The new firebrand of an acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia promises to bring sweeping changes to how the nation’s capital uses the city’s prosecutorial tools.
A conservative radio host who ran the weekly Pro America Report for years, Martin was a St. Louis lawyer and an active figure in Missouri politics for decades before being nominated last month by President Donald Trump to be Washington’s top prosecutor. Martin has already begun to dismantle Biden-era criminal justice policies in D.C. as exemplified by his announcement this week launching more severe consequences for gun crimes.
Before Trump tapped him for the prosecutor spot, Martin was named deputy policy director of the Republican National Committee’s platform committee to help craft the 2024 GOP platform. In December 2024, Martin was appointed to serve as the chief of staff for the director of the Office of Management and Budget. Once Trump was sworn into office, the president immediately appointed him to serve as interim U.S. attorney. Weeks later, Trump nominated him to be D.C.’s permanent U.S. attorney.
Martin has already provoked the anger of Democrats during his time on the job, particularly surrounding his views on Jan. 6 after he moved to drop hundreds of pardoned Jan. 6 cases and demoted several senior prosecutors involved in Jan. 6 prosecutions.
On Thursday, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee filed a complaint against Martin with the D.C. Bar alleging “multiple abuses of power,” including his dismissal of charges against a pardoned Jan. 6 defendant he had represented in court, and “using the threat of prosecution to intimidate government employees.”
Martin has also faced outrage over comments about being “Trump’s lawyer.”
“As President Trumps’ lawyers, we are proud to fight to protect his leadership as our President and we are vigilant in standing against entities like the AP that refuse to put America first,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia quoted Martin as saying in a Feb. 24 post to X.
Days before, Martin also highlighted a social media post asking “Where does it say in the Constitution that the Department of Justice is independent from POTUS?”
The incidents provoked controversy, as Martin is sworn to serve in a nonpartisan capacity as one of “the nation’s principal litigators under the direction of the Attorney General,” according to the DOJ’s website.
These days, Martin is focused on waging war on relaxed crime policies in D.C. set in place by his Biden-era predecessor, former U.S. attorney Matthew Graves. Earlier this month, he announced a “Make D.C. Safe Again” initiative that seeks pretrial detention against every person charged in firearms cases and prohibits prosecutors from declining to bring firearms charges without a green light from Martin’s top criminal chief, Jonathan Hornok.
Martin’s political trajectory
Raised in New Jersey, Martin received an English degree from the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, where his roommate was the son of former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He spent two years studying philosophy in Rome before moving to Missouri in 1995 to earn a law degree and a master’s in healthcare ethics from St. Louis University.
In 1998, Martin began supervising legal clinics for low-income residents as an aide to the human rights office for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Louis. In 1999, the new lawyer coordinated a meeting between civil rights icon Rosa Parks and then-Pope John Paul II, Martin told River Front Times.
The next phase of Martin’s career entailed a clerkship for Judge Pasco M. Brown II on the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals before launching a decades-long law career with the opening of his private legal practice in 2002. For the next several years, Martin would serve as the president of the Federalist Society, build his talk show, and even recruit Scalia to address a local attorney’s event, after which the two men dined with famed conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh.
In 2005, Martin’s political career began to gain steam, with his appointment to chair the state’s Board of Election Commissioners by then-Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt.
“Though he is obviously one of the most partisan guys around,” Jeff Rainford, then St. Louis mayor Francis Slay’s chief of staff, told a local news outlet at the time,”Ed still wanted the place run right, even if that meant more Democrats would vote.”
Blunt later recruited Martin to serve as chief of staff in the governor’s office in 2006. That role lasted for under two years after the lawyer became embroiled in a power struggle with Blunt’s deputy counsel, Scott Eckersley, over allegations that he was mishandling emails and disregarding the state’s Sunshine law open records requirement. In the end, Martin resigned, allegedly at Blunt’s request, although a subsequent state settlement found no evidence of wrongdoing.
In 2010, Martin’s political career took a turn when, with the support of the anti-establishment St. Louis Tea Party, he challenged then-Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-MO) in Missouri’s 3rd Congressional District. The seat had been held by a Democrat for more than sixty years and Martin entered as a clear underdog in the race. Though it had been viewed as a safe Democratic seat, the young upstart, characterized by news reports at the time as someone who was “known for his shoot-from-the-hip” and “combative” style, gave Carnahan a run for his money in the wake of the 2008 recession, concerns about a lackluster economy, and an anti-incumbent mood in the nation.
