Following the Saturday Night Massacre during the Nixon administration, the independence of the Department of Justice from political influence and partisanship became a foundational position of its existence. The DoJ existed to serve the American people, not the president. It was theoretically there to do justice, without fear or favor. And that understanding remained intact until Trump 2.0, when it openly and notoriously became a tool of the administration.
In an act of extreme irony, Attorney General Pam Bondi, whose effusive admiration of her patron was expressed at every opportunity whether relevant or not, named Ed Martin, the Trump nominee for United States Attorney for the District of Columbia whose lack of competence and integrity was so extreme that not even the Republican majority in the Senate would confirm him, the head of the Weaponization Task Force to investigate people who “weaponized” the government against Trump.
Upon being made Czar, Martin announced that if he lacked the evidence to prosecute the president’s enemies, at least he would “name and shame” them.
“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.”
Martin has begun his jihad.
Edward R. Martin Jr. did not waste any time. Days after Mr. Martin, a Trump-aligned activist, was tapped by the Justice Department to investigate the New York attorney general, Letitia James, he wrote a letter to her lawyer saying he would take it as an act of “good faith” if she were to resign.
Mr. Martin followed up this breach of prosecutorial protocol by showing up outside Ms. James’s Brooklyn home, clad in a trench coat and posing for pictures for The New York Post.
While he told an inquiring neighbor that he was “just looking at houses, interesting houses,” Mr. Martin later appeared on Fox News saying that, as a prosecutor, he wanted to see the property with his own eyes. It was the latest in a string of media appearances he made in relation to his investigation of Ms. James, one of Mr. Trump’s most prominent adversaries.
His attack on Tish James, as well as now-Senator Adam Schiff, relates to old mortgage applications, along the lines of Lavrentiy Beria’s “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” It’s not merely fortuitous that two of Trump’s most hated enemies ended up on “Special Attorney” Martin’s radar. And, at least as far as Tish James goes, she’s certainly done everything possible to attract Martin’s, and Trump’s, attention and hatred. While the same might be said for Schiff, at least it falls within his purview as Representative and lead House manager of Trump’s first impeachment trial.
Nor are James and Schiff the only targets of the Trump administration, which has since expanded its list of enemies to be prosecuted to President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Jack Smith and James Comey, among others.
Mr. Martin’s conduct is part of an emerging pattern from Mr. Trump’s administration over the past two months in which top officials seek to use the federal government’s vast intelligence gathering and law enforcement authority to cast the specter of criminality on Mr. Trump’s enemies without demonstrating that they might have committed crimes that rise to the level of an indictment.
Defenders of this Department of Justice’s approach argue that the prior prosecutions of January 6 “patriots” and Trump already demonstrated that the DoJ had been weaponized, rejecting the notion that promoting the insurrection and refusing to return secret documents in the Mar-a-lago bathroom warranted prosecution. And James, in particular, used her office as New York attorney general to get Trump for an offense bearing no connection to his actions as president.
Mr. Trump’s defenders have suggested that his treatment of Ms. James mirrors hers of him. When she ran for New York attorney general during his first term, she pledged to open an inquiry into him and his company, positioning herself as a leader of the resistance to his presidency.
She opened one soon after she was elected and, after investigating him for several years, sued Mr. Trump in 2022, accusing him of exaggerating the value of his properties by billions of dollars. In 2024, she won against him at trial. A judge found Mr. Trump liable for conspiring to manipulate his net worth and punished him with a fine that, with interest, exceeds half a billion dollars. A New York appeals court is considering the case.
Notably, James was a state AG and, to the extent she wrongfully weaponized her office to “get” Trump as she said she would, it was not the Department of Justice.
While there is little doubt that the prosecutions of Trump at the federal level had a sound basis in fact and law, Trump, Bondi and Martin have dropped all pretense of the Department of Justice being independent of the presidency and not doing his bidding by going after Trump’s enemies. Is this wrong? Is this the end of there being any faith in the DoJ’s integrity of prosecuting without fear or favor, rather than serving to use its vast power against those people hated by Trump? Is the DoJ now the president’s prosecutors, going after his enemies and leaving his friends alone?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.