It’s Not the Crime, It’s the Clowning

Then-acting D.C. U.S. Attorney Ed Martin already had plenty of trouble on his hands, all of his own making, when D.C. Bar disciplinary counsel last year began looking into his extortionist threat against Georgetown University. But good ol’ Ed, with characteristic aplomb, managed to make things a whole lot worse for himself.

In a newly filed two-count disciplinary case against Martin in DC, half of the complaint is devoted to his unconstitutional pressure campaign against the Jesuit University and half to Martin’s ham-handed efforts to block the probe by threatening the bar’s disciplinary counsel and by going over his head to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals while the probe was still underway.

In short, Martin managed to get a second count lodged against himself in the course of unsuccessfully fighting off the first count. Well done, sir, well done.

Morning Memo covered last March the details of Martin’s anti-DEI-fueled threat to Georgetown Law School Dean William M. Treanor. (He subsequently upped the ante by threatening Georgetown’s president and board of directors, too, according to the bar complaint.) So let me zero in on Count II, which is where the real comedy is.

Martin went nuclear on the disciplinary counsel right off the bat, according to the complaint:

That letter earned Martin an admonishment from the chief judge, who told him in a follow-up letter that the judges couldn’t meet with him ex parte — that is, without disciplinary counsel present — and that he needed to go through the normal bar disciplinary process.

A week later, Martin cc’ed the chief judge on an email to the disciplinary counsel, which earned him another admonishment from the chief judge:

A month later, after allegedly failing to respond to communications from the disciplinary counsel, Martin sent yet another letter to the chief judge, now taking aim at the disciplinary counsel himself:

That earned Martin a third admonishment from the chief judge.

For his efforts, Martin was hit with the second count in the bar complaint accusing him of (i) improperly communicating ex parte with a judge during a proceeding; and (ii) engaging in conduct that seriously interferes with the administration of justice.

Again, Martin was the acting U.S. attorney in D.C. while all this was going on. He remains the U.S. Pardon Attorney. He wore numerous other hats over the past year, including director of the Trump DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group, Special Attorney for Mortgage Fraud, and assistant attorney general. Apologies if I left out any other titles.

The Trump DOJ came to Martin’s defense after the bar complaint was filed. You’ll recall that the Trump administration is promulgating a new rule that purports to subordinate state bar investigations of DOJ attorneys to the attorney general’s own investigation. Stay tuned.

A New Vindictive Prosecution Claim

The parent company of Smartmatic — the voting machine company falsely reviled by MAGA conspiracists after the 2020 election which has pursued defamation claims against Fox News and right-wing Trump allies — is raising a compelling new claim of vindictive prosecution in a corporate bribery case where it was added as defendant last fall by the Trump DOJ.

Three things that make the Smartmatic vindictive prosecution claim stand out, as it argues in its new filing seeking to get the indictment in federal court in Miami dismissed:

• Smartmatic cooperated with the investigation of its executives in the Philippines, where the alleged 2016 scheme took place, and wasn’t charged when the Biden administration initially brought the prosecution in 2024. Smartmatic was added to the case in a superseding indictment last fall.
• The Trump administration has notoriously abandoned enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practice Act in cases like this, but it made a notable exception for Smartmatic, the first company indicted under the federal law in 15 years.
• Fox News, which is still fighting off a billion-dollar defamation claim from Smartmatic, has allegedly used the criminal charges to try to gain leverage in the civil lawsuit.

Among the other defendants in Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuits: Newsmax, D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox personality, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Mike Lindell.

Jan. 6 Never Ends: Arizona Edition

In a highly unusual development, Homeland Security Investigations is conducting its own investigation of the 2020 election results in Arizona, The Atlantic is reporting. This is in addition to the bogus conspiracy-fueled DOJ probe that led to a grand jury subpoena of state Senate records of its “audit” the 2020 election in Maricopa County. Here’s the key paragraph from The Atlantic in full:

Arizona’s acting special agent in charge for HSI, Matthew Murphy, told the state attorney general’s office [last month] that his office was now probing the 2020 election in Arizona, according to a person familiar with the details of the meeting. A state investigator asked why the government was scrutinizing the results, given that they had already been litigated and investigated. Murphy made clear that he was acting on “direction from D.C.,” the person told us, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. The HSI investigation in Arizona, which has not previously been reported, comes as the FBI has embarked on a separate election probe in the state. “This is not a joint investigation” with HSI, a person familiar with the FBI investigation told us. HSI headquarters and the Office of the Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice are coordinating the investigation, which is focused on identifying alleged voter-fraud activity and related potential enforcement actions, according to a person familiar with the effort.

Mass Deportation Watch

• WaPo: White House tells House GOP to avoid mass deportation talk ahead of midterms
• CBS News: DOJ’s Alex Pretti shooting probe excludes prosecutors who specialize in civil rights cases, sources say
• Politico: Judges say ICE, DOJ leaders are putting rank-and-file lawyers in ‘an impossible position’

Pam Bondi Moves Onto Military Base

Attorney General Pam Bondi joins the growing list of Trump II officials who have moved to military housing in the D.C. area due to threats against them, the NYT reports.

