This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

After a fight with a Black student in a St. Louis suburb left a white student badly injured in March 2024, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey blamed their school district for unsafe conditions, even though the incident occurred after classes and more than a half-mile from campus.

Bailey seized on the fight as evidence of what he called the Hazelwood School District’s misplaced priorities. He sent a letter to the superintendent demanding documents on the district’s diversity policies and accused leaders of “prioritizing race-based policies over basic student safety.” Bailey argued that the district’s dispute with local police departments over its requirement that officers participate in diversity training — an impasse that resulted in some departments leaving schools without resource officers — had left students vulnerable.

In response, the school board’s attorney said Bailey had misrepresented basic facts: The district employed dozens of security guards at schools where it could not assign resource officers, and even if it did have police officers stationed at the school, those officers would not have handled an after-hours, off-campus fight. Finally, police found no evidence that race played a role in the fight.

The attorney general’s office took no further action.

“He was just trying to get attention,” said school board President Sylvester Taylor II.

The legal skirmish was the kind of publicity-getting move that defined Bailey’s two years and eight months as Missouri’s attorney general before his surprise selection last month by President Donald Trump as a co-deputy director of the FBI, according to experts who study the work of attorneys general.

As Missouri’s top law enforcement officer, Bailey repeatedly waded into fights over diversity, gender, abortion and other hot-button issues, while casting conservatives and Christians as under siege by the “woke” left.

Bailey had pledged at the start of his tenure in early 2023 not to use the state’s open public records law “as an offensive tool” to demand bulk records from school districts in broad investigations — a tactic used by his predecessor, Eric Schmitt, now a U.S. senator. Still, he made frequent use of cease-and-desist letters, warning school districts that their diversity initiatives or handling of gender and sex-education issues violated the law.

Some efforts, like his letter to the Hazelwood School District, amounted to little more than a press release. Others ended in defeat, with judges calling his arguments unpersuasive or “absurd” or, in one case, dismissing them without comment. One lawsuit, against China, ended in a judgment against the country that experts said will likely never be enforced.

Bailey, who was sworn in to the FBI position on Sept. 15, did not respond to messages left with the FBI’s press office and with James Lawson, a longtime friend who managed his attorney general campaign and served in various roles on his staff.

Bailey’s actions as attorney general, according to legal observers, stood apart from the office’s core, nonpolitical duties: defending the state against lawsuits and handling felony criminal appeals. That work, by most accounts, continued as usual.

His Republican predecessors, Schmitt and, before him, Josh Hawley, also used the position to advance conservative causes, wage fights against progressive ones and raise their national profiles.

During his stint as attorney general, Hawley — like Schmitt now in the U.S. Senate — delivered a speech in which he claimed the elimination of social stigmas to premarital sex and contraception during the 1960s had degraded the treatment of women and promoted sex trafficking. And he fought to uphold state restrictions that threatened to shut down Planned Parenthood clinics four years before Missouri’s near-total abortion ban took effect after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

Schmitt was named to succeed Hawley in November 2018. During his four years in office, he defended Christian prayer in public schools and sued several local school districts that had enforced mask requirements during the pandemic.

In 2022, he joined a small group of conservative attorneys general in withdrawing from the National Association of Attorneys General, a bipartisan group that had long coordinated multistate investigations in cases against industries ranging from tobacco to opioids. In a letter posted to the social media platform now known as X, Schmitt joined Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen in arguing that NAAG had taken a sharp “leftward shift” and that continued membership was intolerable. Neither Hawley nor Schmitt, through their spokespeople, responded to requests for comment.

Chris Toth, the executive director of NAAG who retired from the organization weeks after the letter became public, said in an interview that the claims in the letter were “completely unsupported by facts.” Republicans, he added, were involved “in every facet of the organization.”

