Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., and supporter of the “Stop the Steal” movement, on Monday threw his support behind Elon Musk and his “Department of Government Efficiency.”
In a public letter to Musk, the prosecutor and ally to President Donald Trump said he would “pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.”
“We must keep all of our American government employees safe, and we must protect the American people’s property,” he wrote, adding that staff at DOGE were “targeted publicly.”
“At this time I ask that you utilize me and my staff to assist in protecting the DOGE work and DOGE workers. Any threats, confrontations or other actions in any way that impact their work may break numerous laws,” Martin said.
He did not describe the specific nature of threats he witnessed being made against the DOGE staffers. He also accused the Biden administration of looking “the other way” as “Antifa and BLM rioters as well as thugs with guns trashed our capital city.”
Trump signed an executive order to create DOGE, an agency run by Musk that was ostensibly tasked with minimizing government waste and unnecessary spending.
Martin’s letter — on which he handwrote Musk’s name — comes after DOGE staffers tried to take over and shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development. As HuffPost reported Monday, workers at USAID said they received an email after midnight telling them to stay out of headquarters. Two USAID security officials were also put on administrative leave after they allegedly refused to grant DOGE staffers access to sensitive data, including the Treasury Department’s federal payment system and records from the Office of Personnel Management.
The letter also comes after Wired identified six men between the ages of 19 and 24 years old who are playing key roles at DOGE. All were identified as engineers, and at least one of the men is a volunteer, according to Wired.
Musk has said USAID is “beyond repair” and that he was trying to shutter it, even though an agency with congressional authorization can’t be shuttered without Congress’ approval.
Martin, whom Trump appointed on Jan. 20, does not have any experience as a federal prosecutor, nor has he been a judge. Martin does have experience as a conservative political commentator and activist, and he once sat on the board of the Patriot Freedom Project, an advocacy network for Jan. 6 defendants. Martin was a no-show for his February 2022 deposition before the Jan. 6 committee as well, ignoring subpoenas issued to him by the congressional investigators.
After a sweeping series of pardons and commutations were issued by Trump — regardless of the severity or violence of offense — Martin opened a probe into all Jan. 6 prosecutions. It was a “special project,” The Washington Post reported, that the interim D.C. attorney assigned to division leaders at the Justice Department’s criminal division and its public corruption division.
Specifically, Martin tasked the department with looking into how prosecutors used a statute to charge defendants with obstruction of an official proceeding.
The statute was narrowed by the Supreme Court last summer after a now-pardoned Jan. 6 defendant, Joseph Fischer, raised the question of whether the statute referred to obstructing Congress from its official duties or if it meant obstruction of physical records. A Trump-appointed judge in Washington, D.C., Carl Nichols, agreed that the obstruction charge had been misapplied in Fischer’s case. Nichols was the first of any federal judge overseeing Jan. 6 cases to rule that way.
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An appellate fight ensued at the U.S. Court of Appeals with a panel of judges overturning Nichols’ ruling and finding that the government had correctly applied the obstruction statute. But the Supreme Court saw it differently when Fischer appealed to them. The high court ruled 6-3 to narrow the meaning of the law but not without conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett openly questioning in her dissent how the court could manage such “textual backflips” to reach its conclusion.