WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump made it clear last week that he wanted Ed Martin to be U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. And Martin believes he would have been confirmed to the position, despite Democratic opposition and media outrage, if Senator Thom Tillis had not intervened.
“I was surprised, and I think the president was too, that Thom Tillis took the position he took,” Martin shared in a Monday interview with The Daily Wire. “I believe we had the votes if we could get to the floor, I really do…I was confident we could make an argument, but ultimately, Thom Tillis decided it was the stand he wanted to make, for reasons that defy good sense to me.”
Tillis, who’s up for re-election in North Carolina, a swing state, had reservations about Martin’s defense of people imprisoned for their role in the January 6 Capitol Riot. Tillis intimated that he represented a group of senators who also would not back Martin, and the White House decided there was nothing to do but move on. Up to the last minute, right-wing commentators and prominent Trump supporters, including Charlie Kirk and Vince Coglianese, held out hope that Martin would still be confirmed.
But on May 8, Trump announced that he had chosen Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro to serve as interim D.C. attorney general.
Still, White House officials were annoyed with Tillis and frustrated by the failure of the nomination. Martin had practiced law for the past two decades and held senior positions at the Eagle Forum Education and Legal Defense Fund, as well as chaired the Missouri Republican Party and served as a member of the Republican National Committee.
They also thought Martin was well-suited to tackle one of Trump’s top priorities: cleaning up Washington, D.C. After all, Martin had served as acting U.S. Attorney for D.C. since early spring, and under his watch, D.C. saw a 25% drop in violent crime, including significant decreases in robberies, assaults, and homicides.
Martin isn’t too beat up about the role change.
“President Trump always turns these kinds of moments into opportunities,” Martin said on Monday, eager and excited as he spoke with The Daily Wire, sharing that Pirro has repeatedly told him that Trump encouraged her to talk to Martin on various projects. “Talk to Ed, work with Ed on this, he’s got things lined up.”
Martin has been given an arguably more prestigious placement: he’ll now serve as the director of the Justice Department’s “Weaponization Working Group,” as well as associate deputy attorney general and pardon attorney at the Justice Department.
Sen. Thom Tillis on May 6, 2025 (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
“I never expected six months ago that Donald J. Trump would be talking about Ed Martin with such familiarity,” he added. “I had met him a few times, but now you know, ‘He’s a good guy, Ed’s a good guy.’ That’s kind of shake-your-head, surreal, but awfully kind of him.”
Tillis hasn’t responded to a number of requests for comment from The Daily Wire. But the senator, who hails from the “the heart of the deep state,” as Martin supporter Mike Benz argued on Bannon’s War Room, has drawn the wrath of top conservative podcasters and commentators like Kirk and Coglianese.
During a fiery episode of the Charlie Kirk Show on Wednesday, Kirk tore into the senator, reminding him that he is up for re-election and castigating him for voting for former President Joe Biden’s nominations.
“We saw this in the Hegseth fight, in the Tulsi fight, in the Bobby Kennedy fight,” said Kirk of the Republican defectors. “Did they learn nothing? And the answer is yes…There is no excuse where you go and vote for Biden’s D.C. U.S. attorney and Biden’s United States Attorney General, and you will not vote for Trump’s U.S. attorney.”
Kirk has repeatedly threatened Republican senators with primary challenges if they buck Trump’s agenda, but specifically told The Daily Wire in December that he did not want to go after Tillis’s seat. On Wednesday, he reiterated his desire to protect Tillis’s seat, arguing: “I wanna hold on to the North Carolina Senate seat. I’ve been pulling for Thom Tillis to find his inner MAGA. But when someone violates this, you gotta call him out.”
“Man, Thom Tillis, I’m begging for you to give Trump voters an excuse to vote for you, but you are actively hostile against us,” Kirk warned. “You’ve declared war on us. And because of that, the chance of you getting elected in a general election is going down tremendously…You might think you’re being all sanctimonious and uppity and a good person, but you are now jeopardizing this hard won Senate seat in North Carolina for being principled.”
Meanwhile, Coglianese was eviscerating Tillis on his show “VINCE,” where he directed his formidable audience to flood Tillis’s office with demands to back Martin — “especially if you are from North Carolina.”
“Be honest about what you want here,” he urged his following. “You want Ed Martin confirmed.”
