Ed Martin, the “Stop the Steal” organizer serving as an interim U.S. attorney of the District of Columbia, made no secret of the fact that he was pursuing Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. On the contrary, the Republican lawyer effectively bragged about his efforts.
The prosecutor’s gambit, however, has apparently run its course. The Washington Post reported:
Interim D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin has dropped plans to investigate the country’s most powerful elected Democrat over a statement he made about two conservative Supreme Court justices five years ago, concluding that a probe is unfounded, two people familiar with the matter said Tuesday.
If you’re new to this story, let’s review how we arrived at this point.
Roughly five years ago, as the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a closely watched abortion-rights case, Schumer spoke at a rally. Referring to two conservative Trump-appointed justices, the New York Democrat 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.
This year, however, the interim U.S. attorney in the nation’s capital considered this a case worth pursuing. In fact, in a leaked memo, Martin launched an initiative called “Operation Whirlwind” — an obvious reference to Schumer’s choice of words — and even tried to connect Schumer’s comments to an incident near Justice Brett 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.)
“I reached out to Senator Schumer to investigate his threats,” Martin said in his memo last month. “He has not yet responded to me.”
The New York Times reported this week that the acting U.S. attorney even wanted to present evidence against Schumer to a federal grand jury. (Neither the Times report nor the aforementioned Post report have been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News.)
Now, however, the matter seems to have collapsed. As the Post’s report added, “Legal analysts said Schumer’s quick retraction, the passage of time, and U.S. case law surrounding threats, free speech and congressional immunity made any prosecution by Martin’s office implausible in the seven weeks he had available.”
The fact that the controversy — I’m using the word loosely — has been resolved is encouraging, but let’s not miss the forest for the trees: Martin is earning his reputation as a hyper-partisan prosecutor, and the fact that he even pursued Schumer is emblematic of the Trump administration’s larger campaign to politicize federal law enforcement to a cartoonish degree.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
