President Donald Trump suggested he will withdraw his embattled nominee for U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., Ed Martin.
“He’s a terrific person, and he wasn’t getting the support from people that I thought, and he’s done a very good job,” Trump told reporters of Martin in the Oval Office on Thursday. “I’m very disappointed in that, but I have so many different things that I’m doing now with the trade, you know, one person I can only make, boom, I can only lift that little phone so many times in a day.”
While he didn’t explicitly say he was pulling the nomination, Trump did talk about the nomination in the past tense.
“He wasn’t rejected, but we felt it would be very, it would be hard,” Trump added.
“It was to me. It was disappointing. I’ll be honest. I have to be straight. I was disappointed. A lot of people were disappointed, but that’s the way it works sometimes, that’s the way it works,” the president said.
Despite being interim U.S. attorney since Trump’s inauguration, Martin has had a tough climb to support in the Senate. On Tuesday, GOP Sen. Thom Tillis said he would not support Martin’s nomination for U.S. attorney in Washington, which would all but tank his nomination with all Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee voting no.
“Given Senator Tillis’ position, it seemed that the votes weren’t there in committee,” Sen. Ted Cruz said, adding that he hadn’t seen the president’s announcement.
Trump said that “hopefully we can bring [Martin] into, whether it’s DOJ or whatever, in some capacity, because really outstanding.”
While Tillis took offense with Martin’s position on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which he once referred to as “Mardi Gras in D.C.,” the North Carolina senator told reporters Thursday he would not oppose Martin if he were to be considered for another Justice Department position — potentially clearing a path for him in the DOJ.
“The issue had to do with Jan. 6 and a difference of opinion on what I think should be zero tolerance for anybody,” Tillis said. “So that was it, and it’s in this district. If he were going to be in any other U.S. attorney district, it wouldn’t be relevant. It was relevant because it was this district.”
Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley told reporters that it’s Trump’s “constitutional responsibility” to nominate someone.
“As far as your interest in this, I have to deal with what the president sends us. We don’t have the power of selecting,” Grassley said. “So, I’ll just have to accept it.”
Sen. John Kennedy, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told reporters he was “anxious to see who the president’s going to pick to replace Mr. Martin.”
“I’ve heard a couple of names that he’s considering,” Kennedy continued.
“I just think we had the problem with the votes, so you don’t have the votes, you have to reconsider,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said. He teased that “we’ll have a blockbuster announcement tomorrow. Stay tuned.”
Martin has also drawn scrutiny in recent weeks for sending threatening letters to leading medical journals. The letters accused the journals of being “partisans in various scientific debates” and called attention to their tax-exempt status. The editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, Eric Rubin, told NPR that he felt that the letter the journal received was “trying to intimidate us.”
Martin was considered a top pick by the anti-abortion movement, which saw him as essential in the District of Columbia, where abortion is legal without limits based on how how far along a pregnancy is.
“President Trump has a hard task ahead of him to replace Ed with a fighter of equal skill and experience,” Kristan Hawkins, president of Students For Life Action, said in a statement to NOTUS
Trump suggested he has a replacement nominee in mind who would be announced in the next few days.
“We have somebody else that will be great,” Trump said.
Martin himself reacted to the news online, posting an AI-generated photo of himself as the pope from his official government account. “Plot twist,” Martin wrote.
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Mark Alfred is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow. Oriana González is a NOTUS reporter. Margaret Manto contributed reporting.