On Monday, President Trump nominated Ed Martin—the acting US attorney for DC—to serve permanently as the District’s top federal prosecutor.
Martin, whom Trump appointed to an interim role shortly after his inauguration, is the first US attorney for DC in at least 50 years to do the job without prior experience as a judge or federal prosecutor. In fact, some of Martin’s highest-profile gigs have been as a defense attorney, representing at least three people accused of participating in the January 6 riots; Martin himself was present at the Stop the Steal Rally, an event he helped to organize, preceding the Capitol break-in.
Since he’s assumed office, Martin has faced backlash for firing about 30 federal prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases, formally asking a judge to drop charges against one of his own former January 6 clients, and vowing legal action against “anyone who impedes” the work of Elon Musk’s DOGE project.
On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported, Martin sent a staffwide email to announce a new DOJ project—dubbed “Operation Whirlwind”—aimed at prosecuting threats against public officials. Additionally, the Post published the full text of five letters sent by Martin to Democratic lawmakers, requesting that they “clarify” comments made about conservative public officials.
Our city has officially been subject to Martin’s legal priorities for a full month now, and you still probably never even heard that he was supposed to be working at the Office of Management and Budget. Here are five things to know about Martin’s life and career, now that he’s up for an official spot in the administration.
1. He got his start in the Catholic Church.
Martin graduated from Saint Louis University’s law school in 1998 (his review, per a 2011 St. Louis Magazine profile:”I didn’t love it”). During his studies, he would attend services at the Cathedral Basilica, where he struck up a friendship with Archbishop Justin Rigali. In fact, the two got close enough that Rigalia nominated Martin to represent youth as a papal assistant at the Synod of the Americas; Martin lived in Rome for a month, where he’d occasionally strike up small talk with Pope John Paul II, according to the St. Louis article.
Soon after, Rigali offered Martin another opportunity: to lead the Human Rights Office at the Archdioceses of St. Louis. At 28, Martin became the youngest such director in the country. In the new role, Rigali encouraged him to carry out an agenda of “more orthodoxy, less autonomy”—in his interview with St. Louis, Martin noted that the office invested a lot in “a whole bunch of social-justice stuff,” including what he described as the issue of “strawberry pickers” (an apparent reference to the labor of strawberry picking, a grueling agricultural job typically held by immigrants). He wanted to move away from that focus.
Angie O’Gorman, a staffer who worked on deportation cases, was not impressed with Martin’s takeover. In a letter to archdiocesan officials, she stressed Martin’s lack of human rights experience. As she put it to St. Louis, “Ed did not understand the difference between charity and human rights,” she told St. Louis. She also did not like that he “decorated his office with hand grenades”—which were actually plastic landmines, Martin rebutted.
Ultimately, Martin fired O’Gorman in May 2001—one month before he left to take another job as a law clerk. With her termination, the secretary was the office’s last remaining original staff member.
Martin’s enduring achievement of this era: getting Rosa Parks and the pope together for a 1999 meeting at the Cathedral Basilica. He escorted Parks to the meeting, and she wound up running late due to a nap that went into overtime. “I’m frazzled, thinking I’m going to let the archbishop down,” Martin told St. Louis. “She turns around and says, ‘Young man, sometimes you need to have a little patience.’”
2. One of his most high-profile cases made waves in the anti-abortion rights movement.
Most of Martin’s legal experience has been in private practice. St. Louis Magazine says he was “bored and a little flamboyant” when he sued Rod Blagojevich, then the governor of Illinois, over an April 2005 emergency mandate that would have prohibited pharmacists from turning away patients who had prescriptions for emergency contraception. Martin, working on behalf of the anti-abortion rights law firm Americans United for Life, represented independent pharmacists who argued that providing Plan B was inconsistent with their religious consciences. After a yearslong battle in the courts, Martin’s team won the case in 2012—by 2006, Plan B was available over the counter, but the ruling allows pharmacists to refrain from stocking the contraceptive on the basis of their faith.
When he was serving as a Republican National Committee chair in 2024, Martin once again received national attention for his stringent anti-abortion views—he has opposed exceptions for rape and incest, advocated for imprisoning both people who get abortions and doctors who perform the procedure, and claimed it’s “an absolute scientific fact that no abortion is ever performed to save the life of the mother.”
