Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, was breezing toward the office elevator in his signature trench coat in February when he passed a group of about 10 young prosecutors preparing to leave, framed diplomas and keepsakes in hand.
“Whoa, what’s going on here?” Mr. Martin asked with a chuckle, seemingly oblivious to who they were and where they were going, according to people with knowledge of the exchange.
The lawyers were too stunned to speak. They had just been fired — part of a purge, overseen by Mr. Martin, of about two dozen prosecutors detailed during the Biden administration to prosecute the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
President Trump nominated Mr. Martin, a conservative Republican political operative from Missouri, to permanently run the U.S. attorney’s office in part because he has emerged as one of the most passionate defenders of Jan. 6 rioters, a small but vocal far-right group that wields outsize influence. Mr. Martin has, in turn, used his authority to help carry out Mr. Trump’s retribution campaign, threatening to investigate Democrats, academic institutions and critics of Elon Musk even while seeking to dismantle and delegitimize the Jan. 6 inquiry.
On Thursday, after an internal debate in the West Wing, Mr. Trump pulled his nomination, telling reporters at the White House, “We have somebody else that will be great.”
Mr. Martin’s fate was sealed on Tuesday when Senator Thom Tillis, a key Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said he would not support the nomination because of Mr. Martin’s work on behalf of the rioters. That dealt a fatal blow to his path to confirmation, leaving the committee deadlocked at 11 to 11, with all 10 Democrats on the panel opposing Mr. Martin. Republican leaders had said they would not take procedural steps to force a vote on the floor.
It is possible that Mr. Martin’s fall signals a limit to what Senate Republicans, who have rubber-stamped Trump nominees, are willing to accept. Mr. Trump’s approval ratings among key demographics have flagged in the past month, darkening the party’s prospects in the 2026 midterms and perhaps loosening the grip of a president who will never again top its ticket.
Yet it is just as likely that Mr. Martin — a hyperpartisan activist with no experience as a prosecutor known for consorting with antisemites and the far-right fringe of his party — was simply more trouble than he was worth. Mr. Martin will be relatively easy to replace with a more palatable nominee who has a similar, if not quite as extreme, set of priorities, according to Republican aides, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy.
Nonetheless, the declaration from Mr. Tillis prompted a ferocious backlash among the influencer elites Mr. Trump is acutely attentive to appeasing, and some in the West Wing remained intent on fighting for Mr. Martin to the end, according to officials speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
In his remarks, Mr. Trump suggested that he would find a place for Mr. Martin somewhere else in his administration, presumably to a post that did not require Senate confirmation. Over the past few days, people close to the president have considered a range of possibilities, including another position in the Justice Department, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Mr. Martin, for his part, was still battling to keep his job on Thursday — writing “Fight, fight, fight” in a social media post in the early morning hours.
He followed that up with Psalm 23:4.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
Whatever happens next needs to happen fast. If someone is not confirmed by May 20, when Mr. Martin’s interim appointment lapses, his successor would be named by the judges who sit on the Federal District Court in Washington. They are led by one of Mr. Trump’s most vaunted judicial adversaries: James E. Boasberg, the court’s chief judge, who is overseeing several cases against the Trump administration.
Mr. Tillis has suggested a more likely alternative: The administration could pick an acting U.S. attorney to buy time.
Representatives for Mr. Martin, the Justice Department and Mr. Trump declined to comment.
Mr. Trump had told people that Mr. Martin was one of his favorite people at the department, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Mr. Trump, who speaks with Mr. Martin regularly, reassured him of his support in recent weeks.
Yet if the Capitol riot loomed largest for Mr. Tillis, it was a revelation about Mr. Martin’s association with a well-known Jan. 6 defendant that turned many fence-sitters against him.
Several times in recent years, Mr. Martin has hosted on his podcast a man named Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who has dressed up like Adolf Hitler, sketched cartoons “depicting Jewish people as pigs” and once declared that he “would kill all the Jews and eat them for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” according to court filings.
Some of the president’s allies in the Senate, including Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have urged him to move on — and quickly. Mr. Trump has begun to reach out to potential successors, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump suggested that he did not know Mr. Martin’s nomination was on the rocks, but also suggested that Mr. Martin’s fate rested with the Senate, not the White House.
“I didn’t know that — but if anybody voted against him I feel very badly,” he told reporters at the White House. “But that’s really up to the senators, if they feel that way.”
Days earlier, the White House seemed to be all in, enlisting former Senator Norm Coleman, who helped push Pete Hegseth over the finish line in his confirmation fight to be defense secretary, to help Mr. Martin negotiate the legislative shoals.
