Latest news with #Schlafly
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Worsening Pandemic of Gambling Highlighted in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons
TUCSON, Ariz., June 02, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Gambling addiction is worse than substance abuse in many ways, including suicide rates, writes Andrew Schlafly, Esq. in the summer issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. A Swedish study estimated that the rate of suicide is 15 times higher among gamblers than in the general population. Physical health problems result from gambling, including hypertension, cardiovascular disease, sleep difficulties, and peptic ulcer disease, Schlafly states. Pathological gambling has also been linked to frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson's disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Psychiatric harm includes the onset or worsening of major depressive episodes, anxiety or substance use disorders, and intense feelings of shame, rash decision-making, and deceptive conduct, he adds. Roughly half of Americans are engaged in gambling now, he estimates. In 2023, $49 billion was spent on table games and slot machines. Extreme addiction to gambling afflicts about 5 percent of the population, and the rate is higher for young adults. Relatively few—typically less than 10 percent—of addicted gamblers ever seek help to overcome their habit, he reports. 'It is no longer necessary to travel to a casino to lose one's life savings,' he writes. Gambling as tailored by artificial intelligence (AI) to individual weaknesses is invading the cell phones of everyone, including teenagers particularly vulnerable to this addiction, he warns. Since the 2018 Supreme Court decision in Murphy v. NCAA, 39 states have legalized sports gambling. By 2021, $57.2 billion was wagered annually on sporting events alone. Today, hundreds of suspicious sports performances annually have been correlated with unusual betting activity, Schlafly states. Gambling may become even more prevalent as a clever new way around state regulation of gambling percolates through the courts: a way to bet on event contracts, which is federally regulated in a very permissive way by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). This includes betting on elections outcomes, which could rope in many more people, and make more corruption inevitable. The Major Questions Doctrine is a legal mechanism that conceivably could help limit the spread of this madness, Schlafly suggests. The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons is published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a national organization representing physicians in all specialties since 1943. Contact: Andrew Schlafly, (908) 719-8608, Aschlafly@ or Jane M. Orient, M.D., (520) 323-3110, janeorientmd@
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Missouri's Ed Martin ghostwrote attacks on a judge and still became a top Trump prosecutor
Former Missouri Republican Party Chairman Ed Martin, speaks about his new job as president of the Eagle Forum with St. Louis on the Air on Thursday, Feb. 12, 2015, at St. Louis Public Radio's headquarters in the city's Grand Center neighborhood (Jason Rosenbaum/St. Louis Public Radio). This story was originally published by ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. The attacks on Judge John Barberis in the fall of 2016 appeared on his personal Facebook page. They impugned his ethics, criticized a recent ruling and branded him as a 'politician' with the 'LOWEST rating for a judge in Illinois.' Barberis, a state court judge in an Illinois county across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, was presiding over a nasty legal battle for control over the Eagle Forum, the vaunted grassroots group founded by Phyllis Schlafly, matriarch of the anti-feminist movement. The case pitted Schlafly's youngest daughter against three of her sons, almost like a Midwest version of the HBO program 'Succession' (without the obscenities). At the heart of the dispute — and the lead defendant in the case — was Ed Martin, a lawyer by training and a political operative by trade. In Missouri, where he was based, Martin was widely known as an irrepressible gadfly who trafficked in incendiary claims and trailed controversy wherever he went. Today, he's the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., and one of the most prominent members of the Trump Justice Department. In early 2015, Schlafly had selected Martin to succeed her as head of the Eagle Forum, a crowning moment in Martin's career. Yet after just a year in charge, the group's board fired Martin. Schlafly's youngest daughter, Anne Schlafly Cori, and a majority of the Eagle Forum board filed a lawsuit to bar Martin from any association with the organization. After Barberis dealt Martin a major setback in the case in October 2016, the attacks began. The Facebook user who posted them, Priscilla Gray, had worked in several roles for Schlafly but was not a party to the case, and her comments read like those of an aggrieved outsider. Almost two years later, the truth emerged as Cori's lawyers gathered evidence for her lawsuit: Behind the posts about the judge was none other than Martin. ProPublica obtained previously unreported documents filed in the case that show Martin had bought a laptop for Gray and that she subsequently offered to 'happily write something to attack this judge.' And when she did, Martin ghostwrote more posts for her to use and coached her on how to make her comments look more 'organic.' 'That is not justice but a rigged system,' he urged her to write. 'Shame on you and this broken legal system.' 'Call what he did unfair and rigged over and over,' Martin continued. Martin even urged Gray to message the judge privately. 'Go slow and steady,' he advised. 'Make it organic.' Gray appeared to take Martin's advice. 'Private messaging him that sweet line,' she wrote. It was not clear from the court record what, if anything, she wrote at that juncture. Legal experts told ProPublica that Martin's conduct in the Eagle Forum case was a clear violation of ethical norms and professional rules. Martin's behavior, they said, was especially egregious because he was both a defendant in the case and a licensed attorney. Martin appeared to be 'deliberately interfering with a judicial proceeding with the intent to undermine the integrity of the outcome,' said Scott Cummings, a professor of legal ethics at UCLA School of Law. 'That's not OK.' Martin did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Martin's legal and political career is dotted with questions about his professional and ethical conduct. But for all his years in the spotlight, some of the most serious concerns about his conduct have remained in the shadows — buried in court filings, overlooked by the press or never reported at all. His actions have led to more than $600,000 in legal settlements or judgments against Martin or his employers in a handful of cases. In the Eagle Forum lawsuit, another judge found him in civil contempt, citing his 'willful disregard' of a court order, and a jury found him liable for defamation and false light against Cori. Cori also tried to have Martin charged with criminal contempt for his role in orchestrating the posts about Barberis, but a judge declined to take up the request and said she could take the case to the county prosecutor. Cori said her attorney met with a detective; Martin was never charged. Nonetheless, the emails unearthed by ProPublica were evidence that he had violated Missouri rules for lawyers, according to Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics expert and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She said lawyers are prohibited from trying to contact a judge outside of court in a case they are involved in, and they are barred from using a proxy to do something they are barred from doing themselves. Such a track record might have derailed another lawyer's career. Not so for Martin. As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump vowed to use the Justice Department to reward his allies and seek retribution against his perceived enemies. Since taking office, Trump and his appointees have made good on those pledges, pardoning Jan. 6 rioters while targeting Democratic politicians, media critics and private law firms. As one of its first personnel picks, the Trump administration chose Martin to be interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, one of the premier jobs for a federal prosecutor. A wide array of former prosecutors, legal observers and others have raised questions about his qualifications for an office known for handling high-profile cases. Martin has no experience as a prosecutor. He has never taken a case to trial, according to his public disclosures. As the acting leader of the largest U.S. attorney's office in the country, he directs the work of hundreds of lawyers who appear in court on a vast array of subjects, including legal disputes arising out of Congress, national security matters, public corruption and civil rights, as well as homicides, drug trafficking and many other local crimes. Over the last four years, the office prosecuted more than 1,500 people as part of the massive investigation into the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While Trump has pardoned the Jan. 6 defendants, Martin has taken action against the prosecutors who brought those cases. In just three months, he has overseen the dismissal of outstanding Jan. 6-related cases, fired more than a dozen prosecutors and opened an investigation into the charging decisions made in those riot cases. Martin has also investigated Democratic lawmakers and members of the Biden family; forced out the chief of the criminal division after she refused to initiate an investigation desired by Trump appointees