The New Yorker:

What the replacement of Ed Martin, who punished his own prosecutors for bringing cases against January 6th rioters, signals about the President’s signature campaign promise.

By Antonia Hitchens

On the first night of Donald Trump’s second term in office, he signed an executive order called “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” which pardoned more than fifteen hundred people who were charged or sentenced for their participation in the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Earlier in the day, Trump had appointed Ed Martin, a conservative activist and lawyer from Missouri, as the acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Martin had helped organize the Stop the Steal rally, at the Ellipse, which preceded the riot. He was at the Capitol on January 6th; he characterized the energy as “like Mardi Gras,” though he later claimed that the federal government had staged some of the day’s activities. He went on to defend so-called J6 hostages in court, and worked with their advocacy organization, the Patriot Freedom Project. (Martin gave an award to a pardoned rioter and Nazi sympathizer, whom he called “an extraordinary man.”) He has compared the imprisonment of Capitol rioters to the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Martin would now lead the office that handled the January 6th prosecutions—the largest criminal investigation in American history. He worked quickly to undo it.

Martin, who was the first U.S. Attorney for D.C. in more than fifty years to have been neither a judge nor a federal prosecutor before assuming the role, summarily fired more than a dozen of the prosecutors who had been involved in the cases, then launched a probe to investigate how the office had handled what he saw as “Communist show trials.” He demoted senior leaders, among them those who oversaw the prosecutions of Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro. (Both men served time after D.C. juries found them guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to coöperate with the House committee investigating January 6th.) On X, Martin described his office as consisting of “President Trumps’ lawyers.”

On Thursday, Trump announced that Martin, who was serving in an interim capacity and still needed to be confirmed by the Senate, would be withdrawn from his post. Two days earlier, Thom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina and a member of the Judiciary Committee, had indicated that he would cast a deciding vote to scuttle Martin’s nomination. “Most of my concerns are related to January 6th,” Tillis told reporters at the Capitol. (He elaborated that if Martin were “being put forth as a U.S. Attorney for any district except the district where January 6th happened, the protests happened, I’d probably support him.”)

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