Ed Martin, the interim U.S. lawyer in Washington, D.C., and supporter of the “Cease the Steal” motion, on Monday threw his help behind Elon Musk and his “Division of Authorities Effectivity.”
In a public letter to Musk, the prosecutor and ally to President Donald Trump mentioned he would “pursue any and all authorized motion towards anybody who impedes your work or threatens your folks.”
“We should hold all of our American authorities staff secure, and we should shield the American folks’s property,” he wrote, including that workers at DOGE had been “focused publicly.”
“At the moment I ask that you simply make the most of me and my workers to help in defending the DOGE work and DOGE employees. Any threats, confrontations or different actions in any manner that affect their work might break quite a few legal guidelines,” Martin mentioned.
He didn’t describe the precise nature of threats he witnessed being made towards the DOGE staffers. He additionally accused the Biden administration of wanting “the opposite manner” as “Antifa and BLM rioters in addition to thugs with weapons trashed our capital metropolis.”
Trump signed an govt order to create DOGE, an company run by Musk that was ostensibly tasked with minimizing authorities waste and pointless spending.
Martin’s letter — on which he handwrote Musk’s identify — comes after DOGE staffers tried to take over and shut down the U.S. Company for Worldwide Growth. As HuffPost reported Monday, employees at USAID mentioned they obtained an electronic mail after midnight telling them to remain out of headquarters. Two USAID safety officers had been additionally placed on administrative depart after they allegedly refused to grant DOGE staffers entry to delicate knowledge, together with the Treasury Division’s federal fee system and information from the Workplace of Personnel Administration.
The letter additionally comes after Wired identified six males between the ages of 19 and 24 years outdated who’re taking part in key roles at DOGE. All had been recognized as engineers, and not less than one of many males is a volunteer, based on Wired.
Musk has mentioned USAID is “past restore” and that he was making an attempt to shutter it, despite the fact that an company with congressional authorization can’t be shuttered with out Congress’ approval.
Martin, whom Trump appointed on Jan. 20, doesn’t have any expertise as a federal prosecutor, nor has he been a decide. Martin does have expertise as a conservative political commentator and activist, and he as soon as sat on the board of the Patriot Freedom Mission, an advocacy community for Jan. 6 defendants. Martin was a no-show for his February 2022 deposition earlier than the Jan. 6 committee as properly, ignoring subpoenas issued to him by the congressional investigators.
After a sweeping sequence of pardons and commutations had been issued by Trump — whatever the severity or violence of offense — Martin opened a probe into all Jan. 6 prosecutions. It was a “particular challenge,” The Washington Post reported, that the interim D.C. lawyer assigned to division leaders on the Justice Division’s legal division and its public corruption division.
Particularly, Martin tasked the division with wanting into how prosecutors used a statute to cost defendants with obstruction of an official continuing.
The statute was narrowed by the Supreme Court last summer after a now-pardoned Jan. 6 defendant, Joseph Fischer, raised the query of whether or not the statute referred to obstructing Congress from its official duties or if it meant obstruction of bodily information. A Trump-appointed decide in Washington, D.C., Carl Nichols, agreed that the obstruction cost had been misapplied in Fischer’s case. Nichols was the primary of any federal decide overseeing Jan. 6 instances to rule that manner.
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An appellate combat ensued on the U.S. Courtroom of Appeals with a panel of judges overturning Nichols’ ruling and discovering that the federal government had accurately utilized the obstruction statute. However the Supreme Courtroom noticed it in another way when Fischer appealed to them. The excessive court docket dominated 6-3 to slender the which means of the legislation however not with out conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett brazenly questioning in her dissent how the court docket might handle such “textual backflips” to achieve its conclusion.
