Thread by @jeremykohler

When Trump appointed Ed Martin as interim U.S. attorney in D.C. in January, I did a double take.
Ed Martin? The same Ed Martin I’d seen stir chaos through Missouri politics for years? And now he was suddenly holding one of the most powerful prosecutorial posts in the country? 🧵

2/ For @stltoday, I had written about Martin as a key player in the legal fight for control of the Eagle Forum, the conservative organization founded by anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly. In 2016, Judge John Barberis issued an order removing Martin as the group’s president.

3/ Nearly a decade later, I checked in on the lawsuit. It was still pending, and led to surprising revelations about Martin, including that he had *ghostwritten attacks* on Barberis.

So I teamed up with @AndyKroll to tell the story.
propublica.org/article/ed-mar…

4/ The attacks on Barberis appeared on his personal Facebook page. They impugned his ethics, criticized a recent ruling and branded him as a "politician" with the “LOWEST rating for a judge in Illinois.”

They were posted by someone named Priscilla Gray.

5/ To be clear, Gray is a real person. She had worked in several roles for Schlafly, but was not a party to the legal dispute between Martin and Eagle Forum.

6/ But as it turns out, after Martin bought a laptop for Gray, she offered to “happily write something to attack this judge.” And when she did, Martin ghostwrote more posts for her to use.

7/ Martin wanted Gray to “turn up the heat” with others on the judge’s Facebook page and to “call what he did unfair and rigged over and over.”

Gray responded that she was “on it.”

8/ Martin coached Gray on how to attack the Judge:

“Go slow and steady. Not too much of a flood. Make it organic.”

He wanted her to email the judge’s comments to others and to send the judge direct messages playing “sweet/dumb.”

9/ The judge had blocked her on Facebook, Gray wrote back. But that wasn’t going to stop her. She said she would still try to make sure the judge saw Martin’s ghostwritten messages by “private messaging him that sweet line.”

10/ It was not clear from the court record what, if anything, she wrote at that juncture. But a legal ethics expert told me the emails were evidence that Martin had attempted to send messages to a judge through a proxy, in violation of Missouri’s rules for lawyers.

11/ Martin did not respond to requests for comment. Asked about the emails in a deposition, Martin declined to talk about them, but did acknowledge that lawyers are prohibited from communicating with judges outside of court or engaging in conduct intended to disrupt the court.

12/ Martin was not sanctioned for those emails. A judge declined to take up a criminal contempt case. The lead plaintiff in the Eagle Forum case said she made an ethics complaint against Martin’s Missouri bar license but was told it had to wait until the lawsuit was resolved.

13/ Martin’s past offers context for his actions now. As a Trump-appointed prosecutor, he’s defending Jan. 6 rioters and investigating Trump’s political enemies.

None of this is new. He just got a bigger stage.

14/ This isn’t the only untold story about Martin that we uncovered. Read our full investigation here: propublica.org/article/ed-mar…