citing a lack of evidence, according to her resignation letter; threatened Georgetown University's law school over its diversity, equity and inclusion policies; and vowed to investigate threats against Department of Government Efficiency employees or 'chase' people in the federal government 'discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically.' Martin 'has butchered the position, effectively destroying it as a vehicle by which to pursue justice and turning it into a political arm of the current administration,' says an open letter signed by more than 100 former prosecutors who worked in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia under Democratic and Republican presidents. Already, Martin has been the subject of at least fourdisciplinarycomplaints with the D.C. and Missouri bars, of which one was dismissed and the other three appear to be pending. Two of the complaints came after he moved to dismiss charges against a Jan. 6 rioter whom he had previously represented and for whom he was still listed as counsel of record. (The first complaint was dismissed after the D.C. bar's disciplinary panel concluded that Martin had dismissed the case as a result of Trump's pardons and so did not violate any rules.) The third was filed in March by a group of Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. Senate. The fourth was submitted last week by a group of former Jan. 6 prosecutors and members of the conservative-leaning Society for the Rule of Law. It argues that Martin's actions so far 'threaten to undermine the integrity of the U.S. Attorney's Office and the legal profession in the District of Columbia.' If Martin has responded to any of the complaints, those responses have not been made public. Trump has nominated Martin to run the office permanently. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have vowed to drag out Martin's confirmation, demanding a hearing and setting up a fight over one of Trump's most controversial nominees. 'I mean, he can get very hyper. He can get very emotional.' – Jo Mannies, former political reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Martin stepped off the elevator into the newsroom of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. He was angry at a reporter named Jo Mannies, one of the city's top political journalists. At a conference table with Mannies and her senior editors, he accused Mannies of being unethical and pressed the paper's leadership to spike her stories about him, according to interviews. Mannies said later she believed he was trying to get her fired. 'He was attacking her,' said Pam Maples, who was managing editor at the time. 'He was implying she had an ax to grind, that she wanted to get some big story and that she was not being ethical. And when that didn't get traction, it was more like 'this isn't a story.' It wasn't that he said anything about a fact being inaccurate, or he wanted to retract a story; he wanted the reporting to stop.' Mannies had been covering a scandal dubbed 'Memogate' that started to unfold in 2007 while Martin was chief of staff to Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt. In that role, Martin was using his government email to undermine Democratic rivals and rally anti-abortion groups. But when reporters requested emails from Blunt's staff, the governor's office denied they existed. Media organizations joined a lawsuit to preserve the messages and recover them from backup tapes. An attorney for the governor, Scott Eckersley, later said in a deposition that Martin tried to block the release of government emails and told employees to delete their messages. After Eckersley warned that doing so might violate state law, he was fired. He sued the state for wrongful termination and defamation and settled for $500,000. Martin resigned as chief of staff in 2007 after just over a year on the job, and Blunt's office would eventually hand over 22 boxes of internal emails. In a 2008 email to the Associated Press, Martin dismissed Eckersley's lawsuit as a 'desperate attempt' to revise his story after he was fired, citing Eckersley's own testimony that not all emails are public records. The Memogate incident was telling — and Martin's efforts to have Mannies fired were never reported. 'His claim was we were misrepresenting what the law was and what he was doing,' she told ProPublica. 'I mean, he can get very hyper. He can get very emotional.' When Martin launched a bid for Congress in 2010, he acted as if Memogate was ancient history. He made himself available to Mannies, she recalled, always taking her calls. Years later, he even appeared, lighthearted and bantering, on a St. Louis Public Radio podcast Mannies co-hosted. She said Martin could be outlandish and aggressive, but he could also be disarmingly passionate about whatever cause he was pursuing at the moment, often speaking in a frenetic rush. 'He just wore people down with his enthusiasm,' she said. Martin allowed a different St. Louis reporter to shadow him during his 2010 run for Congress. The reporter asked about the St. Louis election board, a dysfunctional organization that, by all accounts, Martin had helped turn around in the mid-2000s. Martin had fired an employee there named Jeanne Bergfeld, and she later sued for wrongful termination. The board settled the lawsuit. As part of the settlement, Martin agreed not to talk about the case and the board paid Bergfeld $55,000. Martin and two others issued a letter saying she had been a 'conscientious and dedicated professional.' But talking to the reporter covering his campaign, Martin said Bergfeld enjoyed 'not having to do anything' and 'wasn't interested in changing.' The day after the story was published, Bergfeld sued Martin again, this time for violating the settlement agreement. Martin denied making the comments, but the Riverfront Times released audio that proved he had. Martin agreed to pay Bergfeld another $15,000 but delayed signing the settlement for a few months. The judge then ordered Martin to pay some of her legal costs, citing his 'obstinacy.' Martin lost his 2010 congressional bid. He ran for Missouri attorney general two years later and lost again. After his stint as chair of the Missouri Republican Party, he went to work as Schlafly's right-hand man. Martin grew so attached to Schlafly that a lawyer for the Eagle Forum jokingly called him 'Ed Martin Schlafly.' As the 2016 presidential campaign ramped up, Martin supported Trump even though Eagle Forum board members, including Cori, supported Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Cori described Trump at the time as an 'egomaniacal dictator.' (Today, she said she supports him.) Cori and other board members were stunned when Schlafly endorsed Trump, with Martin standing by her side. A few weeks later, a majority of the Eagle Forum's board voted to oust Martin as president; a lawsuit filed by the board cited mismanagement and poor leadership and described his tenure as 'deplorable.' Martin has maintained that he was Schlafly's 'hand-picked successor' and has characterized his removal as a hostile takeover. 'Every day, they are diminishing the reputation and value of Phyllis,' he said in a 2017 statement. She died in September 2016. Cori and the board's lawsuit sought to enforce Martin's removal and demand an accounting of the forum's assets. That's the case that wound up before Barberis. On top of his efforts to direct Gray's posts on Barberis' Facebook page, Martin prepared a separate statement, according to previously unreported records from the case. The statement called Barberis' ruling to remove him as Eagle Forum president 'judicial activism at its worst' that 'shows what happens when the law is undermined by judges who think they can do whatever they want.' Martin emailed the statement, which said it was from 'Bruce Schlafly, M.D.' — the name of one of Schlafly's sons — to himself, then sent it to two of her other sons, John and Andy, court filings show. Martin said the statement was a 'declaration of war' and urged the Schlaflys to 'put something like this out to our biggest list.' (It's unclear if the message was ever sent.) Bruce Schlafly did not respond to requests for comment. In a 2019 sworn deposition, Cori's lawyer asked Martin questions about the posts on Barberis' Facebook page and the letter he drafted for Bruce Schlafly. Because of the possibility that he could be charged with criminal contempt of court, Martin declined to comment, on the advice of his own lawyer, though he acknowledged that lawyers are barred from communicating with judges outside of court or engaging in conduct meant to disrupt proceedings. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE Andy Schlafly, a lawyer and former Eagle Forum board member who supported Martin in the leadership fight, said 'no court has ever sanctioned Ed for his engagement of First Amendment advocacy' and likened the controversy to liberal attacks on conservative judges. He dismissed concerns about Martin directing Gray to contact the judge, saying she 'speaks for herself' and had every right to voice her outrage. He compared Martin's style — then and now — to Trump's. He said he did not believe the email Martin drafted for his brother Bruce had ever been sent, but if it had been, it would have been no different from Trump posting on Truth Social, which he considered normal behavior in political battles. 'What would Trump do in that position?' Andy Schlafly said of Martin's current role in Washington. 