The move reflected a broader shift in how many attorneys general now use their offices — not only to defend their states in court, but to score political points on the national stage. Few have embodied that strategy more than Paxton, who has often been described as focusing on culture war issues as attorney general.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have reported how Paxton has transformed the attorney general’s office into an agency that seems less focused on traditional duties like representing other state offices in court to one preoccupied with fighting culture wars. His office has increasingly used the state’s powerful consumer protection laws to investigate organizations whose work conflicts with his political views. At the same, he’s started increasingly outsourcing major cases to private law firms.

Paxton’s office has said most of the instances when it declined to represent a state agency were due to practical or legal limits — some agencies chose their own attorneys; others were barred by statute. He’s also argued that certain cases would have required reversing earlier positions or advancing claims he viewed as unconstitutional. He’s defended hiring outside law firms, saying his office lacks the resources to take on powerful industries like tech and pharmaceuticals. Paxton did not respond to a request for comment.

Bailey, though far less prominent nationally, fit squarely within this mold. Before leaving for the FBI, he spoke openly about protecting Missourians from what he called “woke” ideology and lawlessness from the left.

A former U.S. Army officer, he has often framed his mission in combat terms. In a podcast interview this year, he said that while conservative states generally try to limit the power of their attorneys general to “maximize freedom,” blue states have weaponized their offices.

“I mean, Letitia James in New York has every weapon in her arsenal that her general assembly can give her,” he said in the podcast interview. He said she uses them “to mess with people’s lives, to prosecute President Trump, take him to court in civil law to try to seize his assets and undervalue those assets.”

“Missouri is uniquely positioned because we were so recently a blue state,” he said, “so it’s like a retreating army has left the battlefield and dropped their weapons and we’re picking them up and learning how to use them against them.”

A spokesperson for James’ office said that “any weaponization of the justice system should disturb every American” and that it stood behind its litigation against Trump’s business and would continue to stand up for New Yorkers’ rights.

Bailey said in the podcast interview that he supported all efforts to investigate President Joe Biden, his family and his administration, and to uncover what Bailey called the truth behind the COVID-19 vaccine, which he said “seems to not be a vaccine at all.”

Bailey used his office to investigate the nonprofit media watchdog Media Matters for America after it reported that corporate ads were appearing next to extremist content on the social media platform X.

Stephen Miller, a top aide to Trump in his first administration, posted that conservative state attorneys general should investigate; Bailey quickly responded that his team was “looking into the matter.” Weeks later, he issued a “notice of pending investigation” to Media Matters and ordered it to preserve records. He later accused the group of using fraud to solicit donations from Missourians to bully advertisers out of pulling out of X, and demanded internal records and donor information under Missouri’s consumer protection law. In a June 2024 interview with Donald Trump Jr., Bailey described the probe as “a new front in the war against the First Amendment” and tied it directly to the 2024 election, accusing Media Matters of trying to silence conservative voices.

Media Matters sued and a federal judge blocked the investigation as likely retaliatory. In early 2025, Bailey dropped the case in a settlement and said he had not found evidence of financial or other misconduct by Media Matters. The organization did not respond to a request for comment.

When Trump was awaiting sentencing after being convicted in a New York court of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn star, Bailey asked the U.S. Supreme Court to lift a gag order on the former president and delay his sentencing until after the 2024 election, arguing the restrictions kept Missouri voters from hearing Trump’s message. The Supreme Court rejected his request in an unsigned one-page order without explanation. A New York judge later postponed the sentencing until after the election, writing that he wanted to avoid the appearance, however unwarranted, of political influence.

Trump could have faced up to four years in prison, but a judge issued an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction in place but sparing him any penalty or fine. Trump said the conviction was a “very terrible experience” and an embarrassment to New York. He is appealing.

Bailey also fought to keep a woman in prison even after a state court judge declared her innocent. Even after the state Supreme Court ordered her release, Bailey’s office told the prison warden to ignore the court’s order. A state court overseeing the case scolded Bailey’s office in a hearing, saying, “I would suggest you never do that.”

Legal experts and other observers of the office said state attorneys general traditionally didn’t act primarily as partisan warriors. Most were focused on defending the state in court and protecting consumers.