“As of this hour, Thom Tillis’s office is hiding from you,” Coglianese told his audience. “Senator Tillis has not agreed to an interview on this show or on our nationwide radio broadcast. They’re laying low. They’re trying to hide from that accountability.”
Since Trump’s Thursday announcement that Pirro would replace Martin, Tillis has repeatedly posted praise of Trump on social media, touting the president’s border wins and arguing, “The Golden Age is just beginning.”
“He’s definitely spent the last week sucking up to Trump all over X,” Coglianese said in a text message to The Daily Wire. “He’s trying to tweet his way through this.”
Why did Tillis object to Martin’s confirmation? According to Martin, and friends of the acting U.S. Attorney for D.C., Tillis is passionate about the January 6 Capitol Riot. Martin says he spent 90 minutes talking with the senator in preparation for the judiciary committee. During that meeting, Martin said, Tillis made it very clear that he was frustrated with Trump’s pardons of the January 6 prisoners, as well as frustrated with Martin and others who defended “J6 folks.”
“I have no tolerance for anybody that entered the building on Jan. 6, and that’s probably where most of the friction was,” Tillis shared with reporters on Tuesday evening last week.
Interim United States Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin (Photo by Valerie Plesch/For The Washington Post)
“He seemed to me to be someone who has completely accepted what I would call the mainstream hoax of J6,” Martin said, reflecting on his conversations with Tillis. “Obviously, when there’s a policeman hit by a protester, that’s not acceptable, ever. But most people agree that January 6 had a lot of things going on that really don’t make a lot of sense and especially the prosecution of hundreds of people with a fake charge, the 1512 charge that the bipartisan Supreme Court threw out.”
According to Martin supporter Tom Fitton, the head of Judicial Watch, Tillis “mocked the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt” in discussions about Martin’s confirmation. Those present were surprised at how “heated and overwrought” Tillis became, Fitton shared with The Daily Wire.
“If I were Senator Tillis I would apologize to Ashli family for mocking the circumstances of her death,” Fitton said, adding that, “the charitable interpretation is that he doesn’t have all the information about what happened.”
Martin was bothered by Tillis’s analysis of what happened at the United States Capitol that day, sharing that Tillis went “on and on and on” about how anyone who went into the Capitol at any time, for any reason that day, was “morally, legally, and ethically wrong,” and characterized Ashli Babbitt as wrong, “dramatically.”
“This is a guy that isn’t really catching onto reality,” Martin said he thought at the time. “He’s locked in a hoax and once you meet somebody in that space it’s sometimes very difficult to get them to break out of it.”
During that meeting, Tillis allegedly told Martin that he would support the next steps toward a vote, but not necessarily that he would vote for Martin.
“He had told me, and I think the president, and others, that he would give us a chance to get forward and then suddenly he decided not to,” Martin said, adding that he does not know “whether someone got to him,” or “whether he decided something that he didn’t tell us.”
Tillis also told press that he would vote for Martin in any other district, a remark that particularly bothered the acting U.S. attorney for D.C.
“That means he doesn’t think I have a character problem to serve as U.S. attorney [and] doesn’t think I have a skill problem to serve as U.S. attorney,” Martin pointed out. “Remember, there’s a lot of people and a lot of interests that are overlapping in my office. Our office is the office that is investigating the massive transfers of wealth to organizations and entities, whether it’s USAID or others, that’s all in our jurisdiction.”
“I’m excited to go over to lead the weaponization working group, but we’ve already been working on that in our office,” he noted. He’s had experience with pardons, since President Trump pardoned almost 1,600 J6-ers and over 30 pro-life activists targeted by the previous administration, as well as some police officers.
Judge Jeanine Pirro (Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images)
And he’s excited to follow through on the president’s promise to end the weaponization of government. Martin noted that the American people greatly distrust what’s going on in Washington, given many of the events of the last four years, and he argued that the first thing “we have to do is to let the sunshine in and let people see what went on.”
“One of the ways is just to name them, name and shame them, but also to prosecute as much as we can,” he explained. “And the last thing we have to do is heal people.”
He just finished hanging up the pictures in his D.C. office, he joked, so now he’ll have to take them all down. But he’s looking forward to being freed up to be in the fight against weaponization.
“I’ve been promoted to being a general instead of being kind of a commander of a unit in the battle, so I kind of feel freed in that way,” he joked.
“It’s all good. Life is good, God is good, and you just gotta keep going forward and try to do good things,” he added. “This president has given us lots of opportunities.”
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