'I would say Trump would be doing just what Ed's doing. Elections do have consequences.' Gray declined to comment. She was not part of the lawsuit. When Cori's lawyers uncovered the emails, they asked a new judge, David Dugan — who had taken over the case after Barberis was elected to a higher court — why Martin should not be held in criminal contempt for 'an underhanded scheme' to 'attack the integrity and authority' of the court with the Facebook comments about Barberis, according to court records. Dugan declined to take up the criminal contempt motion. But he later found Martin and John Schlafly in civil contempt of court for having interfered with Eagle Forum after Barberis had removed them from the group. John Schlafly appealed the contempt finding and mostly lost. He did not respond to requests for comment. It's unclear if Martin appealed. Cori told ProPublica she also filed an ethics complaint against Martin with the Missouri Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel, which investigates ethics complaints against lawyers. She said she was told her complaint would have to wait until her lawsuit concluded. The office said it could neither confirm nor deny it had received a complaint. In 2022, when part of Cori's lawsuit went to trial, a jury found Martin liable for defaming her and casting her in a false light — including by sharing a Facebook post suggesting that she should be charged with manslaughter for her mother's death. It awarded her $57,000 in damages and also found Martin liable for $25,500 against another Eagle Forum board member. Martin argued that the statute of limitations had expired on the defamation claims and that many of his statements were either true or vague hyperbole not subject to proof. He also claimed he could not be held liable because he didn't write the offending post — he had merely shared something written by someone else. In a post-trial motion, he also leaned into protections that make it harder for public figures to win defamation cases. Under that higher legal standard, it's not enough for a plaintiff to show that a statement was false. Cori also had to prove that Martin knew it was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth, and he said she didn't prove it. But while he's wrapped himself in First Amendment protections when defending his own speech, he's taken the opposite stance since being named interim U.S. attorney by Trump, threatening legal action against people when they criticize the administration. For instance, after Rep. Robert Garcia called DOGE leader Elon Musk a 'dick' and urged Democrats to 'bring weapons' to a political fight, Martin sent Garcia a letter warning his comments could be seen as threats and demanding an explanation. With the start of Trump's first presidency, Martin and his family moved to the Northern Virginia suburbs near Washington, D.C. Martin had no formal role in the new administration, but he turned himself into one of the president's most prolific and unfiltered surrogates. CNN hired him in September 2017 to be a pro-Trump on-air commentator, only to fire him five months later after a string of controversial on-air remarks. He attacked a woman who had accused Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of molesting her as a child, praised Trump for denigrating Sen. Elizabeth Warren as 'Pocahontas' and described some of his CNN co-panelists as 'rabid feminists' and 'Black racists.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Unbowed, Martin went on to make more than 150 appearances on the Russia Today TV channel and Sputnik radio, both Russian state-owned media outlets, first reported by The Washington Post. On RT and Sputnik, Martin railed against the 'Russia hoax,' criticized the DOJ investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller and questioned American support for Ukraine after Russia's invasion by saying the U.S. was 'wasting money in Kiev for Zelensky and his corrupt guys.' The State Department would later say RT and Sputnik were 'critical elements in Russia's disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.' The Treasury Department sanctioned RT employees in 2024. The DOJ indicted two RT employees for conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to fail to register as foreign agents. Martin's flair for fealty set him apart even from fellow Trump supporters. He cheered the Maine Republican Party for considering whether to censure Sen. Susan Collins for her vote to convict Trump during the second impeachment trial. He singled out Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska in a radio segment titled 'America Needs to Go on a RINO Hunt.' He accused Sen. John Cornyn of going 'soft' on gun rights after Cornyn endorsed a bipartisan gun-safety law after the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead. On Jan. 6, 2021, Martin joined the throngs of Trump supporters who marched in protest of the 2020 election outcome. He compared the scene that day to a Mardi Gras celebration and later said the prosecution of Jan. 6 defendants was 'an op' orchestrated by former Rep. Liz Cheney and law enforcement agencies to 'damage Trump and Trumpism.' During an appearance on Russia Today, Martin said then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi 'weaponized' Congress' response to the Jan. 6 riots by ramping up security on Capitol Hill, comparing her to the Nazis. 'Not since the Reichstag fire that was engineered by the Nazis have we seen behavior like what Nancy Pelosi did,' he said. As an attorney, he represented Jan. 6 defendants, helped raise money for their families and championed their cause. Last summer, Martin gave an award to a convicted Jan. 6 rioter named Timothy Hale-Cusanelli. According to court records, Hale-Cusanelli held 'long-standing white supremacist and Nazi beliefs,' wore a 'Hitler mustache' and allegedly told his co-workers that 'Hitler should have finished the job.' (In court, Hale's attorney said his client 'makes no excuses for his derogatory language,' but the government's description of him was 'simply misleading.') After hugging and thanking Hale-Cusanelli at the ceremony, Martin told the audience that one of his goals was 'to make sure that the world — and especially America — hears more from Tim Hale, because he's extraordinary.' In his three months as interim U.S. attorney for D.C., Martin has used his position to issue a series of threats. He's vowed not to hire anyone affiliated with Georgetown Law unless the school drops any DEI policies. He vowed to Musk that he would 'pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.' He publicly told former special counsel Jack Smith and Smith's lawyers to '[s]ave your receipts.' And in another open letter addressed to Musk and Musk's deputy, Martin wrote that '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.' More often than not, Martin's threats have gone nowhere. A month into the job, he announced 'Operation Whirlwind,' an initiative to 'hold accountable those who threaten' public officials, whether they're DOGE workers or judges. One of the 'most abhorrent examples' of such threats, he said, were Sen. Chuck Schumer's 2020 remarks that conservative Supreme Court justices had 'released the whirlwind' and would 'pay the price' if they weakened abortion rights. Even though Schumer walked back his incendiary comments the next day, Martin said he was investigating Schumer's nearly 5-year-old remarks as part of Operation Whirlwind. Despite Martin's bravado, the investigation went nowhere. No grand jury investigation was opened. No charges were filed. That the probe fizzled out came as little surprise. Legal experts said Schumer's remarks, while ill advised, fell well short of criminal conduct. In another instance, when one of Martin's top deputies refused to open a criminal investigation into clean-energy grants issued by the Biden administration, Martin demanded the deputy's resignation and advanced the investigation himself. When a subpoena arrived at one of the targeted environmental groups, Martin's was the only name on it, according to documents obtained by ProPublica. Kevin Flynn, a former federal prosecutor who served in the D.C. U.S. attorney's office for 35 years, told ProPublica that he did not know of a single case in which the U.S. attorney was the sole authorizing official on a grand jury subpoena. Flynn said he could think of only two reasons why this could happen: The matter was of 'such extraordinary sensitivity' that the office's leader took exclusive control over it, or no other supervisor or line prosecutor was willing to sign off on the subpoena 'out of concern that it wasn't legally or ethically appropriate.' And when the dispute between the environmental groups and the Justice Department reached a courtroom, federal Judge Tanya Chutkan asked a DOJ lawyer defending the administration's actions for any evidence of possible crimes or violations — evidence, in other words, that could have justified the probe initiated by Martin. The DOJ lawyer said he had none. 'You can't even tell me what the evidence of malfeasance is,' Chutkan said. 'There are still rules that even the government has to follow, last I checked.' Martin's tenure has caused so much consternation that in early April, Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., put a hold on Martin's nomination. Typically, the Senate Judiciary Committee approves U.S. attorney picks by voice vote without a hearing. But in Martin's case, all 10 Democrats on the committee have asked for a public hearing to debate the nomination, calling Martin 'a nominee whose objectionable record merits heightened scrutiny by this Committee.' Even the process of submitting the requisite paperwork for Senate confirmation has tripped him up. According to documents obtained by ProPublica, he has sent the Judiciary Committee three supplemental letters that correct omissions about his background. In an earlier submission, Martin did not disclose any of his appearances on Russian state-owned media. But just before The Washington Post reported that Martin had, in fact, made more than 150 such appearances, he sent yet another letter correcting his previous statements. 'I regret the errors and apologize for any inconvenience,' he wrote. Sharon Lerner contributed reporting.
