Ed Martin, Donald Trump’s acting U.S. attorney in D.C., is using the power of the law to politicize media coverage. This is what dictators like Putin do and is a dangerous slide towards state control of the press, violating the Constitution’s First Amendment.
It fits in with the White House saying it will decide which news organizations will be included in the press pool for small, close-quarter venues like the Oval Office and Air Force One, a choice that has been left to the press for more than a century.
On Monday, Martin tweeted from his official account on the administration’s legal fight to block the Associated Press from White House coverage. Martin wrote that as “President Trumps’ lawyers, we are proud to fight to protect his leadership as our President and we are vigilant in standing against entities like the AP that refuse to put America first.”
That is because the AP still calls the Gulf of Mexico by its historic name, not the Trump moniker, Gulf of America.
Martin projects a deep and dangerous misunderstanding. There is no law that states anyone, and especially a news organization, must “put America first,” whatever that means. Furthermore, federal prosecutors are very much not the president’s lawyers, that is the job of the White House counsel.
Trump has installed Martin on an acting basis, with the intention to make him the permanent choice subject to Senate approval.
Perhaps Martin could learn a thing or two from another now-former acting U.S. attorney, Danielle Sassoon, who resigned from the top spot in Manhattan rather than act on Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove’s corrupt directive to try to trade a dismissal of charges for Mayor Adams’ cooperation on immigration enforcement. She was followed out the door by top prosecutor Hagan Scotten and several other prosecutors at the Public Integrity Section in D.C.
Trump talked for years about the politicization of the Department of Justice and the FBI, but based on his personnel moves, maybe he didn’t mind it as he is taking blatant politicization to a much higher level.
Trump tried to install the laughably unfit Matt Gaetz as U.S. attorney general, one step ahead of a damming House Ethics Committee report. Gaetz’s nomination collapsed immediately, but other terrible appointments are getting through.
Last week, the Senate confirmed the rightwing conspiracy theorist and podcaster Kash Patel as FBI director on a party line vote. But don’t worry, Patel assured GOP senators, the deputy dictator would be a career special agent who knew the agency well. That was until rightwing conspiracy theorist and podcaster and former Fox News host Dan Bongino was named deputy director. A former NYPD cop and Secret Service agent, Bongino has law enforcement experience, but it is his politicization that is the grave concern.
FBI agents and DOJ lawyers are not the president’s personal employees, nor are they tasked with carrying out the president’s political priorities. Their discretion is around how to apply the law effectively, not whether the application of the law will hurt or help the executive’s agenda.
This is not just our view; it’s not even really a matter of debate around the structure of the American administrative and legal system. The idea that the awesome capabilities of law enforcement, the holder of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, would exist outside of the whims of individual leaders and would treat all people and all entities as equal under the law was one of the basic organizing principles of the new nation. We can’t say we’ve ever fully lived up to these lofty ideals, but as basic rules of our society, they’re non-negotiable.
Patel, Bongino and Martin play a dangerous game in thinking this means that they are Trump’s tools to carry out a political agenda. A collapse in the rule of law ends up hurting everyone.