In the end, Martin suffered a narrow loss of roughly 2%.
Two years later, Martin lost another race for Missouri attorney general, challenging incumbent Chris Koster as he tried to become the first Republican in the state’s attorney general’s office in two decades.
“When you lose, you learn a lot,” Martin told St. Louis Public Radio after he conceded. “What could I have done better? How could I have made better decisions…? But what you really learn is a sense of compassion for how much you can’t control it. You do the best you can.”
The Trump era
Martin became the chairman of the Missouri Republican Party in 2013 before announcing he would not seek reelection in order to become the next head of longtime conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. It would be his friendship with the female activist that launched his political affinity with Trump.
Martin was a protégé of Schafly, with the two co-authoring the 2016 book The Conservative Case for Trump. She asked him to succeed her as Eagle Forum’s leader, which he did on Jan. 31, 2015.
But Martin’s tenure at the organization came to an abrupt halt when Schlafly endorsed Trump for the presidency. Her decision angered many Eagle Forum board members, including her own daughter, Anne, who had backed then-GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz. Martin sided with Schafly and her son, John, when they tried to head off an internal power struggle against the anti-Trump contingent in the forum and disagreements about the direction of the GOP.
Martin eventually lost the battle in April 2016 when the Eagle Forum’s Board of Directors voted to remove him as the organization’s president and ignored Schafly’s calls for several board members to resign.
The Missouri lawyer further caught the eye of the Trump world when he rose to the defense of the president’s concerns about irregularities in the 2020 election.
“No matter what happens tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after, we still need to be in the fight. There’s no summer soldiers and springtime patriots here. There’s the die-hard true Americans,” Martin said during a “Stop The Steal” rally the day before Jan. 6, 2021. “We start today, go through tomorrow and every day till we have a last breath and go home to the Lord because we will stop the steal.”
The following day, Martin joined crowds at the U.S. Capitol, some of whom were Trump supporters rallying in support of the president who were later arrested for breaching federal property. In comments on social media, Martin said the area he was in was “rowdy” but “nothing out of hand.”
Martin defended several Jan. 6 defendants in court. He has argued that a law prohibiting obstruction of an official proceeding, which was one of the felony charges used to imprison Jan. 6 defendants, was being interpreted improperly by prosecutors. Key misdemeanor charges brought against nearly every Jan. 6 defendant have also been contested by Martin, who has slammed the Department of Justice and Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for D.C. from 2021 to 2025, for interpreting laws broadly to charge defendants.
“A lot of my clients and the people that I’ve worked with have the same situation. You’re basically charged with a misdemeanor… you’re in the wrong place, you’re charged with trespass, right and a couple different misdemeanors, and then you’ve got this felony obstruction of official proceeding,” Martin said during a 2024 episode on the Unimpressed podcast. “And that’s not the law as it was written. That’s a lie. It actually is a lie. The obstruction official proceeding had to do with evidence tampering and delivery of evidence with integrity.”
“I’ve never seen anything so unfair in terms of … how these people are characterized, you know, insurrectionists and felonious, all this stuff,” he added. “If you were burning courthouses, but you’re Black Lives Matter. You’re skating. In fact, a lot of you get paid — there’s settlements to get paid for the people that were protesting. But if you were there on January 6… if you just walked through the wrong area, that’s considered participating, and we’re going to come get you.”
Michael Sherwin, the U.S. attorney for D.C. at the time of Jan. 6, told Politico he rejected prosecuting many potential trespass cases before he left office in March 2021 because the suspects had not engaged in any violence or property damage.
“That changed when I left. I don’t know who authorized it, but I refused,” Sherwin said. “I had a bright-line rule … that people should not have been charged if they just walked in through an open door.”
The Supreme Court handed down a ruling on a Jan. 6 case in June 2024 that favored Martin’s view that the obstruction law should be interpreted more narrowly. Two federal judges issued a decision in January of that year that also undercut key misdemeanor charges related to trespassing in a building that was leveled against most Jan. 6 defendants.
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Martin’s interactions with Jan. 6 defendants and his dismissal of felony charges against a man he defended in court have drawn fierce criticism from Democrats, with Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Dick Durbin (D-IL) leading his colleagues on Thursday in accusing the D.C. attorney of “professional misconduct.”
Although Martin has additionally faced criticism for having no prosecutorial experience as he faces the next phase of his political career, Trump has expressed confidence his pick will “get the job done,” and “restore Law and Order” to D.C.