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Untold Story Of How Ed Martin Ghostwrote Online Attacks Against a Judge—And Still Became A Top Trump Prosecutor
This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox. The attacks on Judge John Barberis in the fall of 2016 appeared on his personal Facebook page. They impugned his ethics, criticized a recent ruling and branded him as a 'politician' with the 'LOWEST rating for a judge in Illinois.' Barberis, a state court judge in an Illinois county across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, was presiding over a nasty legal battle for control over the Eagle Forum, the vaunted grassroots group founded by Phyllis Schlafly, matriarch of the anti-feminist movement. The case pitted Schlafly's youngest daughter against three of her sons, almost like a Midwest version of the HBO program 'Succession' (without the obscenities). At the heart of the dispute — and the lead defendant in the case — was Ed Martin, a lawyer by training and a political operative by trade. In Missouri, where he was based, Martin was widely known as an irrepressible gadfly who trafficked in incendiary claims and trailed controversy wherever he went. Today, he's the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., and one of the most prominent members of the Trump Justice Department. In early 2015, Schlafly had selected Martin to succeed her as head of the Eagle Forum, a crowning moment in Martin's career. Yet after just a year in charge, the group's board fired Martin. Schlafly's youngest daughter, Anne Schlafly Cori, and a majority of the Eagle Forum board filed a lawsuit to bar Martin from any association with the organization. After Barberis dealt Martin a major setback in the case in October 2016, the attacks began. The Facebook user who posted them, Priscilla Gray, had worked in several roles for Schlafly but was not a party to the case, and her comments read like those of an aggrieved outsider. Almost two years later, the truth emerged as Cori's lawyers gathered evidence for her lawsuit: Behind the posts about the judge was none other than Martin. ProPublica obtained previously unreported documents filed in the case that show Martin had bought a laptop for Gray and that she subsequently offered to 'happily write something to attack this judge.' And when she did, Martin ghostwrote more posts for her to use and coached her on how to make her comments look more 'organic.' 'That is not justice but a rigged system,' he urged her to write. 'Shame on you and this broken legal system.' 'Call what he did unfair and rigged over and over,' Martin continued. Martin even urged Gray to message the judge privately. 'Go slow and steady,' he advised. 'Make it organic.' Gray appeared to take Martin's advice. 'Private messaging him that sweet line,' she wrote. It was not clear from the court record what, if anything, she wrote at that juncture. Legal experts told ProPublica that Martin's conduct in the Eagle Forum case was a clear violation of ethical norms and professional rules. Martin's behavior, they said, was especially egregious because he was both a defendant in the case and a licensed attorney. Martin appeared to be 'deliberately interfering with a judicial proceeding with the intent to undermine the integrity of the outcome,' said Scott Cummings, a professor of legal ethics at UCLA School of Law. 'That's not OK.' Martin did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Martin's legal and political career is dotted with questions about his professional and ethical conduct. But for all his years in the spotlight, some of the most serious concerns about his conduct have remained in the shadows — buried in court filings, overlooked by the press or never reported at all. His actions have led to more than $600,000 in legal settlements or judgments against Martin or his employers in a handful of cases. In the Eagle Forum lawsuit, another judge found him in civil contempt, citing his 'willful disregard' of a court order, and a jury found him liable for defamation and false light against Cori. Cori also tried to have Martin charged with criminal contempt for his role in orchestrating the posts about Barberis, but a judge declined to take up the request and said she could take the case to the county prosecutor. Cori said her attorney met with a detective; Martin was never charged. Nonetheless, the emails unearthed by ProPublica were evidence that he had violated Missouri rules for lawyers, according to Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics expert and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She said lawyers are prohibited from trying to contact a judge outside of court in a case they are involved in, and they are barred from using a proxy to do something they are barred from doing themselves. Such a track record might have derailed another lawyer's career. Not so for Martin. As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump vowed to use the Justice Department to reward his allies and seek retribution against his perceived enemies. Since taking office, Trump and his appointees have made good on those pledges, pardoning Jan. 6 rioters while targeting Democratic politicians, media critics and private law firms. As one of its first personnel picks, the Trump administration chose Martin to be interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, one of the premier jobs for a federal prosecutor. A wide array of former prosecutors, legal observers and others have raised questions about his qualifications for an office known for handling high-profile cases. Martin has no experience as a prosecutor. He has never taken a case to trial, according to his public disclosures. As the acting leader of the largest U.S. attorney's office in the country, he directs the work of hundreds of lawyers who appear in court on a vast array of subjects, including legal disputes arising out of Congress, national security matters, public corruption and civil rights, as well as homicides, drug trafficking and many other local crimes. Over the last four years, the office prosecuted more than 1,500 people as part of the massive investigation into the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While Trump has pardoned the Jan. 6 defendants, Martin has taken action against the prosecutors who brought those cases. In just three months, he has overseen the dismissal of outstanding Jan. 6-related cases, fired more than a dozen prosecutors and opened an investigation into the charging decisions made in those riot cases. Martin has also investigated Democratic lawmakers and members of the Biden family; forced out the chief of the criminal division after she refused to initiate an investigation desired by Trump appointees citing a lack of evidence, according to her resignation letter; threatened Georgetown University's law school over its diversity, equity and inclusion policies; and vowed to investigate threats against Department of Government Efficiency employees or 'chase' people in the federal government 'discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically.' Martin 'has butchered the position, effectively destroying it as a vehicle by which to pursue justice and turning it into a political arm of the current administration,' says an open letter signed by more than 100 former prosecutors who worked in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia under Democratic and Republican presidents. Already, Martin has been the subject of at least fourdisciplinarycomplaints with the D.C. and Missouri bars, of which one was dismissed and the other three appear to be pending. Two of the complaints came after he moved to dismiss charges against a Jan. 6 rioter whom he had previously represented and for whom he was still listed as counsel of record. (The first complaint was dismissed after the D.C. bar's disciplinary panel concluded that Martin had dismissed the case as a result of Trump's pardons and so did not violate any rules.) The third was filed in March by a group of Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. Senate. The fourth was submitted last week by a group of former Jan. 6 prosecutors and members of the conservative-leaning Society for the Rule of Law. It argues that Martin's actions so far 'threaten to undermine the integrity of the U.S. Attorney's Office and the legal profession in the District of Columbia.' If Martin has responded to any of the complaints, those responses have not been made public. Trump has nominated Martin to run the office permanently. