Ed Martin Clowns Himself Into Bonus Ethics Charges

It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Clowning

Then-acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin already had plenty of trouble on his hands, all of his own making, when D.C. Bar disciplinary counsel last year began looking into his extortionist threat against Georgetown University. But good ol’ Ed, with characteristic aplomb, managed to make things a whole lot worse for himself.

In a newly filed two-count disciplinary case against Martin in DC, half of the complaint is devoted to his unconstitutional pressure campaign against the Jesuit University and half to Martin’s ham-handed efforts to block the probe by threatening the bar’s disciplinary counsel and by going over his head to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals while the probe was still underway.

In short, Martin managed to get a second count lodged against himself in the course of unsuccessfully fighting off the first count. Well done, sir, well done.

Morning Memo covered last March the details of Martin’s anti-DEI-fueled threat to Georgetown Law School Dean William M. Treanor. (He subsequently upped the ante by threatening Georgetown’s president and board of directors, too, according to the bar complaint.) So let me zero in on Count II, which is where the real comedy is.

Martin went nuclear on the disciplinary counsel right off the bat, according to the complaint:

That letter earned Martin an admonishment from the chief judge, who told him in a follow-up letter that the judges couldn’t meet with him ex parte — that is, without disciplinary counsel present — and that he needed to go through the normal bar disciplinary process.

A week later, Martin cc’ed the chief judge on an email to the disciplinary counsel, which earned him another admonishment from the chief judge:

A month later, after allegedly failing to respond to communications from the disciplinary counsel, Martin sent yet another letter to the chief judge, now taking aim at the disciplinary counsel himself:

That earned Martin a third admonishment from the chief judge.

For his efforts, Martin was hit with the second count in the bar complaint accusing him of (i) improperly communicating ex parte with a judge during a proceeding; and (ii) engaging in conduct that seriously interferes with the administration of justice.

Again, Martin was the acting U.S. attorney in D.C. while all this was going on. He remains the U.S. Pardon Attorney. He wore numerous other hats over the past year, including director of the Trump DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group, Special Attorney for Mortgage Fraud, and assistant attorney general. Apologies if I left out any other titles.

The Trump DOJ came to Martin’s defense after the bar complaint was filed. You’ll recall that the Trump administration is promulgating a new rule that purports to subordinate state bar investigations of DOJ attorneys to the attorney general’s own investigation. Stay tuned.

A New Vindictive Prosecution Claim

The parent company of Smartmatic — the voting machine company falsely reviled by MAGA conspiracists after the 2020 election which has pursued defamation claims against Fox News and right-wing Trump allies — is raising a compelling new claim of vindictive prosecution in a corporate bribery case where it was added as defendant last fall by the Trump DOJ.

Three things that make the Smartmatic vindictive prosecution claim stand out, as it argues in its new filing seeking to get the indictment in federal court in Miami dismissed:

• Smartmatic cooperated with the investigation of its executives in the Philippines, where the alleged 2016 scheme took place, and wasn’t charged when the Biden administration initially brought the prosecution in 2024. Smartmatic was added to the case in a superseding indictment last fall.
• The Trump administration has notoriously abandoned enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practice Act in cases like this, but it made a notable exception for Smartmatic, the first company indicted under the federal law in 15 years.
• Fox News, which is still fighting off a billion-dollar defamation claim from Smartmatic, has allegedly used the criminal charges to try to gain leverage in the civil lawsuit.

Among the other defendants in Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuits: Newsmax, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox personality, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Mike Lindell.

Jan. 6 Never Ends: Arizona Edition

In a highly unusual development, Homeland Security Investigations is conducting its own investigation of the 2020 election results in Arizona, The Atlantic is reporting. This is in addition to the bogus conspiracy-fueled DOJ probe that led to a grand jury subpoena of state Senate records of its “audit” the 2020 election in Maricopa County. Here’s the key paragraph from The Atlantic in full:

Arizona’s acting special agent in charge for HSI, Matthew Murphy, told the state attorney general’s office [last month] that his office was now probing the 2020 election in Arizona, according to a person familiar with the details of the meeting. A state investigator asked why the government was scrutinizing the results, given that they had already been litigated and investigated. Murphy made clear that he was acting on “direction from D.C.,” the person told us, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The HSI investigation in Arizona, which has not previously been reported, comes as the FBI has embarked on a separate election probe in the state. “This is not a joint investigation” with HSI, a person familiar with the FBI investigation told us. HSI headquarters and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice are coordinating the investigation, which is focused on identifying alleged voter-fraud activity and related potential enforcement actions, according to a person familiar with the effort.

Mass Deportation Watch

• WaPo: White House tells House GOP to avoid mass deportation talk ahead of midterms
• CBS News: DOJ’s Alex Pretti shooting probe excludes prosecutors who specialize in civil rights cases, sources say
• Politico: Judges say ICE, DOJ leaders are putting rank-and-file lawyers in ‘an impossible position’

Pam Bondi Moves Onto Military Base

Attorney General Pam Bondi joins the growing list of Trump II officials who have moved to military housing in the D.C. area due to threats against them, the NYT reports.

You Don’t Say?

TPM’s Josh Kovesnky has reported extensively on the Trump DOJ’s use of Kyle Shideler of Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy as an expert witness in the Texas “antifa” case. Now The Intercept reports that on cross examination during the trial Shideler admitted that he “provided language that prosecutors used” in the indictment in the first-ever domestic terrorism case against a purported antifa cell. “I told them what I believed to be an accurate definition of antifa, and they used it,” Shideler said.

‘You Go to War With the Army You Have’

• ProPublica: The US Built a Blueprint to Avoid Civilian War Casualties. Trump Officials Scrapped It.
• Politico: Hegseth gutted offices that would have probed Iran school strike
• MSNow: DOJ losing experienced counterterrorism minds at a critical time
• CNN: How Trump and Musk’s spending cuts are hampering US government readiness amid the Iran war

Whoa If True

The inspector general for the Social Security Administration is investigating whether a then-DOGE employee took possession of two highly sensitive databases (and kept one on a thumb drive) and planned to use them at his new job with a federal contractor, the WaPo reports.

The allegations against the unnamed DOGE bro came from an anonymous whistleblower who has subsequently spoken to the WaPo, which also reviewed the whistleblower’s written complaint, which was filed with the inspector general in January :

According to the complaint, he allegedly told the whistleblower that he needed help transferring data from a thumb drive “to his personal computer so that he could ‘sanitize’ the data before using it at [the company.]” The engineer told colleagues that once he had removed personal details from the data, he wanted to upload it into the company’s systems. He told another colleague, who refused to help him upload the data because of legal concerns, that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were deemed to be illegal, according to the complaint.

Before the inspector general began investigating the claims, the Social Security Administration itself dismissed them as “false based on evidence and investigations by all involved.”

When GOP Senators Actually Try

Enough opposition emerged among Senate Republicans, led by Sen. John Curtis (R-UT), to sink the nomination of political commentator Jeremy Carl as assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs. Carl wrote a 2024 book titled “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart” and claimed that it is white people who have faced persistent discrimination and been “erased” from American history, Politico reports. Carl withdrew his candidacy while lamenting the lack of unanimous support from Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Hot tips? Juicy scuttlebutt? Keen insights? Let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.