You Don’t Say?

TPM’s Josh Kovesnky has reported extensively on the Trump DOJ’s use of Kyle Shideler of Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy as an expert witness in the Texas “antifa” case. Now The Intercept reports that on cross examination during the trial Shideler admitted that he “provided language that prosecutors used” in the indictment in the first-ever domestic terrorism case against a purported antifa cell. “I told them what I believed to be an accurate definition of antifa, and they used it,” Shideler said.

‘You Go to War With the Army You Have’

• ProPublica: The US Built a Blueprint to Avoid Civilian War Casualties. Trump Officials Scrapped It.
• Politico: Hegseth gutted offices that would have probed Iran school strike
• MSNow: DOJ losing experienced counterterrorism minds at a critical time
• CNN: How Trump and Musk’s spending cuts are hampering US government readiness amid the Iran war

Whoa If True

The inspector general for the Social Security Administration is investigating whether a then-DOGE employee took possession of two highly sensitive databases (and kept one on a thumb drive) and planned to use them at his new job with a federal contractor, the WaPo reports.

The allegations against the unnamed DOGE bro came from an anonymous whistleblower who has subsequently spoken to the WaPo, which also reviewed the whistleblower’s written complaint, which was filed with the inspector general in January :

According to the complaint, he allegedly told the whistleblower that he needed help transferring data from a thumb drive “to his personal computer so that he could ‘sanitize’ the data before using it at [the company.]” The engineer told colleagues that once he had removed personal details from the data, he wanted to upload it into the company’s systems. He told another colleague, who refused to help him upload the data because of legal concerns, that he expected to receive a presidential pardon if his actions were deemed to be illegal, according to the complaint.

Before the inspector general began investigating the claims, the Social Security Administration itself dismissed them as “false based on evidence and investigations by all involved.”

When GOP Senators Actually Try

Enough opposition emerged among Senate Republicans, led by Sen. John Curtis (R-UT), to sink the nomination of political commentator Jeremy Carl as assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs. Carl wrote a 2024 book titled “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart” and claimed that it is white people who have faced persistent discrimination and been “erased” from American history, Politico reports. Carl withdrew his candidacy while lamenting the lack of unanimous support from Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

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Lawlessness and Disorder

In a searing ruling, a federal judge has rejected Attorney General Pam Bondi’s ham-handed workaround to the disqualification of Alina Habba as U.S. attorney for New Jersey.

The same outside judge who disqualified Habba, U.S. District Judge William Brann of the Middle District of Pennsylvania, ruled that Bondi’s appointment of a trio of DOJ attorneys to run the U.S. Attorney’s Office violates the Constitution and federal statute.

The triumvirate approach was yet another backdoor way of bypassing the Senate confirmation process for a permanent U.S. attorney and denying district judges the chance to exercise their statutory power to name interim U.S. attorneys.

“One year into this administration, it is plain that President Trump and his top
aides have chafed at the limits on their power set forth by law and the Constitution,” Brann wrote. “To avoid these roadblocks, this administration frequently purports to have discovered enormous grants of executive power hidden in the vagaries and silences of the code.”

What’s critical to understanding how these cases are playing out, not just in New Jersey but in other jurisdictions where Bondi is doing President Trump’s bidding on U.S. attorneys, is that the challenges are being brought in run-of-the-mill criminal cases. Defense attorneys are challenging the lawfulness and legitimacy of actions taken by federal prosecutors in leaderless U.S. attorney’s offices.

The unlawful workaround has created “a chaos that pervades criminal prosecutions” in New Jersey, Brann wrote, explicitly framed his ruling around the risk to public safety of invalidating criminal prosecutions en masse: “[W]hy does the fate of thousands of criminal prosecutions in this District potentially rest on the legitimacy of an unprecedented and byzantine leadership structure? The President doesn’t like that he cannot simply appoint whomever he wants.”

Jan. 6 Never Ends

In an expansion of the Trump DOJ’s unprecedented use of a criminal investigation to boost 2020 right-wing election conspiracy theories, the FBI served a federal grand jury subpoena last week on the Arizona state Senate for records relating to its “audit” of the 2020 election results in Maricopa County. While the Cyber Ninjas audit was bogus, it still found that Biden had won the state’s largest county.

“Because of that review, the state Senate retained election records that ordinarily would have been disposed of by now, according to a former staff member familiar with the matter,” the WaPo reports. “The person said those records include images of ballots and absentee envelopes, the tally of cast votes, and the server software.”

Adds ‘Insult to Injury’

Law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 are dismayed that, while the long-delayed plaque honoring them has finally been put on display, it is in a part of the building that is not accessible to the public. The plaque, which is mandated by law, was stymied by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and now hangs on the Senate side of the Capitol basically until the House GOP gets its senses back, whenever that may be, and a decision can be made on a more prominent place to hang it.