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have vowed to drag out Martin's confirmation, demanding a hearing and setting up a fight over one of Trump's most controversial nominees. Martin stepped off the elevator into the newsroom of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. He was angry at a reporter named Jo Mannies, one of the city's top political journalists. At a conference table with Mannies and her senior editors, he accused Mannies of being unethical and pressed the paper's leadership to spike her stories about him, according to interviews. Mannies said later she believed he was trying to get her fired. 'He was attacking her,' said Pam Maples, who was managing editor at the time. 'He was implying she had an ax to grind, that she wanted to get some big story and that she was not being ethical. And when that didn't get traction, it was more like 'this isn't a story.' It wasn't that he said anything about a fact being inaccurate, or he wanted to retract a story; he wanted the reporting to stop.' Mannies had been covering a scandal dubbed 'Memogate' that started to unfold in 2007 while Martin was chief of staff to Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt. In that role, Martin was using his government email to undermine Democratic rivals and rally anti-abortion groups. But when reporters requested emails from Blunt's staff, the governor's office denied they existed. Media organizations joined a lawsuit to preserve the messages and recover them from backup tapes. An attorney for the governor, Scott Eckersley, later said in a deposition that Martin tried to block the release of government emails and told employees to delete their messages. After Eckersley warned that doing so might violate state law, he was fired. He sued the state for wrongful termination and defamation and settled for $500,000. Martin resigned as chief of staff in 2007 after just over a year on the job, and Blunt's office would eventually hand over 22 boxes of internal emails. In a 2008 email to the Associated Press, Martin dismissed Eckersley's lawsuit as a 'desperate attempt' to revise his story after he was fired, citing Eckersley's own testimony that not all emails are public records. The Memogate incident was telling — and Martin's efforts to have Mannies fired were never reported. 'His claim was we were misrepresenting what the law was and what he was doing,' she told ProPublica. 'I mean, he can get very hyper. He can get very emotional.' When Martin launched a bid for Congress in 2010, he acted as if Memogate was ancient history. He made himself available to Mannies, she recalled, always taking her calls. Years later, he even appeared, lighthearted and bantering, on a St. Louis Public Radio podcast Mannies co-hosted. She said Martin could be outlandish and aggressive, but he could also be disarmingly passionate about whatever cause he was pursuing at the moment, often speaking in a frenetic rush. 'He just wore people down with his enthusiasm,' she said. Martin allowed a different St. Louis reporter to shadow him during his 2010 run for Congress. The reporter asked about the St. Louis election board, a dysfunctional organization that, by all accounts, Martin had helped turn around in the mid-2000s. Martin had fired an employee there named Jeanne Bergfeld, and she later sued for wrongful termination. The board settled the lawsuit. As part of the settlement, Martin agreed not to talk about the case and the board paid Bergfeld $55,000. Martin and two others issued a letter saying she had been a 'conscientious and dedicated professional.' But talking to the reporter covering his campaign, Martin said Bergfeld enjoyed 'not having to do anything' and 'wasn't interested in changing.' The day after the story was published, Bergfeld sued Martin again, this time for violating the settlement agreement. Martin denied making the comments, but the Riverfront Times released audio that proved he had. Martin agreed to pay Bergfeld another $15,000 but delayed signing the settlement for a few months. The judge then ordered Martin to pay some of her legal costs, citing his 'obstinacy.' Martin lost his 2010 congressional bid. He ran for Missouri attorney general two years later and lost again. After his stint as chair of the Missouri Republican Party, he went to work as Schlafly's right-hand man. Martin grew so attached to Schlafly that a lawyer for the Eagle Forum jokingly called him 'Ed Martin Schlafly.' As the 2016 presidential campaign ramped up, Martin supported Trump even though Eagle Forum board members, including Cori, supported Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Cori described Trump at the time as an 'egomaniacal dictator.' (Today, she said she supports him.) Cori and other board members were stunned when Schlafly endorsed Trump, with Martin standing by her side. A few weeks later, a majority of the Eagle Forum's board voted to oust Martin as president; a lawsuit filed by the board cited mismanagement and poor leadership and described his tenure as 'deplorable.' Martin has maintained that he was Schlafly's 'hand-picked successor' and has characterized his removal as a hostile takeover. 'Every day, they are diminishing the reputation and value of Phyllis,' he said in a 2017 statement. She died in September 2016. Cori and the board's lawsuit sought to enforce Martin's removal and demand an accounting of the forum's assets. That's the case that wound up before Barberis. On top of his efforts to direct Gray's posts on Barberis' Facebook page, Martin prepared a separate statement, according to previously unreported records from the case. The statement called Barberis' ruling to remove him as Eagle Forum president 'judicial activism at its worst' that 'shows what happens when the law is undermined by judges who think they can do whatever they want.' Martin emailed the statement, which said it was from 'Bruce Schlafly, M.D.' — the name of one of Schlafly's sons — to himself, then sent it to two of her other sons, John and Andy, court filings show. Martin said the statement was a 'declaration of war' and urged the Schlaflys to 'put something like this out to our biggest list.' (It's unclear if the message was ever sent.) Bruce Schlafly did not respond to requests for comment. In a 2019 sworn deposition, Cori's lawyer asked Martin questions about the posts on Barberis' Facebook page and the letter he drafted for Bruce Schlafly. Because of the possibility that he could be charged with criminal contempt of court, Martin declined to comment, on the advice of his own lawyer, though he acknowledged that lawyers are barred from communicating with judges outside of court or engaging in conduct meant to disrupt proceedings. Andy Schlafly, a lawyer and former Eagle Forum board member who supported Martin in the leadership fight, said 'no court has ever sanctioned Ed for his engagement of First Amendment advocacy' and likened the controversy to liberal attacks on conservative judges. He dismissed concerns about Martin directing Gray to contact the judge, saying she 'speaks for herself' and had every right to voice her outrage. He compared Martin's style — then and now — to Trump's. He said he did not believe the email Martin drafted for his brother Bruce had ever been sent, but if it had been, it would have been no different from Trump posting on Truth Social, which he considered normal behavior in political battles. 'What would Trump do in that position?' Andy Schlafly said of Martin's current role in Washington. 'I would say Trump would be doing just what Ed's doing. Elections do have consequences.' Gray declined to comment. She was not part of the lawsuit. When Cori's lawyers uncovered the emails, they asked a new judge, David Dugan — who had taken over the case after Barberis was elected to a higher court — why Martin should not be held in criminal contempt for 'an underhanded scheme' to 'attack the integrity and authority' of the court with the Facebook comments about Barberis, according to court records. Dugan declined to take up the criminal contempt motion. But he later found Martin and John Schlafly in civil contempt of court for having interfered with Eagle Forum after Barberis had removed them from the group. John Schlafly appealed the contempt finding and mostly lost. He did not respond to requests for comment. It's unclear if Martin appealed. Cori told ProPublica she also filed an ethics complaint against Martin with the Missouri Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel, which investigates ethics complaints against lawyers. She said she was told her complaint would have to wait until her lawsuit concluded. The office said it could neither confirm nor deny it had received a complaint. In 2022, when part of Cori's lawsuit went to trial, a jury found Martin liable for defaming her and casting her in a false light — including by sharing a Facebook post suggesting that she should be charged with manslaughter for her mother's death. It awarded her $57,000 