Editorials & Other Articles

Ed Martin's U.S. attorney nomination was cartoonishly ridiculous — and now it's dead.

Trump invested some real political capital into this absurdity, and in a sign of his growing weakness, this fiasco ends with nothing but embarrassment for him.

Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the president has sent some truly outlandish nominees to the Senate for confirmation. In a handful of instances — Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, et al. — there were a smattering of GOP “no” votes, but in nearly every instance, the Republican-led institution ended up confirming Trump’s choice, following the White House’s demands.

Ed Martin, however, proved to be a bridge too far......

That’s not what happened. The president announced Thursday afternoon that Martin's nomination is ending, and he'll choose a new nominee in the coming days.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:aunpu65mdrhwfie7ynymlzeh/post/3loobfqwzwk2a

Link to tweet

.....What Trump might not have fully appreciated was just how ridiculous Martin’s record had become. Indeed, his “greatest hits” package featured misguided and unnecessary fights with the dean of Georgetown University’s law school, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, former President Joe Biden, and Democratic Reps. Robert Garcia of California and Eugene Vindman of Virginia — and that’s before one adds Wikipedia and prominent medical journals to his increasingly bizarre list of targets. During his brief tenure, Martin also:

demoted multiple senior officials involved in Jan. 6 insurrection cases;

compared one of the criminal charges used against Jan. 6 defendants to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II;

falsely described himself as one of the president’s lawyers;

made dubious denials about his earlier praise for a Nazi sympathizer;

made more than 150 appearances on Russian propaganda outlets between August 2016 to April 2024;

weighed in on a civil case involving the White House, which had literally nothing to do with his office;

intervened in a dubious Environmental Protection Agency investigation;

made a dubious decision in a case involving Republican Rep. Cory Mills of Florida;

launched the wildly unnecessary “Operation Whirlwind”;

also launched the wildly unnecessary “Project 1512” initiative;

also launched a wildly unnecessary “election accountability” unit;

made a creepy public vow to wield his prosecutorial powers against those who get in Elon Musk’s way;

engaged in brazen conflict of interest in a Jan. 6 case, in which he effectively took both sides of a criminal case;

and kicked off a radically unnecessary investigation into Jack Smith and a law firm that gave the former special counsel pro bono legal services.

In a piece for New York magazine, Elie Honig recently described the lawyer as Trump’s “dangerous and ridiculous prosecutor.” Martin went out of his way to prove his many critics right, and it derailed his nomination.

As the dust settles on the White House’s latest personnel fiasco, it’s worth appreciating the scope of the president’s failure. Not only did the president nominate a spectacularly unqualified radical to lead one of the nation’s most important prosecutorial offices, and not only did he spend political capital that's suddenly in short supply, but Team Trump also appears to have failed to thoroughly vet Martin in advance — a familiar problem in this administration.