U.S. Attorney Casts Office as ‘Guardians of Federal Workers’

Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, told his staff on Wednesday that his office was investigating an array of threats against federal employees and officials, including a suspected plot to attack Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Mr. Martin, in an email obtained by The New York Times, offered scant details about the plot, saying only that a woman had driven to Washington from Massachusetts last month with “incendiary weapons” and had been arrested. He did not identify the woman by name but said that prosecutors were planning to “charge her with every crime possible.”

Mr. Martin, whom President Trump nominated this week to run the prosecutors’ office full time, also said that he had recently spoken with a senior member of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency and discussed threats made against the agency’s employees. In a letter posted on social media and addressed to Mr. Musk this month, Mr. Martin promised to open an inquiry into allegations raised by Mr. Musk that some of his workers had faced harassment.

The central theme of Mr. Martin’s message was that he would not tolerate threats against anyone working for the federal government. Still, Mr. Martin, a Trump loyalist who was in the mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has proved to be somewhat selective about the question of which government employees deserve his protection.

“We are the DC U.S. Attorney’s office; we are the guardians of federal workers,” he wrote. “You and I must do whatever possible to assure government work is safe for all involved. We must protect our cops, our prosecutors, our DOGE employees, the President, and all other government employees.”

In the email, Mr. Martin revealed that the U.S. attorney’s office itself had been “flooded with threats” after he and his subordinates oversaw the dismissal of dozens of indictments stemming from the attack on the Capitol.

In making that disclosure, Mr. Martin used the sort of politically charged language that Mr. Trump has often employed to support the rioters. He wrote that the threats to his office had been made against “those who helped free the January 6th prisoners.”

As part of Mr. Trump’s sweeping grant of clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with Jan. 6, Mr. Martin personally dismissed some criminal cases in which rioters were accused of attacking Capitol Police officers. And he stood by as the Justice Department fired more than a dozen prosecutors in his office who worked on Capitol riot cases.

Since taking control of the U.S. attorney’s office last month, Mr. Martin has made a habit of sending unusual, almost daily, emails to his staff. The email on Wednesday was particularly odd for the way that it spoke openly about the sensitive investigation into the threat against Mr. Hegseth and suggested that Mr. Martin was dealing directly with senior members of Mr. Musk’s team.

In another unusual move, Mr. Martin disclosed in his email that he had reached out to Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, to investigate what he described as threats Mr. Schumer had made against Supreme Court justices.

In March 2020, as the court heard arguments in a major abortion case, Mr. Schumer spoke at an abortion rights rally, appearing to address two conservative justices, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh, and telling them they had “released the whirlwind” and would “pay the price.”

Mr. Martin apparently sought to connect those statements by Mr. Schumer to the arrest more than two years later of a California man, Nicholas Roske, whom the police caught near Justice Kavanaugh’s home in Maryland armed with a gun and a knife and carrying zip ties. Mr. Roske is currently awaiting trial on federal assassination charges.

A spokesman for Mr. Schumer did not respond to a message seeking comment.

The email about the threats came at a challenging moment for Mr. Martin, who has had a chaotic relationship with some of the hundreds of prosecutors serving under him.

On Tuesday, Denise Cheung, who oversaw the office’s criminal division, abruptly resigned after declining a request from superiors in the Justice Department to freeze assets of a government contractor, saying there was insufficient evidence to do so. In her resignation letter, Ms. Cheung described how Mr. Martin had asked her to step down after she refused to order a bank to freeze the contractors’ accounts.