Trump official may have derailed retribution plans by running mouth: report

President Donald Trump is nominating acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin to serve in that role on a permanent basis — but Martin's ability to enact Trump's "retribution tour" may have ended before it started.

According to a report Thursday, he is already racking up ethics violations and alienating every career prosecutor who works under him.

Slate reported Martin has no experience as a prosecutor; rather, he is a former talk radio host and staffer for the late far-right activist Phyllis Schlafly, who spent years campaigning for Trump. In 2016, he proclaimed it wasn't racist for Trump supporters to hate Mexicans because "Mexican isn't a race," and four years later he pushed Stop the Steal conspiracy theories and compared January 6 to "Mardi Gras."

As a consequence, his immediate first actions as a U.S. attorney were both out of depth and wildly improper, Slate writer Brendan Ballou wrote.

"Most egregiously, he moved to dismiss the case against a Jan. 6 defendant whom he himself had represented, an astounding conflict of interest that has already inspired at least one bar complaint against him," wrote Ballou.

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He also spends excessive time posting on social media, "proposing to prosecute those who may simply criticize staff of the Department of Government Efficiency and, in a misleading letter, accusing Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of threatening Supreme Court justices." He also took to X to threaten former special counsel Jack Smith with prosecution for receiving free legal assistance from an outside law firm.

Prosecutor ethics generally prohibit either disclosure of an ongoing investigation or publicly shaming people under investigation.

All of these ethics missteps not only expose him to disciplinary bar action, but would make it almost impossible for him to prosecute any of these people, since they could argue his behavior tainted any jury pool, Slate reported.

Compounding all this, Ballou wrote, the prosecutors working under him have no respect for him: "Most recently, the office’s top criminal prosecutor resigned rather than follow his allegedly improper orders. One former prosecutor in the office said, 'He’s a fantastically bad manager — a tone deaf bully who inspires ridicule rather than trust.' Perhaps as a result, Martin’s officewide emails are often leaked, including a message complaining about leaks."

Many of Trump's far-right Justice Department appointees, like Emil Bove, are genuinely experienced prosecutors who at least understand the rules of procedure enough to weaponize the law on his behalf, wrote Ballou. "Martin is not one of those attorneys. If, through public protest, his office can be persuaded not to go along with his illegal or unethical plans, those plans, by and large, can be stopped."