On Friday, Ed Martin, the interim head of the federal prosecutor’s office in Washington, fired around 30 government attorneys who had been hired to work on January 6 cases.
In an email on Friday announcing the dismissals — one of a string of missives at all hours sent in the early days of the administration — Martin cited an attached memo from acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove offering up a legal justification for the firings.
Martin highlighted language in the memo that widened a Trump administration investigation into January 6 charges to include how the January 6 prosecutors were hired and instructed employees of the Justice Department office to hang onto potential evidence.
“Finally, the circumstances of the conversions are the subject of an ongoing inquiry at the Justice Department including pursuant to President Trump’s January 20, 2025 Executive Order entitled, ‘Ending The Weaponization Of The Federal Government,’” said the section of Bove’s memo cited by Martin. “Please take all steps necessary to preserve all records, including documents, emails, text messages, and other electronic communications, relating to the conversions and other personnel decisions regarding attorneys hired to support casework relating to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
The firings may appear to be the culmination of a yearslong effort by Martin, a “Stop the Steal” organizer, to advocate for the January 6 defendants. In addition to calling for charges to be dropped, Martin helped lead a group that fundraised for the defendants. (Martin did not respond to mulitple requests for comment.)
The inquiry indicates that the terminations, however, aren’t the end of Martin’s campaign. He has also called for cash reparations for January 6 defendants and — ominously, for the subjects of the investigation — demanded jail time for those responsible for bringing the charges in the first place.
“We have to find & throw in jail the person in Biden’s Administration who ordered the 1512(c) prosecutions of peaceful J6 defendants,” he tweeted in December 2023, referring to a statute used in many January 6 cases.
During a June 2024 podcast episode, Martin said the upcoming election was crucial to ensuring hundreds of Democrats would be jailed for their conduct regarding January 6 prosecutions.
“These people that perpetrated these sets of lies, they used their government office to do it, and that’s against the law,” he said. “And there needs to be accountability.”
For years, Martin’s advocacy for January 6 defendants has centered on D.C. federal prosecutors’ use of 18 U.S. Code 1512(c)(2), a statute that comes with a maximum 20-year prison sentence for anyone who “obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.”
In June, the Supreme Court ruled the cases were outside the scope of the statute. In an internal memo to staff sent on January 27, which was obtained by The Intercept and previously reported on by CNN, Martin referred to his investigation into prosecutors’ use of 1512 as a “special project.” “Obviously, the use was a great failure of our office – S. Ct. decision – and we need to get to the bottom of it,” Martin wrote in the memo.
Martin asked for all information surrounding the cases and the decisions behind them, including involvement from people who had already left the office.
Martin — who once resigned as the Missouri governor’s chief of staff amid controversy spurred by, among other things, his deletion of emails to avoid public records requests — reminded employees to compile all records of their involvement in using 1512.
“Please be proactive – if you have nothing, tell the co-chairs,” he wrote, referering to the officials he’d named to lead the investigation into the use of 1512. “Failure to do so strikes me as insubordinate.”
Until recently, Martin served on the board of the Patriot Freedom Project, a group that raised money and provided legal defense for January 6 defendants. An online archive of the group’s website lists Martin as a board member as recently as January 29.
Patriot Freedom Project’s site pushes conspiracy theories, sells January 6-related merchandise, and features a database of defendants, with links to their fundraising platforms and information on which prison they were in. Shortly after the 2024 election, the Gettr account for the group reposted a status saying: “All January 6 prosecutors should be removed. YOU’RE FIRED!”
For members and supporters of the Patriot Freedom Project, the January 6 defendants are heroes. Martin has said that those who participated in the Capitol riot should be lionized, not condemned.
Martin explained in a June 2024 episode of the Tea Party Power Hour podcast that January 6 defendants should be “actually revered.” He said he hopes in the future that they will be recognized as “a pawn in a bitter struggle between forces of darkness for our country, and therefore we will remember you with a certain fondness. And we help you get jobs, and we help your kids go to college, and we help your family recover.”
“I want reparations for the January 6 defendants. They were pawns of a government scheme,” Martin continued. “I think that these families should be protected, they should be honored.”
By that point, Martin had spent months advocating for compensation for January 6 defendants.
“I have finally come around to reparations,” Martin said in another podcast on January 2024. “I believe that everyone who has been targeted on January 6, they should get a big pot of money, like the asbestos money we got for asbestos victims.”
Martin has suggested the rioters were pushed to violence by the state, thus absolving them of their actions.
A year before Trump’s reelection, Martin vowed to keep fighting for the January 6 defendants even if they were pardoned.
“I’m not quitting when we get pardons for everybody,” Martin said on a November 2023 podcast. “We gotta be here for the long haul for these families that got really, really mistreated.”
Martin added that no one in U.S. history had been so mistreated “since probably the Civil War,” when soldiers did not receive regular paychecks.
