The Most Controversial Nominee in America Right Now

Even the Senate is balking.

The No. 1 rule of Senate confirmation battles: it usually doesn’t help to be associated with a neo-Nazi.

Apparently, Ed Martin didn’t get the memo.

Martin is President Trump’s nominee to be the US Attorney in the District of Columbia. It’s an important job — the top federal prosecutor in the nation’s capital — but one that’s typically somewhat apolitical. The Senate usually confirms them by a voice vote, without even counting the yeas and nays.

Ed Martin

But Martin’s nomination is currently on life support, with Republican senators raising concerns about his ties to January 6 rioters — including Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who is perhaps best known for shaving his mustache to look like Adolf Hitler’s and then proudly parading it around the Navy base where he worked as a contractor.

In interviews with January 6 investigators, Hale-Cusanelli’s former co-workers recounted him declaring that “Hitler should have finished the job” and that he “would kill all the Jews and eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” and “wouldn’t need to season them because the salt from their tears would make it flavorful enough.”

One court filing by a federal agent described Hale-Cusanelli as an “avowed white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer.”

And Martin, Trump’s pick to be one of the most powerful lawyers in the country? He called Hale-Cusanelli an “extraordinary leader” and a “great friend.”

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When I first met Ed Martin, he was traveling from the Republican Party’s mainstream to its fringes, and then — as the fringes became the mainstream — back again.

Martin, a fellow resident of St. Louis, had served as chief of staff to an establishment Republican governor of Missouri. He had chaired the state’s Republican Party, reaching the highest echelon of the local GOP. And, in 2010, he had come within two percentage points of being elected to Congress in my district, running a competitive campaign for a seat that his opponent had won by 36 points two years before.

(In a sign of things to come, Martin blamed his loss on voter fraud, although he eventually conceded.)

By 2015, Martin had been installed as president of Eagle Forum, a conservative group that had been led by the legendary anti–Equal Rights Amendment activist Phyllis Schlafly since its founding decades earlier.

At the time, Schlafly’s organization — and the Republican Party — was split between movement conservatives who backed Ted Cruz in the 2016 presidential primary and a populist faction that was gravitating toward Donald Trump.

In March 2016, Schlafly endorsed Trump over the objection of a majority of Eagle Forum’s board members, who accused Martin of manipulating the 91-year-old conservative crusader. (He denied the allegations.) Five months later, she died. The next day, her final book, The Conservative Case for Trump — co-authored with Martin — was published.

Phyllis Schlafly

After her death, Schlafly’s children fought a bitter legal battle over her legacy. Schlafly’s daughter and her fellow Cruz supporters maintained custody of Eagle Forum. Martin, along with Schlafly’s pro-Trump sons, split off to start a new group, Phyllis Schlafly Eagles. ProPublica recently compared it to “a Midwest version of the HBO program ‘Succession’ (without the obscenities).”

Around this time, I began making it a ritual to attend the annual Eagle Council summit put on in my hometown by Martin’s splinter group. As a reporter, I found it a helpful way to stay in touch with the evolving zeitgeist of the GOP; slowly, I watched as an event that was once dominated by opposition to abortion, feminism, and other social conservative priorities grew into a pro-Trump lovefest.

In the conferences I covered, MAGA luminaries like Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn descended on St. Louis to rally the faithful; one year, “President Trump is #Winning” was the title given to an afternoon of events. And Martin was always at the center of it, the ever-affable master of ceremonies. I got to know Martin, in the limited way a journalist gets to know a source. We chatted; we followed each other on Twitter; we traded emails. I could always count on him to give an interesting, engaging interview.

In 2017, when longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone floated Martin to take Steve Bannon’s place as White House strategist, I shot Martin an email to see if there was anything to the rumor.

“Since Donald Trump won last November, I have said I would help in any way,” he told me. “However, that has never been by entering the Administration. And, while I would ‘never say never’ (because I would answer this President’s call), I have not talked to anyone about a post. Not Bannon’s nor or [sic] other posts. Am flattered to be mentioned.”

But Trump never called. Perhaps Martin — who was by then associated with edgier MAGA types — was considered too extreme to join an administration still led by moderates like John Kelly and Jared Kushner.

Not so in Trump’s second administration. In a vivid demonstration of how differently Trump has staffed his team this time around, Martin was tapped to be interim US Attorney for DC on day one of Trump’s second term. A month later, he was nominated to take the role on a permanent basis, despite lacking any previous prosecutorial experience.

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What changed between 2017 and 2025, bringing Martin from the Midwestern backwaters of Trump’s movement, where he was swimming when I got to know him, directly into the president’s inner orbit?

