US Attorney Ed Martin Undermines DOJ Defense While Cosplaying As President’s Personal Counsel
from the not-how-any-of-this-works dept
Last Friday brought two seemingly unrelated stories: the Associated Press suing White House officials over retaliatory press access restrictions, and Trump’s interim DC US Attorney Ed Martin launching what appears to be a personal intimidation campaign against Trump/Musk political rivals — precisely the kind of unconstitutional “lawfare” that Trump and Musk themselves have previously denounced.
On Monday, those two stories converged. Martin put out a bizarre tweet:
If you’re unable to read the image embedded in the tweet, it reads:
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.
There are so many problems in so few words. First of all, there’s the grammatical error. Saying that he’s “President Trumps’ lawyers” suggests there are multiple President Trumps that he works for.
But the more alarming issue is Martin’s fundamental misunderstanding — or deliberate misrepresentation — of his role. As US Attorney, he serves not as the President’s personal counsel, but as a representative of the American people, bound by oath to defend the Constitution rather than any individual officeholder. This is so obvious and so blatant, that even Community Notes dinged Martin for this:
His tweet isn’t just grammatically incorrect — it’s constitutionally incoherent. By explicitly threatening the AP for “refusing to put America first,” Martin has essentially provided written confirmation that the Justice Department intends to use its power to punish protected speech. Even while his office defends White House officials in this case, their mandate remains defending the Constitution — not “protecting the leadership” or targeting news organizations for their editorial choices.
And while a judge refused to grant an immediate temporary restraining order against the Trump administration here, the judge did make it pretty clear that this appears to violate the First Amendment, and that the administration should reconsider its position:
McFadden said the AP had not proven harm requiring an immediate restraining order. But he cautioned the White House that the law wasn’t on its side in barring AP over continuing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico, not simply the “Gulf of America” as Trump decreed in an executive order.
“It seems pretty clearly viewpoint discrimination,” McFadden told Brian Hudak, a government attorney.
And, in case you’re wondering, Judge McFadden is a Trump appointee. And he seems to recognize how clearly this violates the First Amendment:
Later, though, in an exchange with Hudak, he said “The White House has accepted the correspondents’ association to be the referee here, and has just discriminated against one organization. That does seem problematic.”
Martin’s reckless tweets have now effectively sandbagged his own Justice Department colleagues defending the case. But perhaps that hardly matters when Trump himself continues to broadcast the retaliatory nature of his actions, declaring that “We’re going to keep them out until such time as they agree that it’s the Gulf of America” and dismissing the AP as “radical left lunatics.”
The irony here is impossible to ignore. While self-proclaimed free speech warriors spent months breathlessly parsing the “Twitter Files” and amplifying unproven claims about Biden administration “censorship,” we now have senior government officials openly declaring — on social media, no less — their intent to punish a news organization for its editorial choices. The same voices that detected shadowy government censorship in every content moderation decision have fallen conspicuously silent when faced with explicit, documented proof of First Amendment violations. It seems their concerns about government overreach were somewhat… selective.
Perhaps this shouldn’t surprise us. When your primary concern is scoring partisan points rather than protecting constitutional principles, it’s easy to overlook even the most blatant First Amendment violations — as long as they’re coming from your team. But the Constitution doesn’t care about partisan affiliations, and neither should those who claim to defend it.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, doj, donald trump, ed martin, free speech, retaliation
Companies: associated press
Comments on “US Attorney Ed Martin Undermines DOJ Defense While Cosplaying As President’s Personal Counsel”
Note the direct association of “putting America first” with the act of adhering to a presidential executive order that can only apply to government employees. Sycophantry to authoritarianism is both ugly and stupid.
Re: Oh cool, it gets worse!
“Putting America first” in this instance refers to an executive order signed by Donald Trump. The statement thus implies that America and Donald Trump are one and the same. That, too, is directly out of the authoritarian playbook.
Re:
MAGA bending over backwards to lick the anal warts of a fat, silver-spoon bitch boy tells me everything I ever thought about them was true.
Once more, with feeling: Hypocrisy is a virtue to fascists. They’ll whine all day long that being punished by a social media service for violating its TOS is “censorship” (it isn’t), but stay silent about whether a situation like this—where the government is testing the limits of the Constitution by targeting speech the government doesn’t like for punishment and seeing how much they can get away with—qualifies as censorship.
Re:
Still nice to have it documented, and to occasionally be reminded of it, lest we lose ourselves and start to believe conservatives occasionally act in good faith.
Re: Re:
It’s not us we should be worried about. It’s the majority of the electorate who are beyond hope.
Re: Not quite:
It is not a virtue but a side effect. When you are dealing with people not interested in Making America Great Again, they need to follow a set of rules for achieving that goal by and large. But when you are sure in your heart about what it means to be a great citizen, laws are a distraction that just serves to make lives more secure for evildoers and the Deep State.
So it makes perfect sense not to make yourself reliant on them when you know what is right.
Which is kind of the definition of hypocrisy, so there is nothing to worry about being a flaming hypocrite. It is just another sign that it is you who is being right here.
Something like that. You need to be in the zone to get it, but for that there is X, Breitbart, a bit of Fox and others.
They'll be hoisted with their own petard...
Resist. Keep them talking. The more they say, the better.
It seems their concerns about government overreach were somewhat… selective
That is a very generous view of what they were concerned about. I would wager that the majority of people in political positions knew there wasn’t overreach. They just knew they could leverage this to their advantage.
Multiple Trumps
But there are multiple Trumps. One’s named Don, the other’s Elon. Glad I could clear that up.
Bending over backwards to avoid going against the Dear Leader
“It seems pretty clearly viewpoint discrimination,” McFadden told Brian Hudak, a government attorney.
A statement like that and they still didn’t rule against the government by granting the requested restraining order, gotta say that does not give me high confidence that they’ll ultimately rule in favor of the plaintiffs as if current and ongoing first amendment violations aren’t considered a sufficient showing of harm then I’m not sure what would or even could be.
If Trump actually gave a fuck about putting America first, he wouldn’t even be in office, nevermind engaging in all of the damaging bullshit he’s been up to.
And there’s no Gulf of America. Most of it is either part of Mexico or international waters. We get about 20 miles of coastal shelf to mm rename and it still takes more than an EO to do it.