The Briefing with Jen Psaki
As Trump's parade of failure marches on, his distraction trick loses potency
09 May 2025
Jen Psaki reports on the failure of yet another Donald Trump nominee, Ed Martin, Trump's nominee to be D.C. U.S. attorney, and looks at the broader pattern of Trump trying to make publicity stunt distractions when he's on a losing streak.
Full Episode
At this point, we are all pretty familiar with Trump's flood the zone strategy. I mean, we've all seen it. This is what he does all the time. Move fast, try to bend as many things as possible. Throw so much at us at all times, including some completely bizarre obsessions with renaming things, like lots of things, like the Gulf of Mexico, for example.
It's all kind of hard to keep up with sometimes. I mean, that's the point, though. He wants to make it harder for us to figure out what's real and what's just Trumpian bluster. But one way to cut through some of that, I think, to figure out what's real, what he really cares about, what's going on in his head a little bit, is to go back to January 20th.
And what did Trump prioritize when he was sworn into office a second time? What did he care about? Enough to do immediately. Well, one of the first things he did, really pretty much the very first thing he did after taking the oath of office on January 20th, is he installed this guy as the top federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., Now, the U.S.
Attorney's Office in Washington, as you probably know, is one of the most important, most powerful prosecutor's offices in the country. And for the last few years, it has been in charge of literally the largest criminal probe in American history, the investigation into the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol.
And the moment Donald Trump took office again, he put a guy named Ed Martin in charge of that office. Now, Ed Martin has zero experience as a prosecutor. And he was also literally at the Capitol on January 6th. And he described it this way. He said it was great compared to Mardi Gras, of all things.
Now, after that, he then later went on to serve as a defense lawyer for several Trump supporters who were charged with attacking police officers during the insurrection. He was defending them. Once Trump named him a U.S.
attorney in Washington, the first thing that Ed Martin did was dismiss the cases of about 1,600 Capitol rioters pardoned by Trump, including at least one whom Ed Martin still represented as a defense lawyer. One person he was defending. He helped pardon him. Then he set about demoting and firing federal prosecutors who had worked on those January 6th cases. That's what he did next.
He also tried to indict Chuck Schumer, an effort so weird and outlandish, he apparently couldn't even get Trump Justice Department officials to sign off on that one. Ed Martin also sent out sloppy, poorly worded, vaguely threatening letters aimed at members of Congress, protesters, journalists, even medical journals he decided he needed to target.
In other words, Trump seemed to be getting, I guess, I mean, exactly what he wanted out of one of his very first hires. Someone who would use the power Trump had bestowed on him to gleefully go after Trump's enemies and reward his friends. And Trump clearly really, really wanted Ed Martin in that top prosecutor job. And he seemed to really, really like having him there.
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