3. He deleted emails.
During his time in private practice, Martin fell into the good graces of Matt Blunt, a Republican who would serve as Missouri’s governor from 2005 to 2009. At the beginning of his term, Blunt selected Martin to lead the St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners, a position that allowed him to start making a name for himself in the Washington world. The following year, Blunt made Martin his chief of staff—an attempt to give his administration a bit of an edge, although Martin “readily admitted he knew nothing about the structure of state government,” according to St. Louis Magazine.
St. Louis reported that while Martin was in this role, journalists requested copies of some of his emails: He told them he had deleted those emails because they were not important. Still, the emails would have been available on a backup tape—but, Martin argued, open-records laws did not apply to backup tapes. Scott Eckersley, the deputy general counsel, disagreed with Martin on that claim. So Martin fired him for insubordination. Eckersley sued. Reporters sued. Martin resigned.
Do you have déjà vu? Readers who are feeling sharp in the temporal lobe today might remember the first week of Trump’s presidency. In an emailed memo leaked by a DOJ staffer, Martin announced he would launch an investigation into two prosecutors who brought obstruction charges to some January 6 rioters; these charges were dropped last year after the Fischer v. United States Supreme Court ruling. “Obviously the use was a great failure of our office – s. ct. decision – and we need to get to the bottom of it,” the email reads.
The day after that email leaked, Martin sent another email, which read in part: “Wow, what a disappointment to have my email yesterday to all of you was leaked almost immediately. Again, personally insulting and professionally unacceptable. I guess I have learned my lesson (“Fool me once…”).” This email, too, was leaked almost immediately.
4. He has run for office himself—and his campaigns were nothing ordinary.
Before his resignation from Blunt’s office, Martin co-created a website called SaveAB.com, which aimed to prevent the sale of St. Louis-based Anheiser-Busch to InBev. Ultimately, the acquisition went through and Martin closed the site down—but not before using it to announce his first bid for the House of Representatives, collecting tens of thousands of user email addresses that he could later use in his campaign, according to St. Louis Magazine.
In the 2010 race to represent Missouri’s Third Congressional District, Martin comfortably won the Republican primary but lost the seat to incumbent Democrat Russ Carnahan by about 5,000 votes.
In 2011, Martin’s daughter, who was six years old at the time, told reporter Jeannette Cooperman of St. Louis Magazine that “when Mom needs help, he usually doesn’t help, ’cause he’s speaking so much,” adding that occasionally Martin was seen on the phone in his underwear. Perhaps this was a harbinger of the turbulent political year to come.
At the St. Louis article’s time of publication, Martin was running to defeat incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill in Missouri’s 2012 US Senate election. But about a month later, Martin dropped out of that race as some Republican state heavyweights hopped into the primary. He then tossed his hat in the ring to represent Missouri’s Second Congressional District, which had been freshly redrawn at the time. After running his campaign for more than six months, Martin dropped out again, announcing that he would instead challenge incumbent Democrat Chris Koster to be the state’s attorney general. He proceeded to lose by more than 400,000 votes.
5. He narrowly avoided a fork in the road early in the administration.
Martin’s inclusion in Trump’s new administration has been on the public’s radar since December, when Trump announced that he would be chief of staff the Office of Management and Budget. It is unclear what happened to this arrangement—Trump never brought it up again and appointed Martin to the interim US Attorney post shortly after his inauguration.
Reportedly, Trump had told team members that former Pentagon official Cully Stimson was his top choice for the permanent DC prosecutor role. But sources told CNN this week that Trump has taken a real liking to Martin thanks to his faithful execution of a “retribution agenda.” That demonstrated loyalty is what secured the nomination for Martin, according to those insiders.
The sudden resignation of 25-year DOJ veteran prosecutor Denise Cheung, who quit Tuesday after Martin asked her to investigate Biden-era EPA funding, has apparently sparked even more confusion and distrust in Martin’s leadership among department members. “I’m sure there’s an example of a team that found success despite having a coach that doesn’t know the rules and hates his own team,” an anonymous employee told CNN Wednesday. “I’m not aware of one, though.”
