Ed Martin, DC’s acting US attorney, denounced his longtime relationship with a January 6 rioter and accused Nazi sympathizer in an interview with Jewish publication Forward last week. Timothy Hale-Cusanelli made headlines back in 2021 for the other-than-honorable Army Reserves discharge he earned thanks to his participation in the Capitol break-in—and also for comments that his colleagues told Justice Department investigators he made at work about wanting to “kill all the Jews and eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
Martin invited Hale-Cusanelli on podcasts at least five times last year, and shared the stage with him during two separate events at Trump’s Bedminster golf club over the summer. Just last month, Mother Jones reported that the duo appeared together at a Florida fundraiser for the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles—a conservative advocacy group that Martin led before landing in the Trump administration.
Martin told Forward that he “denounce[s] everything about what that guy said, everything about the way he talked, and all as I’ve now seen it,” adding, “At the time, I didn’t know it.” Illinois Senator Dick Durbin has accused Martin of lying about his awareness of Hale-Cusanelli’s previous antisemitic activity, as the Judiciary Committee reviews Martin’s nomination to the permanent US attorney post. Durbin said Monday that Martin denied, under oath, ever seeing a highly circulated photo of Hale-Cusanelli sporting a Hitler-esque mustache. But in a July clip from Martin’s podcast The Pro America Report, during an episode featuring Hale-Cusanelli as a guest, Martin says January 6 prosecutors “leaked a photo to say, ah, look, these people, these people, MAGA people are antisemitic … you had, like, a mustache shaved in such a way that you looked vaguely like Hitler and making jokes about it. Again, you know, not your best moment, but not illegal.”
The Forward article that includes Martin’s public condemnation of Hale-Cusanelli initially did not mention Martin’s previous comments on the photo or the pair’s recent speaking engagements, as Amanda Moore—a reporter who covers the far right who cowrote the Mother Jones piece on the Bedminster event last month—points out on her Substack page The Turtle Diaries. The story has since been updated to better reflect Martin’s past associations with Hale-Cusanelli, but Moore sees the original, far briefer copy as evidence of Martin’s broader media strategy. “Ed Martin does not respond to hostile media, or media that he perceives to be hostile,” Moore tells Washingtonian.
Following her coverage of last month’s Florida fundraiser, Moore noticed that other media outlets mostly zeroed in on a comment Martin made in his keynote speech that compared the federal January 6 investigation to Japanese-American internment during the Second World War. The more pressing takeaway, from her perspective, was the smattering of January 6 rioters in the audience—particularly, members of far-right fringe groups who were not included in Trump’s sweeping pardons. “These people are in litigation with his office—he is undermining his own employees on a work day in Florida, speaking with them,” she says.
Moore thinks Martin’s denouncement of Hale-Cusanelli is beside the point—another attempt at headlines that focus on his rhetoric rather than his actions. His team has “flooded the zone,” she says, goading media outlets into producing “rewrites of rewrites of rewrites of Ed Martin things—and now, today, you’re going to have rewrites of rewrites of him denouncing Tim Hale.”
A little reputation-buffing couldn’t hurt. Martin’s 120-day interim term expires next month. Trump has nominated him to fill the role permanently, but if the Senate doesn’t confirm him by May 20, US District Court judges in DC will have the authority to name a new temporary US Attorney. His prospects aren’t fabulous: Earlier this month, US Senator Adam Schiff of California placed a hold on Martin’s nomination. In an April 17 video, Schiff cites Martin’s friendship with Hale-Cusanelli as “one of the many reasons why I’m trying to kill this nomination.”
Schiff’s hold on Martin’s nomination is intended to slow down the confirmation process. He has also joined other Senate Democrats in calling for a confirmation hearing—which, if granted, would be the first confirmation hearing for a US attorney candidate in 40 years. The latest effort to stymie Martin’s permanent appointment to the role comes in the form of pressure from former employees of the DC US Attorney’s Office: Almost 100 prosecutors, all of whom served in the office at some point during the period spanning the Johnson and Biden administrations, have signed a letter urging the Senate to reject Martin’s nomination. “Whether our message is futile or not, it is an expression of our conscience and a matter of principle that we deliver with all of the strength that we can muster,” the memo reads.
