Donald Trump’s pardon attorney — the man responsible for deciding who deserves presidential clemency — is trying to use the President of the United States as a human shield to avoid accountability for his own misconduct. And his legal arguments are so sloppy that he can’t even identify which agency is investigating him.
Ed Martin, Trump’s hardline MAGA pardon attorney, filed legal arguments this week claiming that ethics regulators in Washington D.C. have no authority to investigate him for misconduct because — and this is the actual argument — the president and his attorneys are essentially the same person. “The President of the United States is the client of all attorneys appointed pursuant to the President’s Article II authority,” Martin argued, which apparently means that investigating a DOJ lawyer for misconduct is the same as attacking the president himself.
By this logic, every corrupt, unethical, or criminal act committed by any federal attorney is automatically shielded by presidential authority. Forever. With no accountability to anyone.
But here’s where it gets almost comedically incompetent. As part of his defense, Martin claimed he couldn’t be investigated by D.C.’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel because he had already opened a probe into that very office — which he believed was part of the D.C. Bar.
Unfortunately for Martin, it is not part of the D.C. Bar and never has been. It is an arm of the D.C. Court of Appeals — a completely separate entity that has existed as such for its entire history. The head of the Office of Disciplinary Counsel had to write Martin a letter explaining this basic fact.
“You appear to be under the impression that the Office of Disciplinary Counsel is a part of the D.C. Bar,” Hamilton Fox wrote back. “We are not.” Martin’s own defense attorney then made the exact same error in the new filing.
The Trump administration’s pardon attorney — the man deciding who gets clemency and who doesn’t — investigated the wrong agency, doesn’t know the difference between the D.C. Bar and the D.C. Court of Appeals, and is now arguing that the Constitution protects him from basic professional accountability because Donald Trump exists.
For good measure, Martin also filed 40 separate defenses — including the claim that the ethics charges violate D.C.’s Human Rights Act by discriminating against him for his “political beliefs.” Being investigated for sending threatening letters to Georgetown Law School is now, apparently, political persecution.
This is the man Trump wanted to make the permanent U.S. Attorney for D.C. — until Republican senators blocked the nomination because of his erratic behavior and his history of defending January 6th rioters.
And now the DOJ is proposing new rules that would let it indefinitely block any state bar investigation of its own lawyers by simply opening — and never closing — its own internal review. Thousands of attorneys, bar associations, and former prosecutors have denounced the proposal as unprecedented and unconstitutional.
The message from the Trump DOJ is simple: our lawyers answer to no one. Not ethics boards. Not bar associations. Not courts. Just Trump.
That’s not a legal argument. That’s a monarchy.
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BREAKING: Trump’s pardon attorney is claiming that Trump’s executive privilege makes him immune to pending ethics charges.