For his part, Mr. Martin has emphasized the work he has done in bringing down violent crime in the city, which began to fall under his Biden-appointed predecessor, posting news of arrests and meetings with community leaders on his personal and official X pages.
But Mr. Martin did not make it easy on himself. In a recent submission to the Senate Judiciary Committee, he denied having close ties to Mr. Hale-Cusanelli and has claimed to know nothing about his views.
He was a longtime board member of the Patriot Freedom Project, a legal fund-raising operation for Jan. 6 defendants run by Mr. Hale-Cusanelli’s aunt, and the two men appeared together at an event for that group in September at Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J.
During the event, Mr. Martin called Mr. Hale-Cusanelli “an extraordinary man, an extraordinary leader.”
In March, they both spoke from the same podium at an event for another group Mr. Martin has long had ties to, the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, in Naples, Fla., during which Mr. Hale-Cusanelli praised Mr. Martin’s actions.
“We have seen a vast restoration of the truth,” Mr. Hale-Cusanelli said, “which is that Jan. 6 defendants were not criminals. They were in fact the victims.”
Mr. Martin used his speech to compare the Jan. 6 prosecutions to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Mr. Martin has made his share of unforced errors, alienating some members of his staff with religiously inflected office emails, pushing the boundaries of normal prosecutorial behavior and even flubbing basic bureaucratic procedures.
After a filing in February, the clerk’s office in Federal District Court for the District of Columbia informed Mr. Martin that he had not submitted his official certification and was therefore “not in good standing to file in this court.” The issue was later resolved.
That same month, he sent a threatening letter to one of Mr. Trump’s longtime antagonists, Representative Eugene Vindman, Democrat of Virginia, demanding information about his personal finances, skirting normal subpoena procedure by asking voluntarily for sensitive information. It also contained a glaring typo, instructing Mr. Vindman to respond to the inquiries by “day, month, date, 2025,” indicating that Mr. Martin had forgotten to fill in the blanks.
In April, Mr. Martin issued a news release announcing charges against a Washington man in connection with the vandalism of several Tesla vehicles. While he trumpeted the offenses as “domestic terrorism,” his own official statement acknowledged that the man was being prosecuted for low-level misdemeanor crimes.
In March, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee asked the group that governs the legal bar in the District of Columbia to investigate Mr. Martin, saying that he had abused prosecutorial power by threatening his political opponents. In a letter to the D.C. Bar’s disciplinary counsel, the senators also accused Mr. Martin of violating professional standards by refusing to recuse himself from a case involving a Capitol rioter he privately represented.
The complaint followed revelations that Mr. Martin had quietly pushed to present evidence against Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, to a federal grand jury over comments he made in 2020 about Supreme Court justices, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
Mr. Schumer had long ago apologized for the statement, saying it was overheated rhetoric. Alarmed officials at Justice Department headquarters quickly blocked the grand jury request, according to people familiar with the situation.
An earlier letter Mr. Martin sent to Mr. Schumer notifying him of the investigation blindsided career Justice Department officials. He had not bothered to clear the missive or vet the case with lawyers in the public integrity section, as required by department policy.
It is not clear, however, that the department’s top political appointees have been displeased with Mr. Martin’s maximalist approach. Mr. Martin, in coordination with one senior leader, Emil Bove III, pressured Denise Cheung, the head of the office’s criminal division, to freeze the assets of a government contractor that received a green energy grant from the Biden administration.
Ms. Cheung, a 24-year veteran of the department, quit rather than comply. In a resignation letter in February, she cited insufficient evidence of wrongdoing and accused Mr. Bove of trying to “bypass” the usual chain of command by intervening directly on the matter.
Mr. Martin has made common cause with a group of like-minded lawyers in the antitrust division at Justice Department headquarters. He has even tried to create an informal pipeline, seeking to swap criminal prosecutors in his office for antitrust lawyers, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
Nonetheless, morale inside the U.S. attorney’s office has plummeted since his arrival, according to current and former officials.
Early in his tenure, Mr. Martin, whose chipper, courtly personality contrasted with the belligerence of his memos and missives, often confined himself to his office and did not mix with the career staff.
When he ventured out, prosecutors found his behavior bewildering.
At times, he has tried to quietly approach junior prosecutors to recruit them on cases they would later discover to be legally or politically fraught.
His pitch, according to the person familiar with Mr. Martin’s interactions with staff members: “Are you interested in helping out with something great?”
To protect subordinates, some midlevel managers in the office instructed employees to immediately notify a superior if Mr. Martin made such an approach, the person added.
