MAGA Troll Turned DOJ Attorney Hit With Ethics Violations Charges

One of Donald Trump’s most outspoken attorneys is facing discipline over ethics violations. 

Ed Martin, an employee at the Justice Department, is in trouble with Washington, D.C.’s professional conduct investigator for sending a letter to the dean of the Georgetown University Law Center last year saying his DOJ office wouldn’t hire any graduates from the law school due to its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. 

A complaint was filed by Hamilton Fox, who serves as disciplinary counsel for the district, giving him prosecutor-like powers on disciplining attorneys. Professional conduct proceedings will now begin for Martin, where he could face sanctions or even lose his law license. It’s the first such action against a lawyer in the Trump administration. 

“Acting in his official capacity and speaking on behalf of the government, he used coercion to punish or suppress a disfavored viewpoint, the teaching and promotion of ‘DEI,’” said Fox in the complaint. “He demanded that Georgetown Law relinquish its free speech and religious rights in order to continue to obtain a benefit, employment opportunities for its students.”

Trump tried to name Martin as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia early in his second term, only for him to be removed after it became apparent that the Senate would not confirm his appointment. Martin, a former political operative in Missouri, right-wing talk show host, and January 6 apologist, has had a rocky tenure in the Trump administration. 

Martin threatened anyone who criticized Elon Musk’s DOGE effort in its early days with legal action, and the methods he used to target prominent Democrats for criminal charges worried Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche so much that he reportedly “encouraged” a federal grand jury to investigate Martin for potential misconduct.  

Now it appears his attacks on DEI in service of the Trump administration have led to legal trouble. It would be quite the story if Martin ends up facing sanctions or losing his law license for attacking DEI, something every Republican, led by Trump, is doing these days. It might even end up protecting DEI initiatives. 

The Pentagon spent an estimated $5.6 billion on munitions alone during the first two days of Donald Trump’s illegal war in Iran, three U.S. officials told The Washington Post. And every dollar of that was spent without congressional approval.

This figure, which was delivered to Congress Monday, significantly dwarfs the Pentagon’s preliminary cost estimate of $1 billion per day. Some GOP lawmakers told Politico they’d received estimates that were closer to $2 billion.

The Post report comes as Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Tuesday “will be the most intense day of strikes,” just hours after Trump claimed the war “was very complete.”

The officials who spoke to the Post did not disclose what kinds of munitions were fired in the U.S. military’s opening salvo, but U.S. Central Command confirmed that the U.S. has fired more than 2,000 munitions and struck more than 5,000 targets.

Multiple outlets have reported the use of precision weapons including Tomahawk cruise missiles, which cost $2.2 million each. Reports indicate that the U.S. may have used one of these missiles in a deadly strike at a girls’ primary school that killed 175 people, many of whom were children.

But munitions aren’t the only costs, according to the Center for American Progress. Elaine McCusker, who served as deputy undersecretary of defense during the first Trump administration, estimated that it cost $630 million to assemble the largest force of U.S. military assets to the Middle East in decades before the first shot was even fired. Only days into the fighting, a friendly fire incident downed three F-15 fighter jets, costing roughly $351 million.

Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine told reporters last week they would transition away from precision munitions in favor of laser-guided bombs, which are far less expensive. Still, as the fighting drags on, the cost to U.S. taxpayers continues to balloon.

The Trump administration is expected to submit a supplemental defense budget in the coming days—asking for billions more to keep dropping bombs.

The Democratic National Committee is suing the Trump administration for some clarification on any plans to send armed federal agents to polling places amid the president’s threats to “nationalize” elections.

“To ensure that the American people obtain timely knowledge of potential threats to free and fair elections and to enable the D.N.C. to take appropriate action to ensure voting rights are protected, the D.N.C. now seeks this Court’s aid to enforce” Freedom of Information Act requirements, reads the lawsuit, filed on Tuesday.

