By Brad Heath, Sarah N. Lynch and Andrew Goudsward
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – As President Donald Trump moved last month to free the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol, his newly appointed top prosecutor in Washington put his name on a request that a judge drop charges against one of them he represented as a defense attorney.
Lawyers generally are prohibited from taking both sides in the same case and U.S. Justice Department regulations require lawyers to step aside from cases involving their former clients for at least a year.
That did not stop Edward Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, from attaching his name to the federal government’s request to end its case against one of his own clients who took part in the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
Doing so likely violated a swath of ethics rules, legal experts said.
“You can’t do that. It’s a fundamental conflict of interest,” said Richard Painter, the former chief ethics official in Republican President George W. Bush’s administration. “Attorneys don’t switch sides in cases.”
Martin, who has said he was present outside the Capitol during the siege, also represented two other people found guilty of taking part in the attempt to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat. He has faulted the Justice Department for what he described as misconduct in targeting nearly 1,600 people who participated in the attack.
In his first two weeks on the job, he oversaw the end of the Capitol riot prosecutions, which had been the largest investigation in modern Justice Department history. He has clashed with his staff of attorneys and launched an internal review of what he has described as government wrongdoing in using an obstruction law to charge some of the rioters. And he has appeared in the White House alongside Trump.
On January 6, 2021, Martin posted on X, then called Twitter, that he was at the Capitol himself, describing the day as “Like Mardi Gras in DC today: love, faith and joy.”
Before becoming Washington’s top prosecutor, he appeared as an attorney for three people convicted of participating in the riot, according to court records. Two of those cases ended before Trump took office; the third, against Joseph Padilla, was still ongoing on January 21 when Martin’s office filed a motion bearing his name asking a court to drop the charges.
State rules in Missouri, where Martin is licensed, bar government lawyers from handling cases involving their clients without written consent.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A private spokesperson for Martin said he is in complete compliance with the requirements for his position.
On Wednesday, Martin sent an office-wide email seen by Reuters in which he said he had “stopped all involvement” in the cases more than a year and a half ago, that he had handled them pro bono, and said he was “under the impression that I was off the cases.”
He said the U.S. Attorney’s career ethics lawyer asked him about the cases last week and complained that it “immediately leaked to the media.” This leak, he said, was both “personally insulting” and professionally “unacceptable.”
FORMER ETHICS OFFICIAL SEES ‘VIOLATION’
John Sciortino, a former attorney in the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates misconduct by lawyers, said he “cannot imagine any circumstance in which his name should be appearing on a pleading for the United States” in a case involving his client.
Doing so, he said, is “a violation of the conflict of interest rules, and the sort of thing OPR might investigate and which could well result in a misconduct finding.”
Martin did not seek advice from the career ethics lawyer in his office before the filing ending Padilla’s case, a person briefed on the matter said. He asked a court for permission to withdraw as a defense lawyer in one of the closed cases on Monday, but has not done so in Padilla’s.
Padilla was convicted of assaulting police officers. Another of his lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.
Padilla would have been freed with or without Martin’s involvement, because Trump granted clemency to all January 6 participants. But ethics lawyers said Martin should not have been the one to carry out that order for his own client.
“I find it alarming that a lawyer who represented a client in private practice and who is now a public official would be using the powers of the new office for the benefit of his former private client,” said New York University law professor Stephen Gillers.
Martin has moved to align his office with the White House in ways that are unusual for U.S. attorneys, who traditionally work with some degree of independence. He has used his personal X account to make statements about January 6 cases and to promise that his office would investigate “targeting” of people working for Elon Musk to overhaul the federal government.
OUTSPOKEN ADVOCATE
Martin came to the job as an outspoken advocate and fundraiser for people prosecuted over the Capitol riot. He accused President Joe Biden’s administration of bringing the cases for political reasons, and said on X that “we have to find & throw in jail” the officials who brought obstruction of justice charges against some of the rioters.
The Supreme Court later ruled that prosecutors had read that law too broadly.
Martin, who now supervises the people who brought those cases, has ordered an internal investigation of the charges, calling it a “great failure.”
Last year, a foundation Martin headed hosted a banquet at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he honored one of the men convicted of storming the Capitol, Timothy Hale-Cusanelli. Hale was an Army reservist whom prosecutors described as a Nazi sympathizer who was captured on video berating a police officer. His lawyers disputed that characterization.
Martin described him as “an extraordinary man, an extraordinary leader now of those who have survived January 6.”
Hale’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment
The day after Trump was inaugurated, the Justice Department asked a court to drop the charges against Hale as well. Martin’s name appeared on the government’s motion.
(Reporting by Brad Heath, Sarah N. Lynch and Andrew Goudsward; Editing by Scott Malone and Daniel Wallis)
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