Ed Martin Announces He Will Abuse The Powers Of His Next Office, Too

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14-05-2025

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
I don't recall an outgoing interim U.S. attorney holding a press conference at the end of their brief tenure, but then no one else has been a rolling clown show like Ed Martin. His endless self-promotion, Trump brown-nosing, and flagrant abuse of office sets a standard only his successor Jeanine Pirro could hope to match. Don't count her out.
In an especially painful example of the Peter principle, the failure of Martin's nomination to the permanent position as U.S. attorney for D.C. means he's getting bumped up to Main Justice, where he will be, in his words, the 'captain' of the brazenly corrupt 'Weaponization Working Group' that Attorney General Pam Bondi has set up on orders from President Trump.
Martin used his press conference as an opportunity to preview his work weaponizing the Justice Department on behalf of Donald Trump:
'There are some really bad actors, some people that did some really bad things to the American people. And if they can be charged, we'll charge them. But if they can't be charged, we will name them,' Martin said. 'And we will name them, and in a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed. And that's a fact. That's the way things work. And so that's, that's how I believe the job operates.'
As my former colleague Ryan Reilly put it, naming and shaming is 'a major departure from longstanding Justice Department protocols.' Under Trump, with the White House running DOJ, all of the old standards to prevent abuse of power and prosecutorial misconduct are out. The law is now a tool to serve Trump, as either shield or sword, depending on the exigencies of the moment.
Martin is no more or less corrupt that the rest of the Trump-installed yahoos turning the Justice Department upside down. He's just the most buffoonish of the bunch, though his successor might vie that title. Pirro is set to be sworn in as interim D.C. U.S. Attorney today.
The WSJ has a good rundown on the flagrant corruption of the pardon process in Trump II. Into this Wild West strolls Ed Martin as the new U.S. pardon attorney for the Justice Department, a position that came open when the prior pardon attorney was fired. At his farewell presser, Martin was already making noises about reviewing the Biden pardons.
The Trump DOJ has now secured an indictment of Wisconsin state judge Hannah Dugan on allegations that she helped an undocumented criminal defendant in her court briefly evade capture by federal agents. The two-count indictment mirrors the original charges brought against her in the case, but take a closer look at the specific affirmative acts that the Justice Department is alleging amount to criminal obstruction of a government proceeding:
In a weak and strangely written opinion, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Lou Haines of Western Pennsylvania became the first judge to mostly uphold President Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act on the merits – though she found the Trump administration's lack of proper notice to be constitutionally deficient and ordered a 21-day notice going forward.
Even as President Trump is consistently losing the court cases challenging his executive orders against major law firms, he has revoked the security clearances of at least two lawyers from one of the targeted firms, WilmerHale. In his letter alerting the judge to the latest development, WilmerHale counsel Paul Clement did not say which government agency had revoked their clearances.
The Trump administration yanked another $450 million in federal grants from Harvard, which promptly expanded its existing lawsuit against the federal government to include the newest rounds of attacks on its funding.
'This is a once-in-a-century brain gain opportunity.'–Australian Strategic Policy Institute, urging its government to woo U.S.-based scientists and researchers caught in the Trump II attack on research and development
Morning Memo has mostly eschewed the dead-end practice of parsing every utterance by Senate Republicans for signs of splitting from Trump. But the White House incursion into the Library of Congress, using the Justice Department, does seem to have set off alarm bells among some Republicans that we haven't seen to this point:
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.) said it was important for there to be a consultation on nominees such as the librarian of Congress, whom he described as having a 'hybrid role between…Article I and Article II branches of government.'
Asked if there had been consultation with the White House before the firing of the librarian last week, Thune replied, 'Not exactly.'
That's still tepid language, but there was enough concern to force Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the improbable new acting Librarian of Congress, to meet with the staff of the Senate Rules Committee, the WSJ reported.
It's not just the Library of Congress but a list of legislative branch agencies, like the Government Accountability Office, that are under threat if the executive branch asserts control over them.
The Department of Agriculture has begun restoring information on climate change that it had scrubbed from its website and promised to restore the purged content within days, but it took a lawsuit from organic farmers and environmental groups to force the restoration, which makes these kinds of victories while necessary ring a little hollow.
It has taken some self-control not to turn Morning Memo into a running newsletter on the Trump II demolition of NOAA and the National Weather Service, but if anything I've over-steered in the other direction. So to right that wrong, here's a quality rundown on the very real and present threats to human life and property that we're going to begin confronting immediately as a result of the NWS teardown.
On the occasion of the Qatari jumbo jet fiasco, Aaron Blake runs through Donald Trump's long history of pretending to decry foreign money when it came to the Clintons. 'My goal is to keep foreign money out of American politics,' Trump said during his 2016 campaign. 'Hillary Clinton's goal is to put the Oval Office up for sale to whatever country offers the highest price.'
We're going to need to shake ourselves out of our old assumption that revelations like this one – a tiny company with China ties securing funding to buy as much as $300 million of the $TRUMP memecoin – is going to set off investigations or further revelations that lead to some form of accountability for Trump's rampant corruption. That's just not going to happen with a Trump DOJ and a GOP-controlled Congress and immunity from the Roberts Court. As a result, this kind of report from the NYT is going to be the full extent of what we know. There's no bigger reveal coming. There's no other shoe to drop. This is it. This is the corruption.
German authorities have reportedly foiled an allegedly Russia-sponsored plot to use parcel bombs to target logistics operators in Germany.
Fascism experts Jason Stanley and the husband and wife team of Marci Shore and Timothy Snyder talk about why they have all left Yale for the University of Toronto: