Another week, another Donald Trump-appointed temporary U.S. attorney out of a job.
This time, it’s Brad Schimel, who had been installed as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. It turns out the judges in the district just aren’t that into him and declined to extend his tenure.
Federal district court judges can appoint a U.S. attorney upon the expiration of the 120-day interim gig Schimel had if there is no Senate-confirmed candidate. Since the president hasn’t put Schimel’s name before the Senate, the district court judges were his only path to continued employment.
So, come March 17, Schimel is unemployed again, and the judges of the district were pretty pointed about the Trump administration’s attempts to stuff rando temps into these jobs.
“The Court awaits the nomination and confirmation of a full-time United States Attorney by the President and United States Senate,” said a statement posted on the Eastern District website.
It’s so weird that federal judges didn’t want to let an election denier who got his job by texting Attorney General Pam Bondi stick around for the next three years.
This temp gig was Schimel’s reward after getting absolutely murdered in his 2025 race for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat, even though he had multibillionaire tech titan Elon Musk on his side with millions in cash.
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It’s not clear if Bondi plans to try to keep Schimel in the job regardless. You’d think after losing in court about Bill Essayli in California, Alina Habba and New Jersey, Sigal Chattah and Nevada, Ryan Ellison in New Mexico, and, of course, Lindsey Halligan in Virginia, Trump and the Department of Justice would realize that this One Weird Trick they keep trying to pull simply isn’t working. The courts are simply not interested in assisting in the administration’s efforts to install unqualified hacks and skip the whole advice-and-consent thing in the Senate.
So Schimel is unemployed, but that’s probably still better than what’s going on with Ed Martin, who is facing disciplinary proceedings by the Washington D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility.
Mind you, this isn’t just saying that Martin is on the receiving end of a complaint to the bar. The D.C. bar has opened formal disciplinary proceedings stemming from an incident during Martin’s exceedingly brief tenure as interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C.
In March 2025, Martin decided it was a terrific idea to randomly send a threatening letter to the dean of Georgetown University Law School for not sufficiently eradicating DEI practices, while not really explaining what those forbidden practices might be. Then, before the dean even got back to him, Martin wrote again, saying his office would not hire students or graduates from Georgetown Law.
He also seemed to vaguely threaten that he could somehow take the school’s nonprofit status away if they didn’t comply.
“Answers to these questions appear to bear directly on Georgetown University’s status as a 501(c) nonprofit and its receipt of nearly $1billion of federal tax money in recent years,” Martin wrote.
So, that part was bad, what with basically violating the school’s First Amendment rights by using the full weight of the government to dictate what it could say. But how Martin responded when he learned that a retired judge had filed a bar complaint was much, much worse.
Martin learned of the complaint when he was still the interim U.S. attorney in D.C. Rather than responding to the allegations in the complaint, which is both the normal and required thing to do, Martin instead decided to compound his ethical problems by demanding, ex parte, a meeting with the chief judge of the D.C. federal circuit and the senior judges of the D.C. Court of Appeals.
For good measure, he copied the White House counsel and complained about the disciplinary counsel’s “uneven behavior.”
It isn’t clear if Martin thought this would somehow intimidate or impress the judges, but instead, judges kept telling him what students learn during their first week of law school: No, they could not meet with him without the other party being present—in this case, the disciplinary counsel. It’s not kosher for judges to have solo chats with one side.
But Martin kept pressing the issue, which just netted him another ethical violation for the board to charge him with. Good going, Ed.
Martin had a checkered past which included being found in civil contempt, a jury finding him liable for defamation, and getting in a wee bit of a jam over trying to delete or withhold government emails.
Martin was such a bad pick for a U.S. attorney job that even the Trump administration realized it and pulled his nomination. He was then shuffled over to the DOJ to be the pardons attorney and head of the Weaponization Working Group. But Martin managed to screw that up as well.
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It’s a real feat to be too toxic for this Justice Department, but Martin was stripped of his weaponization gig for reportedly leaking grand jury information, so he no longer gets to sit at the big kids’ table in the DOJ headquarters. He’s still the pardons attorney, but is that really a job these days when everyone knows the way you get a pardon is just by bribing Trump?
Who could have known that trying to get around the Senate and install unqualified cronies and election conspiracy theorists as top federal prosecutors would result in such chaos? At least some of them are getting fired—or, in the case of Martin, getting their just rewards.
Source:
www.dailykos.com
