U.S. pardon attorney Ed Martin argued that Washington, D.C., DEI policies were to blame after he refused to comply with an arrest warrant for Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL).
Last year, the Metropolitan Police responded to the report of a domestic assault at Mills' apartment. Although no arrest was made at the time, a warrant was later forwarded to the D.C. U.S. Attorney's office, which Martin was leading.
The allegations came to light again this week as Mills faces an ethics investigation, and Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) called for his expulsion from Congress.
On Tuesday, Martin spoke to Lindell TV to defend his handling of the 2025 warrant.
"The story is the Metropolitan Police Department, the MPD, failed in their job. And then they wanted a mop-up job. And it wasn't the Trump administration or anyone else's job to do that," Martin insisted. "There was, frankly, the leadership at the top failed, and that's the story."
According to the DOJ attorney, he refused to act on the warrant for Mills because MPD declined to force anyone to leave the apartment during the initial call.
"Their policy is when there's a domestic violence issue, they go out to the site, and they're going to take someone away," Martin said. "And the next morning, as the story broke in the press, MPD incompetently said, now you have to indict the guy. And we said, you didn't have probable cause last night. You didn't put it together last night. And now you're changing your story. Why? And the reason why is because it was a mop-up job because of the attention it was getting."
"I will say career prosecutors in my office said, 'Oh well, maybe we should do it. You know, they're asking nice,'" he admitted. "And so they wanted to re-look at this the next day, and we weren't going to play that game."
In the end, Martin said there was a systemic problem at the MPD stemming from an effort to hire a more diverse workforce.
"So the mainstream media, you're thinking, as usual, I would say, always wants to sort of pin this on Trump," he asserted. "I mean, look, the MPD had a police chief that looks and feels like a DEI hire. She's long gone now. She didn't — she wasn't up to the job. She made that clear when she, I think she resigned. She used, you know, expletives and all kinds of things. She was a failure. And this was a kind of failure. These are her people. These are her supervisors. Don't blame us for that, right?"