Scott Holste, who served as a spokesperson for Jay Nixon, a moderate Democrat who served as the Missouri attorney general from 1993 to 2009, recalls a starkly different approach from Bailey’s. For example, in late September 2008, the top headlines on Nixon’s website focused on robocall rules, lawsuits over mortgage fraud and consumer tips for students.

“We were stridently apolitical in our news releases and in the way we operated,” Holste said. “Our job was to serve all Missourians, not to make political points.”

In the days before the August 2024 Republican primary, two of the three stories featured on Bailey’s homepage targeted the Biden administration over immigration and protections for LGBTQ+ students. The third highlighted a consumer-fraud prosecution.

To his supporters, Bailey is fulfilling campaign promises — a conservative acting like a conservative, said state Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson.

Voters see a leader defending their freedoms by fighting policies such as diversity and equity, which they often equate with racism, and mask mandates, which they view as government overreach, Seitz said. “And,” he added, “we have a populist president who appreciates that.”

Toth, the retired head of the national AGs association, traced the shift in how state attorneys general act to the 1998 multistate settlement with the tobacco industry, when nearly every state joined a landmark deal that required cigarette makers to pay more than $200 billion, curb advertising aimed at children and fund anti-smoking campaigns. It also showed attorneys general how much power they could wield.

Over time, the newfound power has raised the profile of attorney general offices across the country, turning them into a springboard for higher office. That higher profile has fueled politicization.

Democratic attorneys general are no strangers to using their offices to fight political battles. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, for example, has filed numerous lawsuits challenging policies of the Trump administration on immigration, environmental regulations and federal funding. While Bonta maintained these suits were based on the law, critics characterized the coordinated legal action as politically motivated resistance.

Dan Ponder, a political science professor at Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, said that as the state has shifted to the right, the GOP primary, rather than the general election, is now the real contest for statewide office.

He pointed to actions such as Schmitt opposing critical race theory and reviewing public school textbooks. “That would have been unheard of 20 years ago,” Ponder said, “but now you can’t lose because you’re fighting the quote-unquote good fight.”

Peverill Squire, a political science professor at the University of Missouri, said that from the time of Bailey’s appointment to the position in January 2023, he probably had only two audiences. The first were voters he needed to defeat Will Scharf, a candidate already in Trump’s orbit, in the 2024 Republican primary for attorney general.

“And then once he secured his election, then I think his audience was really Trump,” Squire said.

Former Missouri Republican Party Chair John Hancock said voters seemed to reward Bailey’s approach. Bailey got nearly as many votes as Trump and Gov. Mike Kehoe in the 2024 general election — and more than Hawley or any of the Republicans who won the offices of lieutenant governor, treasurer or secretary of state.

“So obviously the work he was doing in that office was supported,” Hancock said. “I don’t take terrible shock when politicians do political things.”

Kehoe has appointed Catherine Hanaway, a former Missouri House speaker and U.S. attorney, to succeed Bailey as attorney general. Hanaway has said she intends to run the office in a different style. She told the Missouri Independent she had more interest in Medicaid fraud, consumer protection and violent crimes.

Her office said she was not available for an interview with ProPublica.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

The attacks on Judge John Barberis in the fall of 2016 appeared on his personal Facebook page. They impugned his ethics, criticized a recent ruling and branded him as a “politician” with the “LOWEST rating for a judge in Illinois.”

Barberis, a state court judge in an Illinois county across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, was presiding over a nasty legal battle for control over the Eagle Forum, the vaunted grassroots group founded by Phyllis Schlafly, matriarch of the anti-feminist movement. The case pitted Schlafly’s youngest daughter against three of her sons, almost like a Midwest version of the HBO program “Succession” (without the obscenities).

At the heart of the dispute — and the lead defendant in the case — was Ed Martin, a lawyer by training and a political operative by trade. In Missouri, where he was based, Martin was widely known as an irrepressible gadfly who trafficked in incendiary claims and trailed controversy wherever he went. Today, he’s the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., and one of the most prominent members of the Trump Justice Department.

