Edward R. Martin Jr. did not waste any time. Days after Mr. Martin, a Trump-aligned activist, was tapped by the Justice Department to investigate the New York attorney general, Letitia James, he wrote a letter to her lawyer saying he would take it as an act of “good faith” if she were to resign.
Mr. Martin followed up this breach of prosecutorial protocol by showing up outside Ms. James’s Brooklyn home, clad in a trench coat and posing for pictures for The New York Post.
While he told an inquiring neighbor that he was “just looking at houses, interesting houses,” Mr. Martin later appeared on Fox News saying that, as a prosecutor, he wanted to see the property with his own eyes. It was the latest in a string of media appearances he made in relation to his investigation of Ms. James, one of Mr. Trump’s most prominent adversaries.
Each of Mr. Martin’s actions violates Justice Department rules and norms: Prosecutors are barred from making investigative decisions based on politics; they are asked not to comment on specific cases; and they are supposed to avoid turning their investigations into public spectacles.
The request that Ms. James resign is particularly unusual because it appears the Justice Department is trying to harness its criminal powers to accomplish one of Mr. Trump’s political goals.
Mr. Martin’s conduct is part of an emerging pattern from Mr. Trump’s administration over the past two months in which top officials seek to use the federal government’s vast intelligence gathering and law enforcement authority to cast the specter of criminality on Mr. Trump’s enemies without demonstrating that they might have committed crimes that rise to the level of an indictment.
The behavior may ultimately be so outside the bounds that it could undermine any criminal case, according to legal experts. Attorney General Pam Bondi and her top deputy, Todd Blanche, caught off guard by the Brooklyn stunt, let Mr. Martin know that his actions were not helpful, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
But regardless of the future of the inquiry into Ms. James, Mr. Martin’s actions — along with those from Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe — have once again stoked the base, leading them to believe that the president’s perceived enemies, including Ms. James, former President Barack Obama, the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and the former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan, will soon be punished.
“I’m tempted to describe their conduct as amateurish, but the consequences can be grave because they have enormous power at the Justice Department,” said Barbara L. McQuade, a University of Michigan law professor who was a U.S. attorney during the Obama administration.
She added that she “worried about long-term consequences of the public trust in the department itself because people will see the department as yet one more weapon and tool of politics instead of the independent law enforcement agency it’s supposed to be.”
On Monday, the lawyer for Ms. James, Abbe D. Lowell, responded to Mr. Martin’s letter, writing that Mr. Martin’s conduct had demonstrated that he was “not conducting a serious investigation.”
“Despite the lack of evidence or law, you will take whatever actions you have been directed to take to make good on President Trump’s and Attorney General Bondi’s calls for revenge,” Mr. Lowell wrote.
Michael Caputo, an adviser to Mr. Martin, said, “How funny it is to hear Tish James complain about media attention after spending years attacking President Trump in the press.”
Over the past two months, Mr. Martin, who is in charge of several investigations, has quietly worked with federal prosecutors in multiple jurisdictions, including the Eastern District of New York, the Eastern District of Virginia and Maryland.
Even in his short time on the job, he has become impatient with the pace of investigative work, pressing local prosecutors to move more quickly, according to three people familiar with his actions.
To current and former Justice Department officials, Mr. Martin is equal parts comic relief and existential threat. He has virtually no experience overseeing investigations, or in compiling a case that successfully persuades a grand jury to bring an indictment. But his willingness to take dramatic actions intended to punish and intimidate Mr. Trump’s enemies has earned him support from the White House.
Though he courts the press more aggressively than most, he is hardly unique among law enforcement and intelligence officials in the administration.
Officials — including the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, Ms. Gabbard and Mr. Ratcliffe — have declassified several documents in recent weeks related to the inquiries into ties between Russia and Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign, suggesting that they show a pattern of misconduct, even lawbreaking, by Obama-era officials. Instead of keeping the documents under wraps for use in an investigation, many of the documents have been publicly released and given to Congress.