in damages and also found Martin liable for $25,500 against another Eagle Forum board member. Martin argued that the statute of limitations had expired on the defamation claims and that many of his statements were either true or vague hyperbole not subject to proof. He also claimed he could not be held liable because he didn't write the offending post — he had merely shared something written by someone else. In a post-trial motion, he also leaned into protections that make it harder for public figures to win defamation cases. Under that higher legal standard, it's not enough for a plaintiff to show that a statement was false. Cori also had to prove that Martin knew it was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth, and he said she didn't prove it. But while he's wrapped himself in First Amendment protections when defending his own speech, he's taken the opposite stance since being named interim U.S. attorney by Trump, threatening legal action against people when they criticize the administration. For instance, after Rep. Robert Garcia called DOGE leader Elon Musk a 'dick' and urged Democrats to 'bring weapons' to a political fight, Martin sent Garcia a letter warning his comments could be seen as threats and demanding an explanation. With the start of Trump's first presidency, Martin and his family moved to the Northern Virginia suburbs near Washington, D.C. Martin had no formal role in the new administration, but he turned himself into one of the president's most prolific and unfiltered surrogates. CNN hired him in September 2017 to be a pro-Trump on-air commentator, only to fire him five months later after a string of controversial on-air remarks. He attacked a woman who had accused Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of molesting her as a child, praised Trump for denigrating Sen. Elizabeth Warren as 'Pocahontas,' and described some of his CNN co-panelists as 'rabid feminists' and 'Black racists.' Unbowed, Martin went on to make more than 150 appearances on the Russia Today TV channel and Sputnik radio, both Russian state-owned media outlets, first reported by The Washington Post. On RT and Sputnik, Martin railed against the 'Russia hoax,' criticized the DOJ investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller and questioned American support for Ukraine after Russia's invasion by saying the U.S. was 'wasting money in Kiev for Zelensky and his corrupt guys.' The State Department would later say RT and Sputnik were 'critical elements in Russia's disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.' The Treasury Department sanctioned RT employees in 2024. The DOJ indicted two RT employees for conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to fail to register as foreign agents. Martin's flair for fealty set him apart even from fellow Trump supporters. He cheered the Maine Republican Party for considering whether to censure Sen. Susan Collins for her vote to convict Trump during the second impeachment trial. He singled out Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska in a radio segment titled 'America Needs to Go on a RINO Hunt.' He accused Sen. John Cornyn of going 'soft' on gun rights after Cornyn endorsed a bipartisan gun-safety law after the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead. On Jan. 6, 2021, Martin joined the throngs of Trump supporters who marched in protest of the 2020 election outcome. He compared the scene that day to a Mardi Gras celebration and later said the prosecution of Jan. 6 defendants was 'an op' orchestrated by former Rep. Liz Cheney and law enforcement agencies to 'damage Trump and Trumpism.' During an appearance on Russia Today, Martin said then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi 'weaponized' Congress' response to the Jan. 6 riots by ramping up security on Capitol Hill, comparing her to the Nazis. 'Not since the Reichstag fire that was engineered by the Nazis have we seen behavior like what Nancy Pelosi did,' he said. As an attorney, he represented Jan. 6 defendants, helped raise money for their families and championed their cause. Last summer, Martin gave an award to a convicted Jan. 6 rioter named Timothy Hale-Cusanelli. According to court records, Hale-Cusanelli held 'long-standing white supremacist and Nazi beliefs,' wore a 'Hitler mustache' and allegedly told his co-workers that 'Hitler should have finished the job.' (In court, Hale's attorney said his client 'makes no excuses for his derogatory language,' but the government's description of him was 'simply misleading.') After hugging and thanking Hale-Cusanelli at the ceremony, Martin told the audience that one of his goals was 'to make sure that the world — and especially America — hears more from Tim Hale, because he's extraordinary.' In his three months as interim U.S. attorney for D.C., Martin has used his position to issue a series of threats. He's vowed not to hire anyone affiliated with Georgetown Law unless the school drops any DEI policies. He vowed to Musk that he would 'pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.' He publicly told former special counsel Jack Smith and Smith's lawyers to '[s]ave your receipts.' And in another open letter addressed to Musk and Musk's deputy, Martin wrote that '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.' More often than not, Martin's threats have gone nowhere. A month into the job, he announced 'Operation Whirlwind,' an initiative to 'hold accountable those who threaten' public officials, whether they're DOGE workers or judges. One of the 'most abhorrent examples' of such threats, he said, were Sen. Chuck Schumer's 2020 remarks that conservative Supreme Court justices had 'released the whirlwind' and would 'pay the price' if they weakened abortion rights. Even though Schumer walked back his incendiary comments the next day, Martin said he was investigating Schumer's nearly 5-year-old remarks as part of Operation Whirlwind. Despite Martin's bravado, the investigation went nowhere. No grand jury investigation was opened. No charges were filed. That the probe fizzled out came as little surprise. Legal experts said Schumer's remarks, while ill advised, fell well short of criminal conduct. In another instance, when one of Martin's top deputies refused to open a criminal investigation into clean-energy grants issued by the Biden administration, Martin demanded the deputy's resignation and advanced the investigation himself. When a subpoena arrived at one of the targeted environmental groups, Martin's was the only name on it, according to documents obtained by ProPublica. Kevin Flynn, a former federal prosecutor who served in the D.C. U.S. attorney's office for 35 years, told ProPublica that he did not know of a single case in which the U.S. attorney was the sole authorizing official on a grand jury subpoena. Flynn said he could think of only two reasons why this could happen: The matter was of 'such extraordinary sensitivity' that the office's leader took exclusive control over it, or no other supervisor or line prosecutor was willing to sign off on the subpoena 'out of concern that it wasn't legally or ethically appropriate.' And when the dispute between the environmental groups and the Justice Department reached a courtroom, federal Judge Tanya Chutkan asked a DOJ lawyer defending the administration's actions for any evidence of possible crimes or violations — evidence, in other words, that could have justified the probe initiated by Martin. The DOJ lawyer said he had none. 'You can't even tell me what the evidence of malfeasance is,' Chutkan said. 'There are still rules that even the government has to follow, last I checked.' Martin's tenure has caused so much consternation that in early April, Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., put a hold on Martin's nomination. Typically, the Senate Judiciary Committee approves U.S. attorney picks by voice vote without a hearing. But in Martin's case, all 10 Democrats on the committee have asked for a public hearing to debate the nomination, calling Martin 'a nominee whose objectionable record merits heightened scrutiny by this Committee.' Even the process of submitting the requisite paperwork for Senate confirmation has tripped him up. According to documents obtained by ProPublica, he has sent the Judiciary Committee three supplemental letters that correct omissions about his background. In an earlier submission, Martin did not disclose any of his appearances on Russian state-owned media. But just before The Washington Post reported that Martin had, in fact, made more than 150 such appearances, he sent yet another letter correcting his previous statements. 'I regret the errors and apologize for any inconvenience,' he wrote. Sharon Lerner contributed reporting.
