On the first night of Donald Trump’s second term in office, he signed an executive order called “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” which pardoned more than fifteen hundred people who were charged or sentenced for their participation in the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Like, pretty crazy, right? Earlier in the day, Trump had appointed Ed Martin, a conservative activist and lawyer from Missouri, as the acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. Martin helped organize the Stop the Steal rally at the Ellipse before the riot went down. He was there at the Capitol on January 6th and thought the vibe was like Mardi Gras, but then later said the government staged some of the activities. He even defended J6 hostages in court and worked with their advocacy organization, the Patriot Freedom Project. (Martin even gave an award to a pardoned rioter and Nazi sympathizer, calling him “an extraordinary man.”) He even went as far as comparing the Capitol rioters’ imprisonment to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Wild, right? Now, he’s the big shot leading the office that handled the January 6th prosecutions, which is like the biggest criminal investigation in American history. He was quick to shake things up.
Martin, who was the first U.S. Attorney for D.C. in over fifty years to have zero experience as a judge or federal prosecutor before taking on the role, straight-up fired more than a dozen prosecutors involved in the cases and started an investigation into what he called “Communist show trials.” He demoted some senior leaders, including those in charge of prosecuting Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro. (These dudes did time after D.C. juries found them guilty of contempt of Congress for not cooperating with the House committee investigating January 6th.) On X, Martin said his office was full of “President Trumps’ lawyers.”
On Thursday, Trump dropped the bomb that Martin, who was only serving in an interim capacity and still needed Senate confirmation, was getting the boot. Two days before that, Thom Tillis, a Republican senator from North Carolina and a Judiciary Committee member, hinted that he would cast the decisive vote to sink Martin’s nomination. “Most of my concerns are related to January 6th,” Tillis told reporters at the Capitol. (Basically, he was cool with Martin being a U.S. Attorney for any district except the one where January 6th went down. Go figure.)
Trump, who usually isn’t shy about playing hardball when things don’t go his way, surprisingly didn’t throw any threats Tillis’ way. “I’m bummed out,” Trump said. “But I’ve got so much stuff on my plate now with trade. I’m just one person. How many times can I dial that little phone in a day?” When I chatted with Tami Perryman, whose husband got locked up for three years for assaulting a cop during the riot, she was pretty stoked about seeing a prosecutor cry after getting canned in Martin’s purge. “It’s not often that someone takes a stand for what’s right, and that’s what Martin did,” she said. But that was just the beginning, according to her. “J6 ain’t over with those pardons,” Perryman insisted. “We want a real investigation. They came for us, and all the shady stuff needs to come to light. I need to see some action.”
Trump has been making some major moves during the first few months of his term, but the MAGA originalists are still worried about the deep state messing with them and wonder about staying true to the movement’s core beliefs. Before Martin’s confirmation hearing, J6 defendants were passing around a list of broken promises. “Epstein list in their hands—no arrests. DOGE pointing out fraud/abuse—no arrests. Clinton caught red-handed with the Russian hoax—no arrests. When are we gonna see some accountability?” they asked. “They’re at it again because you let them off easy last time.” Right after Trump won re-election, Mike Davis, the guy behind the Article III Project, a constitutionalist judicial group, said he wanted to drag the Democrats’ dead bodies through the streets, burn them, and toss them off a wall. (He even brought up the idea of “gulags” for journalists.) Kash Patel, Trump’s F.B.I. director, listed out his enemies in an appendix to his book “Government Gangsters” and vowed to go after them. Martin was the new hope for these folks, with the whole of D.C. under his thumb. “People saw Ed Martin as brave enough to go after corrupt actors in the federal government, Congress, N.G.O.s, defense contractors,” someone who worked in the first Trump Administration told me.