And the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal watchdog agency, this month eagerly confirmed that it was investigating Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor who twice indicted Mr. Trump. The inquiry, into whether Mr. Smith violated a law that prohibits federal workers from using their government jobs to engage in political activity, appears to be theater, given that the most severe penalty is dismissal from federal employment. Mr. Smith left government at the start of the year.
Mr. Martin, a Missouri Republican raised in New York and New Jersey, had never worked as a prosecutor before Mr. Trump put him in charge of the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. He endeared himself to the president, by lending him political support in Missouri and serving as an advocate, fund-raiser and eventually a lawyer for many of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He was in the mob outside the Capitol that day.
Mr. Martin dismantled many of the Jan. 6 criminal cases that had not been effectively wiped out by Mr. Trump’s broad pardons after the president appointed him to lead the Washington office earlier this year.
In May, Mr. Trump withdrew Mr. Martin’s nomination to take the job permanently after Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, announced that he would not support Mr. Martin because of his ties to the Jan. 6 rioters.
He was not the only Republican who had issues with Mr. Martin: Others were alarmed by his unsuccessful effort to convene a grand jury to indict another Trump foe from Brooklyn, Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat, over comments he made about Supreme Court justices in 2020.
Mr. Martin was quickly reassigned to Justice Department headquarters, where he holds four titles, including United States pardon attorney and director of the so-called Weaponization Working Group, a task force established to seek retribution against Mr. Trump’s political enemies. He included all of those positions in his letter to Mr. Lowell.
Mr. Martin has stated that if he is unable to successfully obtain indictments against the targets of his inquiries, he will use his prosecutorial pulpit to name and shame.
“If they can be charged, we’ll charge them,” he told reporters. “But if they can’t be charged, we will name them. And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.”
Mr. Trump has made it clear that he believes Ms. James is one of those people. She has been a target since he returned to the White House, and her Brooklyn home is one of at least two properties being scrutinized in the Justice Department investigation that Mr. Martin now supervises. The inquiry began in the spring, after the president called Ms. James a “crook” on social media, posting an article that accused her of committing fraud in her private real estate transactions.
The Justice Department has opened a second investigation into Ms. James, subpoenaing her office for records related to its long-running inquiry into Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump’s defenders have suggested that his treatment of Ms. James mirrors hers of him. When she ran for New York attorney general during his first term, she pledged to open an inquiry into him and his company, positioning herself as a leader of the resistance to his presidency.
She opened one soon after she was elected and, after investigating him for several years, sued Mr. Trump in 2022, accusing him of exaggerating the value of his properties by billions of dollars. In 2024, she won against him at trial. A judge found Mr. Trump liable for conspiring to manipulate his net worth and punished him with a fine that, with interest, exceeds half a billion dollars. A New York appeals court is considering the case.
By contrast, Ms. James has not been formally accused of any wrongdoing and the cumulative value of the houses in question is less than $2 million. Mr. Lowell has said that the allegations against her lack “any credible foundation” and are a pretext for a revenge tour Mr. Martin has been happy to aid.
The trip to New York was part of another tour for Mr. Martin, a trip back home that combined the personal and the political. He was in the area to visit his father in Hoboken, N.J., paid a visit to Alina Habba, the U.S. attorney in New Jersey, then tacked on the Brooklyn expedition, according to a person with knowledge of his itinerary.
Mr. Martin’s choice of attire on the trip was also rooted in his history.
The wrinkled tan trench coat with epaulets that he wore in the stifling heat in Brooklyn is his signature garment, donned in homage to another family member who staked out a career as a notable supporting player — the character actor Thomas Mitchell, best known for portraying the bumbling Uncle Billy in the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
Mr. Martin was born in New York City seven-plus years after Mr. Mitchell died in 1962.
But he idolizes his famous forebear and wears the coat to honor one of Mr. Mitchell’s final appearances onstage as Detective Columbo, a role later made famous by Peter Falk in the 1970s television series.