In early 2015, Schlafly had selected Martin to succeed her as head of the Eagle Forum, a crowning moment in Martin’s career. Yet after just a year in charge, the group’s board fired Martin. Schlafly’s youngest daughter, Anne Schlafly Cori, and a majority of the Eagle Forum board filed a lawsuit to bar Martin from any association with the organization.

After Barberis dealt Martin a major setback in the case in October 2016, the attacks began. The Facebook user who posted them, Priscilla Gray, had worked in several roles for Schlafly but was not a party to the case, and her comments read like those of an aggrieved outsider.

Almost two years later, the truth emerged as Cori’s lawyers gathered evidence for her lawsuit: Behind the posts about the judge was none other than Martin.

ProPublica obtained previously unreported documents filed in the case that show Martin had bought a laptop for Gray and that she subsequently offered to “happily write something to attack this judge.” And when she did, Martin ghostwrote more posts for her to use and coached her on how to make her comments look more “organic.”

“That is not justice but a rigged system,” he urged her to write. “Shame on you and this broken legal system.”

“Call what he did unfair and rigged over and over,” Martin continued.

Martin even urged Gray to message the judge privately. “Go slow and steady,” he advised. “Make it organic.”

Gray appeared to take Martin’s advice. “Private messaging him that sweet line,” she wrote. It was not clear from the court record what, if anything, she wrote at that juncture.

Legal experts told ProPublica that Martin’s conduct in the Eagle Forum case was a clear violation of ethical norms and professional rules. Martin’s behavior, they said, was especially egregious because he was both a defendant in the case and a licensed attorney.

Martin appeared to be “deliberately interfering with a judicial proceeding with the intent to undermine the integrity of the outcome,” said Scott Cummings, a professor of legal ethics at UCLA School of Law. “That’s not OK.”

Martin did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Martin’s legal and political career is dotted with questions about his professional and ethical conduct. But for all his years in the spotlight, some of the most serious concerns about his conduct have remained in the shadows — buried in court filings, overlooked by the press or never reported at all.

His actions have led to more than $600,000 in legal settlements or judgments against Martin or his employers in a handful of cases. In the Eagle Forum lawsuit, another judge found him in civil contempt, citing his “willful disregard” of a court order, and a jury found him liable for defamation and false light against Cori.

Cori also tried to have Martin charged with criminal contempt for his role in orchestrating the posts about Barberis, but a judge declined to take up the request and said she could take the case to the county prosecutor. Cori said her attorney met with a detective; Martin was never charged.

Nonetheless, the emails unearthed by ProPublica were evidence that he had violated Missouri rules for lawyers, according to Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics expert and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She said lawyers are prohibited from trying to contact a judge outside of court in a case they are involved in, and they are barred from using a proxy to do something they are barred from doing themselves.

Such a track record might have derailed another lawyer’s career. Not so for Martin.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump vowed to use the Justice Department to reward his allies and seek retribution against his perceived enemies. Since taking office, Trump and his appointees have made good on those pledges, pardoning Jan. 6 rioters while targeting Democratic politicians, media critics and private law firms.

As one of its first personnel picks, the Trump administration chose Martin to be interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, one of the premier jobs for a federal prosecutor.

A wide array of former prosecutors, legal observers and others have raised questions about his qualifications for an office known for handling high-profile cases. Martin has no experience as a prosecutor. He has never taken a case to trial, according to his public disclosures. As the acting leader of the largest U.S. attorney’s office in the country, he directs the work of hundreds of lawyers who appear in court on a vast array of subjects, including legal disputes arising out of Congress, national security matters, public corruption and civil rights, as well as homicides, drug trafficking and many other local crimes.

Over the last four years, the office prosecuted more than 1,500 people as part of the massive investigation into the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While Trump has pardoned the Jan. 6 defendants, Martin has taken action against the prosecutors who brought those cases. In just three months, he has overseen the dismissal of outstanding Jan. 6-related cases, fired more than a dozen prosecutors and opened an investigation into the charging decisions made in those riot cases.

