Ed Martin has earned a reputation as a far-right partisan. The longtime Republican operative has a record as a far-right anti-abortion activist, organizer for the misguided “Stop the Steal” movement and a lawyer representing Jan. 6 criminals.
His current job is serving as the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., making Martin the top prosecutor in one of the most important law enforcement offices in the nation. This week, Donald Trump announced that he would nominate the GOP lawyer — who’s already had a highly controversial tenure in the post — to stay right where is, removing the word “interim” from his title.
It was against this backdrop that Martin reportedly had quite a bit to tell his colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, by way of an interoffice memo that appears to have leaked rather quickly.
The New York Times reported, for example, that the Republican prosecutor warned of an alleged plot targeting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The Times’ account, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that Martin tailored his memo in a predictably partisan way, singling out DOGE employees as the kind of officials in need of prosecutors’ assistance and describing pardons for Jan. 6 criminals as “free[ing] the January 6th prisoners.”
Subtle, it was not.
But as Reuters reported, Martin also announced the launch of a new endeavor related to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Martin named the initiative ‘Operation Whirlwind,’ saying that Schumer, the top Democrat in the Republican-led U.S. Senate, is the subject of a threats investigation. Schumer spoke out against Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh at a 2020 abortion rights rally by saying: ‘You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price.’
Some backstory is probably in order.
Roughly five years ago, as the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a closely watched abortion rights case, the New York Democrat spoke at a rally. Referencing two conservative, Trump-appointed justices, Schumer said they had “released the whirlwind” and would “pay the price.”
The senator soon after realized that the rhetoric had been perceived as excessive, and he walked back his comments.
The interim U.S. attorney in the nation’s capital, however, apparently isn’t letting this go. In fact, in his leaked memo, Martin tried to connect Schumer’s comments to an incident near Kavanaugh’s house. (The prosecutor said the latter came “months” after the senator’s speech. In reality, the gap was more than two years, and there’s literally no evidence to suggest Schumer’s rhetoric contributed to the incident.) "We will protect DOGE."This morning, Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin — a "stop the steal" organizer and Jan. 6 defendant advocate — sent an email titled "Operation Whirlwind" in which he said he's personally launched an investigation into Sen. Chuck Schumer.The text: Nevertheless, the prosecutor appears to be treating this as as open matter. “I reached out to Senator Schumer to investigate his threats,” Martin said. “He has not yet responded to me.” This is exactly the sort of political game that is likely to excite his ally in the Oval Office, but the idea that the interim U.S. attorney has begun an official inquiry related to the Democratic Senate leader, over a five-year-old speech that the senator already walked back, speaks volumes about the kind of hyper-partisan work Martin apparently intends to do in his position. In an online statement this week, the president claimed the Republican prosecutor is “fighting tirelessly to restore Law and Order.” Given recent events, that’s not the first phrase that comes to mind.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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