Donald Trump’s interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia has made a series of headlines since taking over as the district’s top prosecutor, including his internal probe of the office’s Jan. 6 work and his public display of protection for Trump ally Elon Musk.
A new entry in the Ed Martin genre is that the lawyer who represented Jan. 6 defendants didn’t officially withdraw from his defense representation before he moved — as the prosecutor — to dismiss the remaining Jan. 6 cases in D.C. That is, Martin was still listed as a Jan. 6 defense counsel on the docket when he moved to dismiss Jan. 6 cases.
A Reuters piece highlighting Martin’s dual roles noted potential ethical issues, as lawyers are generally prohibited “from taking both sides in the same case and U.S. Justice Department regulations require lawyers to step aside from cases involving their former clients for at least a year.”
When Trump granted mass Jan. 6 clemency as one of the first presidential acts of his second term on Jan. 20, he also ordered the attorney general “to pursue dismissal with prejudice to the government of all pending indictments against individuals for their conduct related to the events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.” The next day, a filing from the D.C. federal prosecutor’s office, listing Martin as the U.S. attorney, moved to dismiss the case of Joseph Padilla, who was represented by Martin and convicted of assaulting, resisting or impeding officers and other crimes.
It wasn’t until Reuters wrote about the subject that Martin on Wednesday moved to withdraw as Padilla’s attorney, writing to the court in his personal capacity that he hadn’t been recently representing Padilla and that he “requests that the Court grant this motion so the docket may accurately reflect this fact.”
Somehow that wasn’t the end of the matter, because a subsequent entry on the docket from the D.C. court said that Martin’s attorney membership with the court wasn’t up to date, and so he is “not in good standing” and is “not permitted to file.” It further said that “the presiding judge in this case has been notified that you are currently not in good standing to file in this court.” Whatever the deal is with his membership, that’s all the more reason to have cleared it up before becoming the top prosecutor. Even if it wouldn’t have made a difference to the ultimate outcome of the case going away, since the order came from the president, it’s better to be beyond ethical reproach, rather than raising potential ethical issues, while presiding over law enforcement in the district. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in Donald Trump’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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