Martin has also investigated Democratic lawmakers and members of the Biden family; forced out the chief of the criminal division after she refused to initiate an investigation desired by Trump appointees citing a lack of evidence, according to her resignation letter; threatened Georgetown University’s law school over its diversity, equity and inclusion policies; and vowed to investigate threats against Department of Government Efficiency employees or “chase” people in the federal government “discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically.”

Martin “has butchered the position, effectively destroying it as a vehicle by which to pursue justice and turning it into a political arm of the current administration,” says an open letter signed by more than 100 former prosecutors who worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia under Democratic and Republican presidents.

Already, Martin has been the subject of at least four disciplinary complaints with the D.C. and Missouri bars, of which one was dismissed and the other three appear to be pending. Two of the complaints came after he moved to dismiss charges against a Jan. 6 rioter whom he had previously represented and for whom he was still listed as counsel of record. (The first complaint was dismissed after the D.C. bar’s disciplinary panel concluded that Martin had dismissed the case as a result of Trump’s pardons and so did not violate any rules.) The third was filed in March by a group of Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. Senate. The fourth was submitted last week by a group of former Jan. 6 prosecutors and members of the conservative-leaning Society for the Rule of Law. It argues that Martin’s actions so far “threaten to undermine the integrity of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the legal profession in the District of Columbia.” If Martin has responded to any of the complaints, those responses have not been made public.

Trump has nominated Martin to run the office permanently. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have vowed to drag out Martin’s confirmation, demanding a hearing and setting up a fight over one of Trump’s most controversial nominees.

Martin stepped off the elevator into the newsroom of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. He was angry at a reporter named Jo Mannies, one of the city’s top political journalists. At a conference table with Mannies and her senior editors, he accused Mannies of being unethical and pressed the paper’s leadership to spike her stories about him, according to interviews.

Mannies said later she believed he was trying to get her fired.

“He was attacking her,” said Pam Maples, who was managing editor at the time. “He was implying she had an ax to grind, that she wanted to get some big story and that she was not being ethical. And when that didn’t get traction, it was more like ‘this isn’t a story.’ It wasn’t that he said anything about a fact being inaccurate, or he wanted to retract a story; he wanted the reporting to stop.”

Mannies had been covering a scandal dubbed “Memogate” that started to unfold in 2007 while Martin was chief of staff to Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt. In that role, Martin was using his government email to undermine Democratic rivals and rally anti-abortion groups. But when reporters requested emails from Blunt’s staff, the governor’s office denied they existed. Media organizations joined a lawsuit to preserve the messages and recover them from backup tapes.

An attorney for the governor, Scott Eckersley, later said in a deposition that Martin tried to block the release of government emails and told employees to delete their messages. After Eckersley warned that doing so might violate state law, he was fired. He sued the state for wrongful termination and defamation and settled for $500,000. Martin resigned as chief of staff in 2007 after just over a year on the job, and Blunt’s office would eventually hand over 22 boxes of internal emails.

In a 2008 email to the Associated Press, Martin dismissed Eckersley’s lawsuit as a “desperate attempt” to revise his story after he was fired, citing Eckersley’s own testimony that not all emails are public records.

The Memogate incident was telling — and Martin’s efforts to have Mannies fired were never reported. “His claim was we were misrepresenting what the law was and what he was doing,” she told ProPublica. “I mean, he can get very hyper. He can get very emotional.”

When Martin launched a bid for Congress in 2010, he acted as if Memogate was ancient history. He made himself available to Mannies, she recalled, always taking her calls. Years later, he even appeared, lighthearted and bantering, on a St. Louis Public Radio podcast Mannies co-hosted. She said Martin could be outlandish and aggressive, but he could also be disarmingly passionate about whatever cause he was pursuing at the moment, often speaking in a frenetic rush. “He just wore people down with his enthusiasm,” she said.