Martin has appeared to earn Trump’s favor by spending the last few years defending a group that most Republicans considered too toxic to touch: the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

After Trump’s 2020 defeat, Martin emerged as a leader of the “Stop the Steal” movement, embracing the president’s false claims of election fraud and helping organize the DC rally that took place in the hours before the Capitol attack. At a time when many conservatives began to tiptoe away from Trump, Martin pushed himself closer.

Martin joined the board of the Patriot Freedom Project, an organization set up to defend January 6 rioters in court. In a questionnaire submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Martin was asked to name the “ten most significant” cases he had handled in his legal career; the top three on his list were all Capitol rioters for whom he served as defense counsel.

Between 2022 and 2024, Martin interviewed Hale-Cusanelli — the rioter who gave himself a Hitler stache — five times on his podcast. On behalf of Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, Martin even gave Hale-Cusanelli an award, hailing him as an “extraordinary man” in a ceremony held at Trump’s New Jersey golf club.

In response to questions from Judiciary Committee members, Martin now says that he is “not close” with Hale-Cusanelli and that he didn’t know about the Hitler mustache before giving him an award.

Both claims appear to be false: just last year, in a pair of podcast episodes, Martin called Hale-Cusanelli a “great friend” and said that he had “gotten to know him really well.” In one of the episodes, which was taped six weeks before the award ceremony, Martin and Hale-Cusanelli specifically discussed a photo in which Hale-Cusanelli has the mustache and a Hitler-like haircut.

Timothy Hale-Cusanelli

“You had, like, a mustache shaved in such a way that you looked vaguely like Hitler and making jokes about it,” Martin said. “Again, you know, not your best moment, but not illegal.”

Martin’s podcast episodes are no longer available on most platforms, although they were disclosed on a form required by the Judiciary Committee — unlike hundreds of his appearances on RT, Russia’s state TV network, and various right-wing outlets. (Martin has since updated his paperwork to include those appearances, which he said were excluded accidentally. He also said he had nothing to do with his podcasts being taken suddenly offline.)

Martin apologized for praising Hale-Cusanelli in an interview with the Forward, a Jewish newspaper, last month. “I denounce everything about what that guy said, everything about the way he talked, and all as I’ve now seen it,” Martin said.

But it may be too late: Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) announced on Tuesday that he plans to oppose Martin. “If Mr. Martin were being put forth as a US Attorney for any district except the district where January 6 happened, the protest happened, I’d probably support him,” Tillis said. “But not in this district.”

Tillis is a member of the Judiciary Committee, which is split between 12 Republicans and 10 Democrats. If Tillis votes against Martin, the panel will tie 11–11, blocking the nomination from advancing to the Senate floor and making it one of Trump’s few congressional defeats so far this term.

Trump himself has gotten involved in the lobbying effort to rescue Martin’s nomination, making phone calls to Tillis and other senators in an unusual — perhaps unprecedented — presidential intervention in a US Attorney confirmation fight. The president also posted about Martin on Truth Social on Monday (“HE WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN”), another sign of how important this battle for a position that’s usually fairly anonymous has become to Trump.

So far, Tillis isn’t budging. Other Republicans may be unconvinced as well. Even Ted Cruz has raised concerns, according to CNN.

In the meantime, Martin continues to serve as US Attorney on an acting basis, a perch he has used to help facilitate January 6 pardons (including some for those he defended), demote prosecutors who handled the Capitol riot cases, promise to investigate anyone who “impedes” the work of Elon Musk, and send letters threatening legal action against everyone from Chuck Schumer to Wikipedia.

In one post on X, Martin described himself and his colleagues at the US Attorney’s office as “President Trumps’ [sic] lawyers.”

Interim US Attorneys can serve for only 120 days without being confirmed, a clock that’s set to run out for Martin on May 20. By then, either he needs to receive Senate approval or Trump needs to accept defeat and pick a new top DC prosecutor.

By law, if neither of those paths are taken by the deadline, Martin’s successor as acting US Attorney will be chosen by the DC federal district court — an option Trump would surely prefer to avoid. That court happens to be led by Chief Judge James Boasberg, the same jurist who blocked the president’s use of a 1798 law to deport migrants to El Salvador and whom Trump has taken to calling a “Radical Left Lunatic” on social media.

Trump may want to start thinking of other names for the post, as Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has acknowledged that Martin’s confirmation is unlikely without Tillis’s support. Trump told reporters Tuesday that Tillis’s decision was “disappointing” but sounded an unusually lenient note. “That's really up to the senators. If they feel that way, they have to vote the way they vote, they have to follow their heart, and they have to follow their mind,” Trump said.

Thom Tillis

The most vocal MAGA voices online have been less forgiving, rallying to defend Martin, one of their own. “Hey North Carolina,” wrote Rogan O'Handley, a right-wing commentator who the White House recently selected for its “new media” seat, “PRIMARY THOM TILLIS.”