Donald Trump’s nominee to be one of the nation’s most powerful prosecutors has apologized for praising a Nazy sympathizer.
Ed Martin, who is nominee to be U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia and also holds the interim role claimed he was unaware of the views of Timothy Hale-Cusanelli—who he praised during an evening at Trump’s New Jersey golf course. As well as being an avowed follower of Hitler, Hale-Cusanelli was a January 6 felon.
“I denounce everything about what that guy said, everything about the way he talked, and all as I’ve now seen it,” Martin said about Hale-Cusanelli in an interview Thursday with Forward. “At the time, I didn’t know it.”
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“I’m sorry,” he added.
Martin emceed an awards ceremony last August at the Bedminster club and described Hale-Cusanelli as “extraordinary.” It is unclear if he was wearing his Hitler mustache at the time.
Hale-Cusanelli, who was handed a four-year sentence in 2022 for participating in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol but was released in Dec. 2023, spoke at the Bedminster event and at a June fundraiser at the same venue.
In court filings, the Justice Department called Hale-Cusanelli an “avowed white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer.” Prosecutors noted that he repeatedly made racist statements to coworkers at a naval weapons station, among them “Hitler should have finished the job” and “babies born with any deformities or disabilities should be shot in the forehead.”
The indictment also included photographs of Hale-Cusanelli with a “Hitler mustache.”
Martin—a Trump ultra-loyalist who as prosecutor has sent threatening letters to the publishers of medical journals to ask them about “viewpoint diversity”—said he should have been wiser.
“But,” he added, “I certainly didn’t know all the terrible things that he said and how he had acted. I think that’s terrible, and I denounced it completely. I hate it. I hate that it happened.”
Martin, who is awaiting confirmation to be Washington D.C.’s U.S. attorney, said he had explained the issue to Senate staffers.
Martin has also come under scrutiny for failing to disclose 150 appearances on Russian state media in his first disclosure forms after his nomination. He appeared on several channels, including notorious Putin propaganda outlet RT, as a guest commentator from August 2016 to April 2024 and appeared on them more often than any other major cable network during that span.