Martin allowed a different St. Louis reporter to shadow him during his 2010 run for Congress. The reporter asked about the St. Louis election board, a dysfunctional organization that, by all accounts, Martin had helped turn around in the mid-2000s. Martin had fired an employee there named Jeanne Bergfeld, and she later sued for wrongful termination. The board settled the lawsuit.

As part of the settlement, Martin agreed not to talk about the case and the board paid Bergfeld $55,000. Martin and two others issued a letter saying she had been a “conscientious and dedicated professional.”

But talking to the reporter covering his campaign, Martin said Bergfeld enjoyed “not having to do anything” and “wasn’t interested in changing.” The day after the story was published, Bergfeld sued Martin again, this time for violating the settlement agreement. Martin denied making the comments, but the Riverfront Times released audio that proved he had.

Martin agreed to pay Bergfeld another $15,000 but delayed signing the settlement for a few months. The judge then ordered Martin to pay some of her legal costs, citing his “obstinacy.”

Martin lost his 2010 congressional bid. He ran for Missouri attorney general two years later and lost again. After his stint as chair of the Missouri Republican Party, he went to work as Schlafly’s right-hand man. Martin grew so attached to Schlafly that a lawyer for the Eagle Forum jokingly called him “Ed Martin Schlafly.”

As the 2016 presidential campaign ramped up, Martin supported Trump even though Eagle Forum board members, including Cori, supported Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. Cori described Trump at the time as an “egomaniacal dictator.” (Today, she said she supports him.) Cori and other board members were stunned when Schlafly endorsed Trump, with Martin standing by her side.

A few weeks later, a majority of the Eagle Forum’s board voted to oust Martin as president; a lawsuit filed by the board cited mismanagement and poor leadership and described his tenure as “deplorable.” Martin has maintained that he was Schlafly’s “hand-picked successor” and has characterized his removal as a hostile takeover.

“Every day, they are diminishing the reputation and value of Phyllis,” he said in a 2017 statement. She died in September 2016.

Cori and the board’s lawsuit sought to enforce Martin’s removal and demand an accounting of the forum’s assets. That’s the case that wound up before Barberis.

On top of his efforts to direct Gray’s posts on Barberis’ Facebook page, Martin prepared a separate statement, according to previously unreported records from the case. The statement called Barberis’ ruling to remove him as Eagle Forum president “judicial activism at its worst” that “shows what happens when the law is undermined by judges who think they can do whatever they want.”

Martin emailed the statement, which said it was from “Bruce Schlafly, M.D.” — the name of one of Schlafly’s sons — to himself, then sent it to two of her other sons, John and Andy, court filings show. Martin said the statement was a “declaration of war” and urged the Schlaflys to “put something like this out to our biggest list.” (It’s unclear if the message was ever sent.) Bruce Schlafly did not respond to requests for comment.

In a 2019 sworn deposition, Cori’s lawyer asked Martin questions about the posts on Barberis’ Facebook page and the letter he drafted for Bruce Schlafly. Because of the possibility that he could be charged with criminal contempt of court, Martin declined to comment, on the advice of his own lawyer, though he acknowledged that lawyers are barred from communicating with judges outside of court or engaging in conduct meant to disrupt proceedings.

Andy Schlafly, a lawyer and former Eagle Forum board member who supported Martin in the leadership fight, said “no court has ever sanctioned Ed for his engagement of First Amendment advocacy” and likened the controversy to liberal attacks on conservative judges. He dismissed concerns about Martin directing Gray to contact the judge, saying she “speaks for herself” and had every right to voice her outrage. He compared Martin’s style — then and now — to Trump’s. He said he did not believe the email Martin drafted for his brother Bruce had ever been sent, but if it had been, it would have been no different from Trump posting on Truth Social, which he considered normal behavior in political battles.

“What would Trump do in that position?” Andy Schlafly said of Martin’s current role in Washington. “I would say Trump would be doing just what Ed’s doing. Elections do have consequences.”

Gray declined to comment. She was not part of the lawsuit.

