President Trump’s new U.S. attorney in Washington has opened an internal investigation into the use of an obstruction statute brought against scores of people charged with taking part in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to an email obtained by The New York Times.
The move by Ed Martin, who was named by Mr. Trump last week to run the federal prosecutor’s office, was the latest example of how he has sought in recent days to wind down — even discredit — the office’s sprawling investigation of the Capitol attack. It came on the same day that top Justice Department officials fired several prosecutors who worked for the special counsel Jack Smith on two separate criminal cases brought against Mr. Trump.
In an email on Monday to members of his staff, Mr. Martin described the use of the obstruction law, which was brought against more than 250 Jan. 6 defendants, as a “great failure of our office.”
“We need to get to the bottom of it,” he wrote, adding that all of the prosecutors working under him needed to turn over all “files, documents, notes, emails and other information” about their use of the statute as soon as possible.
Mr. Martin said he expected a preliminary report about the office’s use of the law to be finished by Friday, but it remained unclear exactly what he intended to do with the report’s findings.
The U.S. attorney’s office essentially stopped using the obstruction charge — known in the penal code as 18 U.S.C. 1512 — in Jan. 6 cases after the Supreme Court ruled last year that prosecutors had overstepped by employing it.
The statute was initially used in lieu of more politically fraught charges like seditious conspiracy to accuse people of interfering with the proceeding at the Capitol on Jan. 6 where Mr. Trump’s loss in the election was certified.
But the justices said prosecutors had gone beyond the original intent of the law, which was passed as part of Sarbanes-Oxley Act to criminalize things like destroying documents or tampering with witnesses in corporate malfeasance cases.
Ever since he took over the U.S. attorney’s office, Mr. Martin has been executing Mr. Trump’s instructions to dismiss any Jan. 6-related criminal cases that remain active in Federal District Court in Washington, where all of the proceedings have unfolded.
Those instructions were part of the sweeping clemency proclamation that Mr. Trump issued on Inauguration Day along with orders to pardon more than 1,000 Jan. 6 defendants and to commute the sentences of another 14, who were accused of sedition as members of far-right groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys.
Mr. Martin’s motions to dismiss the cases have drawn fierce criticism from some federal judges in Washington who have grudgingly gone along with his requests. But they have often done so in orders asserting that nothing — not even a presidential decree — can erase the facts of what happened on Jan. 6.
The path Mr. Martin took to running the federal prosecutor’s office that oversaw the vast Jan. 6 investigation was, to say the least, an unusual one.
He was a prominent member of the “Stop the Steal” movement that sought to overturn Mr. Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. The day before the assault on the Capitol, he called in a speech for “die-hard true Americans” to work until their “last breath” to “stop the steal.”
He was also at the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to his own social media posts.
“Like Mardi Gras in DC today: love, faith and joy,” he wrote in one post. “Ignore #FakeNews.”
Moreover, Mr. Martin is still listed as a board member of the Patriot Freedom Project, one of the most prominent fund-raising organizations working to help pay legal fees for Jan. 6 defendants. He has also represented some of those defendants himself, squaring off against the very same federal prosecutors he now leads.
Late last week, Mr. Martin took the unusual step of inserting himself into the case of Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, who was recently released from prison by Mr. Trump’s clemency grant.
Acting even before Mr. Rhodes’s defense lawyers did, Mr. Martin opposed an order issued by the judge in Mr. Rhodes’s case that barred the far-right leader from visiting Washington without permission.
In court papers filed on Friday, Mr. Martin argued that the judge, Amit P. Mehta, had overstepped his authority by prohibiting Mr. Rhodes and several other members of the Oath Keepers from entering Washington.
On Monday, Judge Mehta rescinded his order, conceding that the “unconditional” nature of Mr. Trump’s clemency proclamation meant that he could not impose restrictions on Mr. Rhodes’s movements now that he is out of custody.
Mr. Martin’s decision to go to bat for Mr. Rhodes was unusual for a number of reasons.
First, it was a stunning reversal for the federal prosecutor’s office in Washington, which has overseen all of the Jan. 6 criminal cases and secured the convictions of Mr. Rhodes and other members of the Oath Keepers in late 2022.
Moreover, Mr. Martin signed the court papers opposing Judge Mehta’s travel restrictions on Mr. Rhodes personally, an unusual move for a U.S. attorney who generally has subordinates file legal briefs.
Judge Mehta’s order barring Mr. Rhodes from Washington unless he had his permission came after the far-right leader turned up in the city after Mr. Trump’s inauguration. During that trip, he visited a Dunkin’ on Capitol Hill and the local jail where many Jan. 6 defendants had been held.
Over the weekend, Mr. Rhodes also attended a Trump event in Las Vegas, sitting in an area behind the president with another notorious far-right figure: Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who led an armed standoff against federal land management officials in 2014.
Mr. Rhodes and the Oath Keepers took part in that standoff, which ended when the Bureau of Land Management gave up its attempts to seize the Bundy family’s cattle in an effort to solve a dispute over the Bundys’ refusal to pay grazing fees to the federal government.