While President Trump himself hasn’t made public plans to send agents to ballot boxes, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have both refused to rule it out. And Trump has repeatedly said that he wants to nationalize voting. This lawsuit would compel the administration to confirm or deny under oath any “plans” to send federal agents to the polls this election.

“The Republicans should say, ‘We wanna take over, we should take over the voting in at least 15 places’; the Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” Trump said on former Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino’s podcast last month. “We have states that I won, that show I didn’t win … like the 2020 election, I won the election by so much. Everybody knows it.”

Donald Trump opted not to attend the dignified transfer for the seventh U.S. service member killed during the war with Iran.

Several prominent Trump officials attended Sergeant Benjamin N. Pennington’s funeral procession at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Monday, including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine. But Trump—who earlier this week was lambasted for wearing a self-aggrandizing baseball cap to another dignified transfer—was noticeably absent.

Instead, Trump was at his golf club in Doral, Florida, with lawmakers for the House Republicans’ annual policy retreat. His schedule indicated that he was flying back to Washington at the time of the procession.

Pennington died Sunday after sustaining injuries earlier this month at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. He was the seventh U.S. military member to die amid the current Middle East conflict. Six other slain troops were transferred to U.S. soil on Sunday, though the honorary service was overshadowed by Trump’s fashion choices, which included wearing a Trump-branded, white-and-gold baseball cap that he kept on even as the flag-covered coffins passed by.

The president has not been shy about his casual and callous disregard for America’s troops. He has requested that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades; refused to visit a World War II graveyard; derided deceased soldiers as “suckers” and “losers”; and claimed that the Presidential Medal of Freedom he awarded to one of his billionaire donors was “much better” than the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor. Trump doesn’t have any military experience of his own thanks to a conveniently timed bone spur diagnosis that helped him skirt the Vietnam War draft in 1968.

Meanwhile, the president is privately warming to the idea of deploying U.S. troops on the ground in Iran, showing “serious interest” in the possibility of keeping a small contingent there for “specific strategic purposes,” NBC News reported. Trump’s vision for Iran involves controlling the government, securing its uranium, and leeching off its oil supply, similar to how the White House infiltrated Venezuela in January, according to internal sources that spoke with NBC.

The U.S. could have had the schematics for Iran’s Shahed drones, but the Trump administration said no.

Roughly seven months ago, Ukrainian officials tried to sell the White House the technology to destroy Iran’s inexpensive, low-flying drones, going so far as to compile a PowerPoint presentation to sway the admin. The intel was battle-proven: Ukraine has more experience fighting Shaheds than practically any other country, downing the same design under Russia’s flag (Russia rebranded the military tech as “Geran drones”).

The decision to snub the offer is now being discussed as one of the biggest miscalculations thus far in the Iran war.

“If there’s a tactical error or a mistake we made leading up to this [war in Iran], this was it,” a U.S. official told Axios Tuesday.

Ukraine developed its own home-grown, low-cost interceptor drone to combat the design, along with air defense systems and sensors. At a closed-door White House meeting on August 18, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy offered the defense tech to Donald Trump. It was extended in an act of good will—an attempt to strengthen ties with the U.S. amid increasing tension over Russia’s invasion. Trump was reportedly interested and “asked his team to work on it, but they have done nothing,” an unnamed Ukrainian official told Axios.

The Shahed drones are capable of flying low and slow, a facet of their design that has made them difficult targets for U.S. air defenses, particularly as the U.S. and its allies run low on interceptor munitions.

Military officials have stressed since last weekend that fighting Iran has drastically depleted America’s missile defense systems. In a closed-door meeting with lawmakers on March 3, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine reportedly said that Iran’s Shahed attack drones had proved a more difficult problem than initially predicted.

In the days since, European Union defense officials have warned that the U.S. is no longer capable of supplying missiles to its allies amid its war with Iran, stressing that the continent would need to develop its own missile manufacturing sector in order to adequately fill its supply without Washington’s help.

One source told CNN that the U.S. has been “burning” through long-range precision-guided missiles in order to fend off the drones.