Martin’s supporters started to praise a version of the Presidency that was all about revenge for those who got locked up for Trump. “That’s Trump at his core,” a conservative lawyer in D.C. said. “January 6th and busting liberals is his top priority. But real Trumpism is dead.” (He did admit to a few wins, like the antitrust trial that could break up Meta and the tariffs slapped on countries worldwide.) Steve Bannon, still a MAGA icon, who spends hours each week talking about payback on his “War Room” podcast, said there needed to be more urgency in taking down the bad guys. We even talked about the recent arrest of Hannah Dugan, a judge in Wisconsin who got busted for allegedly helping an undocumented immigrant dodge the feds in her courtroom. She was paraded out in handcuffs. “That’s what I voted for,” Bannon said. He wanted to see a lot more of that. “We haven’t even gotten started on the hard work,” he said. “We’re wasting time.”
In recent months, on Capitol Hill, the Republican-controlled Congress has bent over backward time and again to support the President with little pushback. “I don’t care what Trump does, ‘cause I trust Trump,” Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, once said. But not getting Martin into a committee hearing seemed like a turning point, revealing the fractures and tensions within the legislative branch. “It’s like there’s a low-key Civil War happening within the Republican Party,” the ex-Trump Administration worker told me. “Only a few Senate Republicans are really riding with Trump.”
Other Trump supporters weren’t as worried. A government lawyer in D.C. who digs MAGA pointed out that a big chunk of Martin’s time in charge was spent writing threatening letters to Congress members, which got shared all over the web. “People don’t seem to get the diff between being politically loyal and being good at the job,” he said. “I think that’s a big issue for the Trump movement right now—how much folks talk up their love for the cause versus how well they put it into action.” Getting real results on the important stuff would need the U.S. Attorney for D.C. to be seen as legit. The lawyer had a different idea of payback, like taking down federal agencies through deregulation or exposing dark money—not just parading Trump’s enemies in cuffs for the cameras.
Another conservative lawyer put it like this: “There are some serious deep-state problems, but it’s prob better not to have someone who’s that much of a clown in charge.” He added, “The Dems’ prosecutions were political, but at least they tried to make it look fair.” And any cases brought by the U.S. Attorney in D.C. that went to trial would face a heavily Democratic jury. “It’s a waste of time,” he said. “They don’t get how the law is supposed to work.” The MAGA faithful wanted to take down the norms and systems they saw as rigged against them, but nabbing a D.C. judge wasn’t gonna cut it. Bannon thought differently. He wanted to see District Court Judge Beryl Howell, who presided over January 6th cases and axed Trump’s executive order targeting Perkins Coie, in cuffs. “That’ll shake up the fancy legal and political crowd running this city,” he told me. To him, it was more than just a symbol—he thought a left-leaning D.C. jury might actually convict her if they saw how deep the corruption ran. “You gotta shake things up, and that hasn’t happened yet. Ed Martin was starting to do that, and they lost it.”
Then, on Thursday night, Trump said Jeanine Pirro, the Fox News host, would take over for Martin. (Martin got moved to the Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group.) Pirro used to be a district attorney in Westchester County and was even considered to run the Eastern District of New York in 2016. She’s known for her tough justice act on TV and her reality show “Judge Jeanine Pirro.” “She’s perfect for the role, with that fighting spirit,” Bannon said. Losing Martin might’ve led to an even better replacement, in his eyes. (“Hope they enjoy Judge Jeanine,” Jack Posobiec, the MAGA diehard, told me, giving a wink to the G.O.P. senators who tried to hem in Martin.)
Trump made Pirro an acting U.S. Attorney for a hundred and twenty days without Senate approval, swapping one interim big shot for another. It might get tricky to run things without his own party’s backing; defendants in Washington could challenge their prosecution, and the courts could shut down some actions since Pirro wasn’t officially appointed. But it’s easy to see Trump picking a new U.S. Attorney every four months from a crew of loyalists, letting them run wild without worrying about a confirmation hearing. “Just picture if he picks me,” Mike Davis wrote on X. “My seventeen weeks of terror. No mercy.”