Immigration Appeals Gambit Blocked

Over the weekend, U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss of Washington, D.C., blocked the Trump administration’s unilateral effort to summarily dispense with thousands of immigration appeals.

“Under the new policy, all appeals would be automatically dismissed unless a majority of the Board of Immigration Appeals, the body that reviews decisions by immigration judges, voted to reconsider the case within 10 days,” the NYT reports.

How Many AEA Detainees Were There?

In a new status report in the original Alien Enemies Act case, the ACLU has alerted U.S. District Judge James Boasberg of Washington, D.C., that nearly one year since two flights of Venezuelan nationals took off for El Salvador’s CECOT prison, the Trump administration continues to give incomplete or conflicting data on how many AEA detainee there were:

Plaintiffs’ counsel received a class list of 137 class members from the Government …. Plaintiffs have some reason to believe the 137 is not exhaustive. Specifically, counsel notes that there are two individuals … who are not on the Government’s class list.

The new filing, which came the same day that the Trump administration asked Boasberg to stay his latest ruling in the case while it appeals that decision, also provided update figures on what the detainees wish to do to vindicate the due process rights they were initially denied. According to the filing, of the 91 former detainees who have shared their preferences with the ACLU :

• 22 want to return to U.S. to pursue their claims, knowing they’ll likely be detained once they arrive; and
• 68 want to pursue their claims through court filings remotely.

The ACLU continues to try to reach the approximately 50 other former detainees.

More Evidence U.S. Struck Iranian School

Markings on purported fragments of a missile that struck an elementary school in southern Iraq last week indicated it was a U.S.-made weapon, according to a NYT analysis.

Meanwhile, President Trump continued his one-man disinformation campaign to blame Iran for the incident, preposterously claiming that the Islamic republic has its own U.S.-made Tomahawk missiles.

Narrator, with a heavy sigh: Iran does not possess Tomahawks.

A Chilling Read

The WSJ has an in-depth report on the last days of the Iranian missile frigate that became the first combat kill by a U.S. submarine since World War II.

U.S. Confirms Military Ops in Ecuador

Last week’s reporting that the Trump administration had expanded its lawless campaign against alleged drug-smuggling boats to include land-based operations in Ecuador was murky about the level of direct U.S. involvement against drug traffickers. But now the Trump administration has sent a notice of the Ecuador operation to Congress under the War Powers Act.

The operations against drug traffickers, rebranded by the Trump administration as narco-terrorists, were reportedly advised and supported by U.S. Special Forces. But the War Powers Act notice would seem to confirm a more direct, if still unspecified, level of U.S. involvement, which would be consistent with President Trump’s repeated promises that the U.S. would be taking it to the drug cartels on land not just at sea.

LOL … Sob

News that President Trump is withholding his expected endorsement of Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) over state Attorney General Ken Paxton in the GOP primary runoff for Senate in Texas as a way of leveraging Senate Republicans into passing the SAVE Act is on the hand a comical conundrum. Sit back and pass the popcorn.

On the other hand, the ridiculousness of the situation highlights the extent to which nothing matters to Trump as much as prevailing in the midterms, by hook or by crook. “It will guarantee the midterms,” Trump told House Republicans, who have already passed two versions of the SAVE Act. “If you don’t get it, big trouble, my opinion.”

For what it’s worth, Paxton — on the verge of losing Trump’s endorsement last week after he finished second to Cornyn in Tuesday’s election — engineered this conundrum for the GOP by promising to drop out of the race if the Senate passed the SAVE Act.

Senate GOP leaders have been unsuccessful in puncturing the right-wing myth that they can overcome a Democrat filibuster through clever parliamentary maneuvering and pass the bill. In short, it’s a self-made clusterfuck that epitomizes the fever dreams and magical thinking of the Trump II presidency.

Be the Next Alexander Butterfield

More than half a century later, Alexander Butterfield, who died yesterday at 99, still stands as an exemplar of honesty and candor against one’s own interest for revealing in the summer of 1973 the existence of a taping system in the Nixon White House. Butterfield’s revelation blew open the slow-rolling Watergate scandal, which had commenced the previous summer with the break-in at DNC headquarters and would culminate the following summer with Nixon’s resignation.

Butterfield’s role has always been a little more complicated than that though. He wasn’t exactly a whistleblower in the classic sense: someone who comes forward to volunteer previously unknown information, often at great personal risk. Rather, he was the Federal Aviation Administration chief who, by virtue of being a former Nixon White House aide, was a Watergate witness. What set Butterfield apart was that when he asked about the taping system, he told the truth, at some personal and political risk. He didn’t participate in the coverup.

In some ways, that’s a low bar. If you’re looking for more inspiration, I have often found it in the person of Donald G. Sanders, the Republican staff attorney who first sussed out from Butterfield the existence of the taping system, in a closed-door interview three days before his public testimony to the Senate Watergate committee.

Both figures stand in sharp contrast to the current political moment.

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