When Cori’s lawyers uncovered the emails, they asked a new judge, David Dugan — who had taken over the case after Barberis was elected to a higher court — why Martin should not be held in criminal contempt for “an underhanded scheme” to “attack the integrity and authority” of the court with the Facebook comments about Barberis, according to court records.

Dugan declined to take up the criminal contempt motion. But he later found Martin and John Schlafly in civil contempt of court for having interfered with Eagle Forum after Barberis had removed them from the group. John Schlafly appealed the contempt finding and mostly lost. He did not respond to requests for comment. It’s unclear if Martin appealed.

Cori told ProPublica she also filed an ethics complaint against Martin with the Missouri Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel, which investigates ethics complaints against lawyers. She said she was told her complaint would have to wait until her lawsuit concluded. The office said it could neither confirm nor deny it had received a complaint.

In 2022, when part of Cori’s lawsuit went to trial, a jury found Martin liable for defaming her and casting her in a false light — including by sharing a Facebook post suggesting that she should be charged with manslaughter for her mother’s death. It awarded her $57,000 in damages and also found Martin liable for $25,500 against another Eagle Forum board member.

Martin argued that the statute of limitations had expired on the defamation claims and that many of his statements were either true or vague hyperbole not subject to proof. He also claimed he could not be held liable because he didn’t write the offending post — he had merely shared something written by someone else.

In a post-trial motion, he also leaned into protections that make it harder for public figures to win defamation cases. Under that higher legal standard, it’s not enough for a plaintiff to show that a statement was false. Cori also had to prove that Martin knew it was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth, and he said she didn’t prove it.

But while he’s wrapped himself in First Amendment protections when defending his own speech, he’s taken the opposite stance since being named interim U.S. attorney by Trump, threatening legal action against people when they criticize the administration.

For instance, after Rep. Robert Garcia called DOGE leader Elon Musk a “dick” and urged Democrats to “bring weapons” to a political fight, Martin sent Garcia a letter warning his comments could be seen as threats and demanding an explanation.

With the start of Trump’s first presidency, Martin and his family moved to the Northern Virginia suburbs near Washington, D.C. Martin had no formal role in the new administration, but he turned himself into one of the president’s most prolific and unfiltered surrogates.

CNN hired him in September 2017 to be a pro-Trump on-air commentator, only to fire him five months later after a string of controversial on-air remarks. He attacked a woman who had accused Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of molesting her as a child, praised Trump for denigrating Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas,” and described some of his CNN co-panelists as “rabid feminists” and “Black racists.”

Unbowed, Martin went on to make more than 150 appearances on the Russia Today TV channel and Sputnik radio, both Russian state-owned media outlets, first reported by The Washington Post. On RT and Sputnik, Martin railed against the “Russia hoax,” criticized the DOJ investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller and questioned American support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion by saying the U.S. was “wasting money in Kiev for Zelensky and his corrupt guys.” The State Department would later say RT and Sputnik were “critical elements in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.” The Treasury Department sanctioned RT employees in 2024. The DOJ indicted two RT employees for conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to fail to register as foreign agents.

Martin’s flair for fealty set him apart even from fellow Trump supporters. He cheered the Maine Republican Party for considering whether to censure Sen. Susan Collins for her vote to convict Trump during the second impeachment trial. He singled out Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska in a radio segment titled “America Needs to Go on a RINO Hunt.” He accused Sen. John Cornyn of going “soft” on gun rights after Cornyn endorsed a bipartisan gun-safety law after the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Martin joined the throngs of Trump supporters who marched in protest of the 2020 election outcome. He compared the scene that day to a Mardi Gras celebration and later said the prosecution of Jan. 6 defendants was “an op” orchestrated by former Rep. Liz Cheney and law enforcement agencies to “damage Trump and Trumpism.”

During an appearance on Russia Today, Martin said then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “weaponized” Congress’ response to the Jan. 6 riots by ramping up security on Capitol Hill, comparing her to the Nazis. “Not since the Reichstag fire that was engineered by the Nazis have we seen behavior like what Nancy Pelosi did,” he said.