USA Today
14-03-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
MLB World Series winners since 2000 ranked 1-25: Which champ was best?
MLB World Series winners since 2000 ranked 1-25: Which champ was best? Some of MLB's champions were better than others this millennium. Show Caption Hide Caption With the Dodgers favored to repeat, is the MLB becoming too top-heavy? Bob Nightengale and Gabe Lacques discuss whether or not the MLB is lacking parity and could be facing a potential problem in the future. Sports Seriously Time is flying in this, the third century of baseball history. We're already at the quarter pole of the 2000s, a significant swath of the game's lore already in the record books, and for some it still feels like yesterday that the New York Yankees were wrapping up a three-peat at Shea Stadium. That was 25 years ago, and no franchise has won consecutive championships since. Yet a few mini-dynastys and major surprises have sprung since then. With the 2025 Major League Baseball season approaching, USA TODAY Sports ranks the 25 World Series champions from, shall we say, least-accomplished to greatest in this century: 25. 2006 St. Louis Cardinals We're not here to take the shine off anyone's diamonds, but this group is an easy choice for No. 25. At 83 wins, they tote the lowest win total of this group. Their postseason run was turbocharged by manager Tony La Russa's derring-do on the last day of the season, when he held out Chris Carpenter hoping his team would either win or back in with a Houston loss. They did both – and Carpenter plowed through the playoffs. The World Series was rainy and grim and error-prone. Best forgotten, unless you wash down your toasted ravioli with a swig of Schlafly. 24. 2021 Atlanta Braves It's fitting that this seven-year run of Atlanta excellence netted a championship, but ironic that perhaps its most diminished team pulled it off. The Braves lost Ronald Acuña Jr. to a midseason knee injury, won just 88 games and then saw Game 1 World Series starter Charlie Morton succumb to a broken leg. They gutted through with a handful of bullpen games, Max Fried's brilliance and a three-headed, bepearled monster in the outfield to replace Acuña. 23. 2011 St. Louis Cardinals We mean no disrespect to the Gateway to the West. For real. It's just that these Cardinals were 10 ½ games out of first on Sept. 5, won 90 games and needed some acts of nature to simply get in the playoffs. What they did have: Albert Pujols and Carpenter, who vanquished Roy Halladay and the Phillies in an epic NLDS Game 5 and made three World Series starts thanks to some timely rainouts. 22. 2000 New York Yankees The Yankees' three-peat hardly ended with a whimper. They were just a little tired, perhaps. These Bombers won just 87 games and were forced to an ALDS Game 5 by the low-payroll Oakland Athletics. Yet all the usual suspects turned up when they needed them, buttressed by David Justice, who hit 20 homers after a June trade from Cleveland and three more big ones in the postseason, earning ALCS MVP. 21. 2014 San Francisco Giants Perhaps no franchise is tougher to slot in this exercise than the three-time champion Giants, whose whole was always grander than the sum of their parts. We'll call this edition the weakest of their three even-year champions, simply because this was always a pitching-centric operation and Tim Hudson, 39, and Jake Peavy combined for a 9.22 ERA in four World Series starts. But the gallant Madison Bumgarner can cover up a lot of deficiencies, with help from a battle-tested bullpen. 20. 2003 Miami Marlins Talk about a team that had everything and nothing: The only squad among this bunch that fired its manager (Jeff Torborg) midseason, drew just 1.3 million fans to its cavernous football stadium and had a closer eventually convicted of attempted murder in Venezuela. Yet these 91-win wild cards had an amazingly effective throwback duo of slap-and-run dudes in Juan Pierre and Luis Castillo combine for 7.9 WAR, a ready-made playoff ace in Josh Beckett and a 20-year-old hitting machine named Miguel Cabrera. Yes, this team took out the Aaron-Bleeping-Boone Yankees. 19. 2013 Boston Red Sox No hate for these 97-game winners that rank the lowest among Boston's four titlists. And salute to David Ortiz, who had perhaps his most epic postseason (.353, five homers, 1.206 OPS in 16 games), months after his "this is our (bleeping) city" moment in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing. Yet these were the Sox of Shane Victorino and Jonny Gomes, John Lackey and Mike Napoli, a salty veteran crew that got it done. Salute to them all, even if they're less decorated than other squads who earned the right to pilot duck boats on the Charles. 18. 2023 Texas Rangers Almost the epitome of the potent yet streaky squad that caught fire at the right time, Texas won just 90 games and had to fight through the wild-card series, yet proved there's such a thing as performers built for the postseason. Namely, ace Nathan Eovaldi, slugging shortstop Corey Seager and manager Bruce Bochy, who added a fourth title to his Hall of Fame resume. 17. 2002 Anaheim Angels They crafted the modern ideal of a playoff team: Make contact but also slug home runs, get by with nominal starting pitching and turn it over to a dominant bullpen. These wild-card Angels won 99 games, ended the Yankees' streak of four straight AL pennants and stunned Barry Bonds' Giants with a stirring Game 6 rally. Lackey, beginning a run of three championships with three franchises, won Game 7. 16. 2012 San Francisco Giants The year Giants postseason devil magic was truly born. They lost All-Star center fielder Melky Cabrera to a PED suspension, trailed St. Louis 3-1 in the NLCS and trusted their season to shaky veteran Barry Zito in Game 5. But Zito and the Giants roared all the way back, and the lefty beat Justin Verlander in World Series Game 1, when Pablo Sandoval – Pablo Sandoval! – crushed three homers off the future Hall of Famer. 15. 2019 Washington Nationals Not your average 93-win wild card, not with a pitching staff featuring future Hall of Famer Max Scherzer, World Series MVP Stephen Strasburg at the height of health and dominance and Patrick Corbin somehow justifying a $140 million contract with one great season. Oh, and this Juan Soto fellow graced the postseason stage for the first time, helping them overcome a 2-1 NLDS deficit and 3-2 World Series disadvantage to stun the Astros. 14. 2005 Chicago White Sox Jon Garland, Freddy Garcia, Mark Buehrle and Jose Contreras – this version of El Duque had just turned 40 – won't make anyone's list of most dominant pitching quartet. But for two weeks in October, they couldn't be stopped, pitching four consecutive complete games to shock the Angels in the ALCS and then sweeping aside Houston. A nice capstone for franchise stalwart Paul Konerko, who hit five playoff homers and won ALCS MVP honors. 13. 2022 Houston Astros A true meld of the older-school Astros and the next generation, with Yordan Alvarez capping the run with a mammoth Game 6 World Series home run. Jeremy Peña deftly replaced Carlos Correa, winning ALCS and World Series MVP honors, and the pitching staff's top-to-bottom dominance was exemplified by Cristian Javier running the opening leg on a four-man World Series no-hitter. 12. 