DC Prosecutor Ed Martin Keeps Inventing New Ways To Disgrace His Office

Everyone knew that putting a conspiracy theorist with no Justice Department experience in charge of the US Attorney’s Office in DC would be a disaster. But no one could possibly have predicted the tire fire currently raging in the nation’s capital.

Ed Martin, the January 6 protester nominated to lead the USAODC, spent the past five weeks waggling his wizened bits at various Democrats in a pathetic attempt at intimidation, while prostrating himself before the DOGE dauphin in the vain hope of succeeding Pam Bondi when she inevitably wanders off to resume her true calling as a foreign lobbyist. His knowledge of the First Amendment and legal ethics is scant. But he makes up for it with dogged malevolence.

To wit, when the former top criminal lawyer in his office resigned rather than put her name on a bogus letter asserting that there was probable cause to believe that EPA funds were illegally distributed, Martin gamely sent it himself. The supposedly “illegal” distribution was in fact made pursuant to a $27 billion congressional allocation to set up “green bank” funds to be loaned out to finance small and mid-size projects. But Project Veritas, the rightwing smear shop, recorded a low-level EPA staffer in a bar saying that the Biden administration was rushing to get appropriated funds out the door “like throwing gold bars off the Titanic,” and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has been trying to make this a thing for two weeks now.

According to the Washington Post, after sending out the “freeze letter” to Citibank, Martin then tried and failed to get a federal magistrate judge to issue an actual criminal warrant:

Interim U.S. attorney Ed Martin then personally submitted a seizure warrant application without any other prosecutors in his office that was rejected by a U.S. magistrate judge in D.C., who found that the request and accompanying FBI agent affidavit failed to establish a reasonable belief that a crime occurred, three of the people said.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove, who is doing his darnedest to make a name for himself as number one villain before his boss Todd Blanche gets confirmed, has been shopping the case to multiple other US Attorneys Offices, trying to get some prosecutor to launch a grand jury investigation of this supposedly criminal spending. The Post says that he finally got someone in Miami to bite:

Meanwhile, the former EPA official in the Project Veritas video, Brent Efron, was contacted last week by the EPA’s inspector general’s office and on Monday by an FBI agent from Washington at the request of Miami federal prosecutor Joshua Paster, deputy chief of an asset forfeiture unit with the southern district of Florida, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Miami office is at least the third U.S. attorney’s office asked to take part in the investigation. It was not clear if Paster would remain on the case, the person said.

Efron’s lawyer, the ubiquitous Mark Zaid, told the Post that his client was “never involved in the obligation or disbursement of funds from any EPA assistance program.” But that’s not stopping Bove and Martin, who will indict this ham sandwich if it’s the last thing they do.

But Martin wasn’t resting on his laurels. Bloomberg reports that he just demoted multiple senior prosecutors who worked on the January 6 cases, reassigning them to work on pre-prosecution assessment of misdemeanor cases.

Is America great again yet?

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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