As an attorney, he represented Jan. 6 defendants, helped raise money for their families and championed their cause. Last summer, Martin gave an award to a convicted Jan. 6 rioter named Timothy Hale-Cusanelli. According to court records, Hale-Cusanelli held “long-standing white supremacist and Nazi beliefs,” wore a “Hitler mustache” and allegedly told his co-workers that “Hitler should have finished the job.” (In court, Hale’s attorney said his client “makes no excuses for his derogatory language,” but the government’s description of him was “simply misleading.”)

After hugging and thanking Hale-Cusanelli at the ceremony, Martin told the audience that one of his goals was “to make sure that the world — and especially America — hears more from Tim Hale, because he’s extraordinary.”

In his three months as interim U.S. attorney for D.C., Martin has used his position to issue a series of threats. He’s vowed not to hire anyone affiliated with Georgetown Law unless the school drops any DEI policies. He vowed to Musk that he would “pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.” He publicly told former special counsel Jack Smith and Smith’s lawyers to “[s]ave your receipts.” And in another open letter addressed to Musk and Musk’s deputy, Martin wrote that “if people are discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them and we will chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable.”

More often than not, Martin’s threats have gone nowhere.

A month into the job, he announced “Operation Whirlwind,” an initiative to “hold accountable those who threaten” public officials, whether they’re DOGE workers or judges. One of the “most abhorrent examples” of such threats, he said, were Sen. Chuck Schumer’s 2020 remarks that conservative Supreme Court justices had “released the whirlwind” and would “pay the price” if they weakened abortion rights.

Even though Schumer walked back his incendiary comments the next day, Martin said he was investigating Schumer’s nearly 5-year-old remarks as part of Operation Whirlwind. Despite Martin’s bravado, the investigation went nowhere. No grand jury investigation was opened. No charges were filed. That the probe fizzled out came as little surprise. Legal experts said Schumer’s remarks, while ill advised, fell well short of criminal conduct.

In another instance, when one of Martin’s top deputies refused to open a criminal investigation into clean-energy grants issued by the Biden administration, Martin demanded the deputy’s resignation and advanced the investigation himself. When a subpoena arrived at one of the targeted environmental groups, Martin’s was the only name on it, according to documents obtained by ProPublica.

Kevin Flynn, a former federal prosecutor who served in the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office for 35 years, told ProPublica that he did not know of a single case in which the U.S. attorney was the sole authorizing official on a grand jury subpoena. Flynn said he could think of only two reasons why this could happen: The matter was of “such extraordinary sensitivity” that the office’s leader took exclusive control over it, or no other supervisor or line prosecutor was willing to sign off on the subpoena “out of concern that it wasn’t legally or ethically appropriate.”

And when the dispute between the environmental groups and the Justice Department reached a courtroom, federal Judge Tanya Chutkan asked a DOJ lawyer defending the administration’s actions for any evidence of possible crimes or violations — evidence, in other words, that could have justified the probe initiated by Martin. The DOJ lawyer said he had none. “You can’t even tell me what the evidence of malfeasance is,” Chutkan said. “There are still rules that even the government has to follow, last I checked.”

Martin’s tenure has caused so much consternation that in early April, Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., put a hold on Martin’s nomination. Typically, the Senate Judiciary Committee approves U.S. attorney picks by voice vote without a hearing. But in Martin’s case, all 10 Democrats on the committee have asked for a public hearing to debate the nomination, calling Martin “a nominee whose objectionable record merits heightened scrutiny by this Committee.”

Even the process of submitting the requisite paperwork for Senate confirmation has tripped him up. According to documents obtained by ProPublica, he has sent the Judiciary Committee three supplemental letters that correct omissions about his background. In an earlier submission, Martin did not disclose any of his appearances on Russian state-owned media. But just before The Washington Post reported that Martin had, in fact, made more than 150 such appearances, he sent yet another letter correcting his previous statements.

“I regret the errors and apologize for any inconvenience,” he wrote.