President Trump announced Monday that he’s nominating Ed Martin, a lawyer who has long defended Jan. 6 rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol, to serve as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
The president said Mr. Martin, who served as interim U.S. attorney in Washington since Mr. Trump returned to the White House, has “led a distinguished career of service”
“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. He will get the job done,” Mr. Trump said in a statement posted on Truth Social.
Often echoing Mr. Trump’s unproven claims that the 2020 election was rigged, Mr. Martin was part of the mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. That day, a violent riot broke out in the Capitol when a pro-Trump mob tried to stop Congress from certifying President Biden’s election victory.
Mr. Martin posted on social media that day the riot was filled with “faith and joy.” The night before the Capitol riot, he wrote on social media that “true Americans should work until “their last breath” to “stop the steal.”
He has spent the past four years defending some of the people charged in the Jan. 6 riot in court and sat on the board of the Patriot Freed Project, a nonprofit that raised money to assist the families of those facing criminal charges from that day.
“I’ve never seen anything so unfair in terms of … how these people are characterized, you know, insurrectionists and felonious, all this stuff,” Mr. Martin said on the Unimpressed podcast last year.
Since serving as the interim U.S. attorney, Mr. Martin has worked to dismantle the office’s investigations into those who participated in the attack on the Capitol. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia led the probe, charging more than 1,500 people.
Mr. Martin also fired about two dozen prosecutors who oversaw the Jan. 6 investigations. He launched a review of how the U.S. Attorney’s Office used the charge of obstructing an official proceeding against hundreds of the pro-Trump protesters.
The U.S. Supreme Court last year ruled that the obstruction charge only applied in the few Jan. 6 cases when the defendant tampered or destroyed documents. The decision severely limited use of the charge in the Jan. 6 cases and resulted in some convicts receiving reduced sentences and others getting released from jail.
Mr. Martin will replace Matthew Graves, who was appointed by President Biden. Mr. Graves was heavily criticized for the increase in crime in the District on his watch as well as declining to bring charges against Hunter Biden, which allowed the statute of limitations to expire on tax charges dating back to his dad’s time as vice president.
Although he has never prosecuted a case, Mr. Martin has served as director of the Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis’ Human Rights Office, where he supervised legal clinics for low-income residents. He later worked as a judicial clerk to Judge Pasco M. Brown II on the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and launched a private law practice.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.