2010 San Francisco Giants They needed all 162 games to clinch the NL West with 92 wins, but Bochy's first championship team was about to brew up something special. While their lineup of spare parts inspired the phrase 'Torture' to describe Giants baseball, the last great year of Tim Lincecum – he struck out a major league-high 231 – dovetailed with the arrival of Buster Posey and the rise of Madison Bumgarner to inspire an 11-4 run through the playoffs. And no, we did not forget Matt Cain's 21 ⅓ playoff innings with no earned runs allowed. 11. 2024 Los Angeles Dodgers That attrition forced them to throw four bullpen games in this postseason run, stare down a 2-1 deficit in the NLDS and get taken to six games by the Mets in the NLCS tempts us to downgrade this group. But also: Shohei Ohtani. The sport's only 50-50 man slammed three homers and drove in 10 runs through Game 1 of the World Series, before a Game 2 shoulder separation slowed his mojo. No worries: There's always another Hall of Famer in L.A. to pick up the slack. 10. 2017 Houston Astros They'd be a couple spots higher if not for The Scandal, which you may have heard about. Regardless, this was a squad, especially once they traded for Justin Verlander in August and saw him post a 1.06 ERA in five starts down the stretch and strike out 38 over 36 postseason innings. 9. 2007 Boston Red Sox You can make an argument this group was more talented than the history-making 2004 squad. And can we really produce 'remember when?' documentaries when nobody's stopped talking about it?)Anyhow, these guys featured plenty of '04 holdovers yet upgraded with Kevin Youkilis, Dustin Pedroia and Mike Lowell on the dirt and Beckett and Jon Lester ensuring Curt Schilling wouldn't need to pitch until his sock turned red. 8. 2020 Los Angeles Dodgers Fun fact: Only two teams in the wild-card era have first-half winning percentages higher than these Dodgers' .717 mark in the COVID-shortened 60-game season: The 1998 Yankees and 2001 Mariners. The former is arguably the greatest team in that era and the latter won 116 games. Point is: These Dodgers would've made the playoffs, as they have the past 13 seasons. And these Dodgers had All-Star and Hall of Fame players performing at peak capability – from Mookie Betts to Corey Seager, Clayton Kershaw to Walker Buehler. With the rules the same for everyone, the Dodgers won more postseason games – 13 – than any champion to that point, 11 of them at a neutral site. Recognize. 7. 2015 Kansas City Royals Shh, don't tell any salary cap-loving owners that smaller-market teams can hit the gas and win it all. The Royals were one win – or 90 feet plus some extra-inning luck – shy of a championship in 2014, then came back and finished the job a year later. Like the Giants who vanquished them a year earlier, the Royals put the ball in play and played exceptional defense. They also had a taut bullpen and went for the jugular at the trade deadline, adding Johnny Cueto and Ben Zobrist. Ninety-five wins and an 11-5 postseason run – not bad for a Central Division club. 6. 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks Game 7 of the '01 World Series has been referred to as "The Last Night Of The Yankee Dynasty." It's also a pretty neat coda to an era of, shall we say, anti-aging enhancement. Of the 17 everyday regulars on both teams, 12 were at least 32 years old. That just doesn't happen anymore! Sure, these Diamondbacks were plenty flawed, but didn't need too much more than a 1-2 starting pitching punch we won't see again. Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson combined to win 43 regular season games and all four of Arizona's Series games – named co-MVPs – with Johnson replacing Schilling in relief to win the epic Game 7. No, the manager wasn't great, the back end of the rotation was shaky and the bullpen was terrible. But sometimes two horses beats a whole stable. 5. 2009 New York Yankees Ah, remember when a $424.5 million outlay for three players was a 'splurge?' So it was for the Yankees when they reeled in CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Mark Teixeira after missing the 2008 playoffs. And goodness, it worked: The Yankees won 103 games, went 11-4 in the postseason and tamed a budding Phillies dynasty in the World Series. Just a perfect mix of old and new guard on this team, epitomized by Sabathia, Burnett and Pettitte starting every playoff game, often on three days' rest. Alex Rodriguez clutched up, months after his exposure as a steroid scoundrel. And while Derek Jeter had long been derided as statuesque at shortstop, he produced a 6.6-WAR season, his best since 1999. 4. 2004 Boston Red Sox Oh, yeah – these guys. As we mentioned, there might be a better Red Sox team deeper on the list, but it's tough to match the star power, resiliency and overall thump of this club. Manny Ramirez clubbed 43 homers. Schilling and Pedro Martinez combined for 37 regular season wins. Keith Foulke was dynamite in the eighth and ninth innings. The bit parts – Bill Mueller, Mark Bellhorn, trade deadline pickup Orlando Cabrera and yes, even Dave Roberts – fit perfectly around this core. And oh, what a history-making core. 3. 2008 Philadelphia Phillies Still kind of amazing these Phillies won just one World Series and two pennants. Yet the '08 squad featured four of their most important pieces firing at peak performance. From Ryan Howard's majors-leading 48 home runs to Chase Utley's 9-WAR season and Jimmy Rollins stealing 47 bases - this was the essence of that run. Cole Hamels won Game 1 of every playoff series while fashioning a 1.64 ERA, with Brad Lidge nearly perfect in nine ninth-inning playoff appearances, racking up seven saves. 2. 2016 Chicago Cubs Nope, not a sentimental choice here. These Cubs won 103 games and were a stunning blend of brilliant youth and veteran smarts. At 24, Kris Bryant was never better, winning NL MVP, drilling 39 homers with a .939 OPS and leading the league with 7.3 WAR; Anthony Rizzo, 26, produced 5.8 WAR from first base and hit 32 homers. Veterans Lester and Lackey produced one more championship hurrah, while Jake Arrieta was only a little less nasty than his 2015 Cy Young campaign. The late-spring re-signing of Dexter Fowler and deadline add of closer Aroldis Chapman put the team over the top – even if World Series Game 7 brought some frightful moments before Bryant's iconic, stumbling toss to Rizzo for the final out and their first championship in 108 years. 1. 2018 Boston Red Sox This championship looked pretty good at the time and has only gotten better with age. Mookie Betts and J.D. Martinez finished first and fourth in MVP voting, and the latter's signing in spring training proved a massive boon thanks to his own production (43 homers, 130 RBI) and lending his hitting expertise to Betts and others. Mookie will be in the Hall of Fame some day and this was his finest hour, leading the majors and setting career highs in WAR (a career-best 10.3), average (.346) and slugging (.640, thanks to 32 homers and 47 doubles). A rotation fronted by three current or future Cy Young winners – Chris Sale, Rick Porcello and David Price – provided the bedrock for a 108-win season, and the trio only grew more lethal in the postseason. That's when rookie manager Alex Cora deployed them often in relief, papering over a bullpen he trusted only so much. The season ended appropriately, when Sale pitched the ninth inning of a Price start and unleashed a nasty backfoot slider to vanquish Manny Machado and the Dodgers. That capped an 11-3 postseason and 119-win campaign – the team of the century for what's still the franchise of the century. The USA TODAY app gets you to the heart of the news — fast. Download for award-winning coverage, crosswords, audio storytelling, the eNewspaper and more.
