Reporting Highlights
- Emails Revealed: Court records show emails between Ed Martin and an ally urging online criticism of a judge handling a case he was involved in, which experts say is an ethical violation.
- Legal Payouts: Martin’s actions have led to more than $600,000 in legal settlements or judgments against Martin or his employers, much of that not previously reported.
- Politicized Prosecutions: Martin has reshaped the office to reflect Trump’s priorities, firing or demoting prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases and targeting Trump’s critics with legal threats.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
The attacks on Judge John Barberis in the fall of 2016 appeared on his personal Facebook page. They impugned his ethics, criticized a recent ruling and branded him as a “politician” with the “LOWEST rating for a judge in Illinois.”
Barberis, a state court judge in an Illinois county across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, was presiding over a nasty legal battle for control over the Eagle Forum, the vaunted grassroots group founded by Phyllis Schlafly, matriarch of the anti-feminist movement. The case pitted Schlafly’s youngest daughter against three of her sons, almost like a Midwest version of the HBO program “Succession” (without the obscenities).
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