change how his office prosecutes crime in the District of Columbia.
His actions have been met with fierce pushback from Democratic lawmakers, watchdog groups and legal experts. There have been at least four disciplinary complaints filed against him with the D.C. and Missouri bars. One of the D.C. complaints has been dismissed; the other three appear to be pending. If Martin has responded to the complaints, his statements have not been made public.
Martin did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Here are some of Martin’s most contentious moves so far.
Jan. 6 Retribution
At Trump’s direction, Martin has presided over the dismissal of outstanding cases that were part of the Justice Department’s investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol.
But Martin got tripped up by what should have been a legal formality: In one of the cases he dismissed, he was still listed as counsel of record for the defendant, a possible conflict of interest. The incident prompted bar complaints against Martin in D.C. and Missouri. (The D.C. bar’s disciplinary panel dismissed the complaint, saying Martin had been acting at the behest of the president. The Missouri complaint appears to be pending.)
Martin fired more than a dozen federal prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases. He demoted seven senior lawyers in his office, including the two prosecutors who led the Jan. 6 team, to low-level roles in D.C. Superior Court, which handles local prosecutions. (Most of the affected attorneys have not commented publicly, but those who have are critical of Martin’s tenure.)
Martin has opened an investigation into supposed leaks related to Jan. 6 cases, saying the information was used “by the media and partisans as misinformation.” He also ordered an investigation into past charging decisions made as part of the Jan. 6 cases. In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the DOJ’s use of an obstruction statute in those prosecutions. In an office-wide email obtained by ProPublica, Martin quoted an unnamed contact who compared the DOJ’s use of the obstruction statute to President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to imprison more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II.
DOGE Enforcer
Martin has published several open letters to Musk on the Musk-owned social media platform X.
In the first letter, dated Feb. 3, Martin asked Musk to “utilize me and my staff” to protect the people and the work of DOGE. He vowed to take “any and all legal action against anyone” who impeded DOGE’s work.
“We will not act like the previous administration,” Martin added, “who looked the other way as the Antifa and BLM rioters as well as thugs with guns trashed our capital city.”
In his second letter, dated Feb. 7, Martin expanded on his pledge to his office’s legal powers in support of Musk and DOGE’s work. “Please let me reiterate again: If people are discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them and we will chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable,” Martin wrote.
He urged his employees to respond to Musk’s demand that all federal employees list five things they accomplished that week, adding: “DOGE and Elon are doing great work! Historic.”
And when DOGE employees attempted to seize control of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a private nonprofit that receives government funding, Martin and his office assisted so that DOGE could take over and wind down the nonprofit.
“We Will Defend You”
The U.S. attorney’s office for D.C. is unique in that it prosecutes both federal and local crimes. In his tweets and public statements, Martin has vowed to “Make D.C. Safe Again,” even though violent crime has broadly declined in the District in recent years.
While his public safety agenda is light on details so far, he has pledged to be a stalwart defender of the D.C. police. In yet another open letter posted on X, Martin wrote that the “radical ‘Defund the Police’ movement by Black Lives Matter is over” and that it was “time to get back to protecting and supporting our law enforcement officers.”
“At every turn, we will defend you,” he said.
Yet current and former federal prosecutors in D.C. say Martin’s actions so far have undercut morale in the office while his proposed reforms could make it harder, not easier, for prosecutors to do their jobs.
In February, Martin removed the chief and deputy chief of the Federal Major Crimes section, which oversees cases involving drugs, firearms possession, child exploitation, human trafficking and immigration violations. The two lawyers, who had decades of experience between them and were widely respected, were demoted to low-level roles; the more senior of the two, Melissa Jackson, resigned soon afterward. (Jackson declined to comment; her deputy did not respond to requests for comment.)
Martin also said he was “rewriting” the office’s policy for the so-called Lewis list, a repository of police officer disciplinary records. Prosecutors consult the Lewis database when they decide whether to put a police officer on the witness stand. They also use the Lewis list to identify officers about whom they need to disclose information to defense attorneys that bears on a witness’s credibility or potential bias to fulfill their constitutional obligations.
Martin framed his decision to reform the Lewis list as part of a broader shift to be more pro-police. “USAO will no longer allow judges or others to gratuitously damage your careers because of the outsized impact of inexact characterizations,” he wrote.
Michael Romano, a former federal prosecutor in the D.C. office, said that any effort to weaken or eliminate the Lewis list will only make it harder for prosecutors to argue and win cases because it would deprive them of information that they must disclose in court. “Gutting the Lewis list,” Romano told ProPublica, “makes it less likely that prosecutors will obtain convictions at trial, makes it more likely that convictions will be reversed on appeal and puts prosecutors’ licenses to practice law at risk.”
Investigating Democrats
Martin has initiated multiple inquiries into critics and opponents of Trump.
Martin asked Rep. Eugene Vindman, D-Va., for information about a business that Vindman and his brother, Alexander, started to support Ukraine in its war against Russia, The Washington Post reported. Vindman and his twin brother, Alex, both blew the whistle on Trump’s attempt to withhold military aid to Ukraine while pressuring the country’s leader to investigate the family of President Joe Biden. Eugene Vindman said that Martin’s letter was part of Trump’s “retribution campaign” and that those who wrote the letter and “encouraged this weird attempt at intimidation are lying.”
Biden’s family members and former officials from his administration received letters from Martin’s office related to the ex-president’s decision to grant pardons to people close to him, The New York Times reported. Trump has pushed an unproven theory that Biden’s actions weren’t valid because he wasn’t mentally competent.
He also sent letters to Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and Rep. Robert Garcia of California, both Democrats, asking them to answer questions about incendiary public comments they had made. The inquiries appeared to have fizzled out and did not result in any charges.
Targeting Medical Journals
On Apr. 14, Martin sent a list of questions to the editor of Chest magazine, a medical journal published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The letter accused the journal and others like it of “being partisans in various scientific debates” and asked a series of contentious questions, such as “How do you clearly articulate when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others?” and “How do you handle allegations that authors of works in your journals may have misled readers?”
Two other medical journal publishers received similar letters, The New York Times reported. The letters have raised grave concerns about curbing free speech and government intimidation of scientific publications.
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