CNN’s Elie Honig Sounds ‘Alarm Bells’ Over Trump DOJ Appointee: ‘Toxic Blend of Traits’ and ‘No Qualifications’

CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig has a solid track record of calling balls and strikes in his television commentary, often taking a more moderate stance than other panelists at the table with him. But the recent actions of Ed Martin, President Donald Trump’s nominee and the current interim acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, had Honig taking an uncharacteristically alarmed tone.

Anderson Cooper introduced the segment on Tuesday’s episode of AC360 by recapping some of Martin’s exploits, including being an organizer of the “Stop the Steal” movement (including speaking at a rally in Washington on Jan. 5, 2021), representing some of the January 6th rioters, urging judges to remove some of the few remaining restrictions on the pardoned rioters, and then just on Monday, tweeting a statement in which he declared that the U.S. Attorneys were “President Trumps’ lawyers” (punctuation error in original) and attacked the AP.

Martin also “became the first U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., in at least 50 years, to be appointed without experience as a judge or a federal prosecutor, according to The Washington Post,” said Cooper, and “makes no bones about where his loyalty lies,” declaring his intention to go after any critics of the president or DOGE chief Elon Musk.

“Umm, is he qualified to be the U.S. Attorney?” Cooper asked Honig.

“No!” Honig said emphatically. “But if only he was just unqualified, we’d be in a better position where we are here.”

Honig, a former federal prosecutor, told Cooper that after taking “a deep dive on Ed Martin over the last several weeks since he took office” he was “sounding the alarm”:

I’m sounding the alarm. I’m sounding the alarm bells here, and I don’t do that often. Ed Martin brings a toxic blend of traits to the job.

One, he’s never done the job before. Now, that’s not automatically disqualifying, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and he doesn’t understand the big principles as reflected in what you just showed. Calling yourself the president’s lawyer goes against everything the Justice Department is about.

Two, he brings this startling arrogance to the job. If you look at his public statements, everything is chest beating. Everything is “I’m going to tear you down.” It is not becoming of a prosecutor. And it suggests to me an amateur who is trying to act like a tough guy.

And then finally, and I think most problematically, he is explicitly political. He is bringing a political agenda to seek out and seek vengeance on those who have wronged Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Cooper asked Honig to explain what the position of U.S. Attorney was supposed to be.

Honig described the job duties: “You get the privilege — it sounds corny — but you get to stand up in court and say, ‘representing the United States of America,'” and mentioned two components. The first was “the criminal prosecution angle, where you’re supposed to bring cases without regard to politics,” but Martin “is doing the or threatening to do the exact opposite,” and the second was the civil cases where the U.S. Attorneys defend the federal government in lawsuits.

“But the whole notion of ‘without fear or favor’ — that’s another cliche we like — I mean, his public statements have been almost entirely geared towards ‘I will avenge Donald Trump, I will avenge Elon Musk, I will avenge DOGE,'” Honig added.

“It’s interesting because even [Attorney General] Pam Bondi said during her confirmation hearing that her client is the people of America,” Cooper remarked.

Bondi was right on that issue, said Honig. “She needs to reel in this guy, Ed Martin, because Pam Bondi has been a prosecutor for a long time. He has not. And I think that’s a very telling difference right there.”

“And just in a traditional presidency,” said Cooper, “the Justice Department, they’re not supposed to even have a whiff of White House politics. They’re not supposed to have connections at all.”

“You’re supposed to be separate,” Honig agreed, and “traditionally” there were “policies in place” that limited the contact between the White House and DOJ.

It was “outrageous” that Martin was posting comments that were “basically threatening people,” said Honig, including Special Counsel Jack Smith, anyone who had anything to do with any Trump prosecution or any January 6th prosecution. Martin had defended January 6 cases and then “the first thing he did when he took office was fire a whole bunch of January 6th prosecutors,” which was “obviously” a conflict of interest, but “then it’s not enough for him to just fire these people, he then said, and we’re going to investigate you all criminally, you prosecutors.”

Cooper brought up how Martin was still just an interim officeholder and would have to be confirmed by the Senate to be the permanent U.S. Attorney.

“He will. He will need a majority vote in the Senate,” Honig agreed. “Look, I believe he has no qualifications to do this job. I believe regardless of which party the senators are coming from, they should vote no, especially given the way he’s handled it thus far. But basically every nominee above the Matt Gaetz line so far has gotten through.”

Making the situation all the more serious, Honig said, was that this specific U.S. Attorney’s Office was “one of the most sensitive and important federal prosecutor’s offices in the country,” because it was in D.C., “so all the political stuff passes through there in some respect,” like the January 6th cases.

Another problematic issue was how Martin “seems to be aggressively policing speech,” said Honig. “One of the things he’s threatened to do is he said, I’m opening a criminal investigation of Chuck Schumer and Representative Garcia, both of whom made inflammatory political comments. But that’s not criminal. He is trying to take speech he does not like and threaten to make it criminal, using his badge. He sees himself as almost this private police force for Trump and for Elon Musk.”

“I see very bad things and very dangerous things ahead, especially if he gets confirmed,” Honig concluded.

Watch the clip above via CNN.