Washington, D.C. — Ed Martin doesn’t sound like a man retreating from public life. He stepped down last month as U.S. pardon attorney, but in a sprawling conversation with The Post’s Miranda Devine on the “Pod Force One” podcast, the 56-year-old former Justice Department insider sounded as combative as ever. The occasion was CBS’s “60 Minutes” season premiere, which featured a segment on “pardon brokers”—people charging exorbitant fees to exploit supposedly connections to Trump world and promises of clemency. Martin reacted with a mixture of contempt and weary recognition. “The season premiere of 60 Minutes has a story on pardons,and ‘Oh my gosh,there’s people making money on pardons,’” he vented. “To me, this is like the Russia hoax.” He dismissed the reporting by veteran correspondent Leslie Stahl: “I don’t believe what Leslie Stahl was peddling.” For Martin, the uproar over clemency-for-cash accusations was a predictable media circus, a moral panic designed to smear a president whose approach to pardons had been unfairly caricatured. He acknowledged that some figures in Trump’s orbit had tried to market their access, but he insisted the broader narrative was bloatedand misleading. The old Washington playbook, he suggested, was to turn a genuinely complicated, human institution—mercy—into a scandal. In his telling, what the press saw as corruption was often just influence-peddling by fringe operators, not a system overseen by Trump. He didn’t deny grifters exist; he denied that they representedthe administration. The fury, he argued, was manufactured,and the comparison to “Russia hoax” was deliberate: another instance of elites inventing a scandal to delegitimize Trump’s presidency. He spoke with the wounded righteousness of a man who believes history will absolve him, even if the cable chyrons never do.
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Martin reserved his sharpest scorn for the men at the center of the 60 Minutes segment: Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, two Republican operatives who have long hovered at the margins of conservative politics. Hidden cameras captured them boasting that they could “put pressure on the president from all directions in a consistent way, to force his hand.” The former pardon attorney laughed off the suggestion that these two could influence the White House. “Those are clowns,” he said, calling them “snake oil salesmen” who were selling false hope to desperate families. For Martin, their performances were less evidence of a corrupt pardon marketplace than proof that con artists will always flock to power. He juxtaposed them with his ownexperience grantshing clemency: during a 15-month stretch, he met with more than 1,000 individuals—inmates, family members, lawyers, victims—to parse whether a pardon or commutation was truly warranted. It was, he suggested, painstaking, often heartbreaking work, not the backroom dealing the media imagined. Trump, he argued, deserved credit rather than blame for changing how presidents handle pardons. Most of his predecessors—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, even Joe Biden—had slipped out pardons “ in the dark of night on their way out the door,” a last-minute, secretive exercise in political convenience. Trump, by contrast, had sought to make clemency part of a broader conversation about justice and mercy, even if that openness invited scrutiny. In Martin’s eyes,the same transparency that made Trump look reckless was actually an improvement on decades of cowardice. He insisted that the people rushing to judgment had never sat across from a prisoner’s mother, had never read the letters, had never felt the weight of deciding whether someone deserved another chance. That, he implied, was where the real story lived—not in hidden-camera stings outside a lobbyist’s office.
But theer conversation soon turned from defending Trump’s record to mourning what Martin saw als a squandered opportunity. Although he served in the Justice Department—not the White House—he spoke effortlessly abou the administration’s broader mission to dismantle the federal bureaucracy, and he admitted frankly that the energy of the first few months had not lasted. “I’m reminded, first of all, of our first two or three months, they were glorious,” he recalled, his voice brightening. “We were just firing everybody, getting rid of cases. We’re pardoning everybody. The energy was up,and the fearlessness was high.” Then came the inevitable comedown. “And after three months, everybody’s tired,and you sort of settle into a rhythm,and it changes.” He wasn’t just talking abou fatigue; he was diagnosing the gravitational pullof Washington institutionalism, which slowly absorbs even the most disruptive newcomers. In his view, the administration had squandered its scarcest resource—the opening weeks of a presidency—by failing to cut deeply enough. He pointed to the short-lived Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, which had identified thousands of cuts but had been, in his view, too timid. “In retrospect, I think you have to use that first period of time to cut even deeper,” he reflected. “I know everybody thinks, ‘Oh, DOGE, DOGE, DOGE.’ They identified a lot,and we got rid of a lot. I’m not saying we didn’t. But that’s the window where there’s real possibilities.” For Martin, revolutions require velocity; once the bureaucracy regains its breath, it reasserts control. The lesson was almost existential: change cannot be gradual; it must be relentless, because the window closes faster than anyone expects. He spoke like a man who had watched his own revolution get swallowed by the very machine he had hoped to dismantle—first through exhaustion, then through habit, finally through the quiet return of caution.
Martin also cast a satisfied glance backward at the targets of the Biden-era Justice Department, which he had studied closely during his time leading the administration’s Weaponization Working Group. He had reviewed the work of former special counsel Jack Smith, who had charged Trump in two federal cases, and Martin’s assessment was acid-capped:“I looked at Jack Smith’s inboxand this guy was a real nasty planner. Donald Trump was at the center of this grand thing. It would have been a show trial.” In other words, Martin believed Smith’s investigation was never genuinely about justice; it was about usingthe apparatus of the state to destroy a political enemy. He derived evident satisfaction from the fact that even former President Joe Biden had, in Martin’s phrase, been abandoned by“the left.” He called the 46th president“despicable,” an assessment both personal and historical.“At the end of his life, Joe Biden’s been sick,and there’s a lot of talk that he’s not welland all that,but I hope he hears it while he’s alive,” Martin said, in a striking moment of raw vindictiveness.“He is one of the great frauds,and I would say thatwould be enough to be one ofthe great frauds in American history,but he’s truly one of the evil frauds of American history. Did real evil, allowed real evil, and just a fraudulent guy.” The bile was unmistakable, but so was the sorrow underneath: for Martin, Biden represented not just a failed president, but a moral fraud who had weaponized justice against his rival while projecting compassion. To Martin, the special counsel investigations were not oversight; they were persecution, and Biden was not a healer;he was a man who had allowed the machinery of state vengeance to run wild in his name. That belief—that the old order had been cruel in the guise of kindness—gave Martin’s fury a moral edge, even to those who recoiled from his words.
Yet beneath the bluster,the interview revealed a more complicated figure. Martin is not a polished Washington operative;he speaks in torrents,mixing legalistic jargon with barstool bluntness,occasionally betraying the hurt of someone who believes he has been fighting the good fight and has been misunderstood. He sounded like a man who had spent 15 months staring into Americans’ darkest moments—families begging for second chances,prisoners claiming innocence,victims demanding finality—and had emerged with a conviction thatthe system,not the president,was broken. His dismissal of the pardon brokers was rooted in a certain professional pride::he had done the actual work,met the actual people,made the actual judgments,while men like Burkmanand Wohl merely sold fantasies. He also carried himself like someone conscious that his time in power had been brief and that the window for sweeping change had already closed. That awareness gave his complaints an elegiac undertone; he was not gloating über victories so much as grieving missed chances. When he spoke of the first months—“we were just firing everybody”—there was nostalgia in his voice,not just bravado. He knows revolutionaries rarely get second acts;;the bureaucracy outlasts them all. And so he clung tothe belief that history would vindicate Trump’s approach,even if the media never did. He was,in many ways,a man out of time: too combative for the old Washington, too disenchanted for the new one,convinced that his side had won the election but lost the momentum.
In the end,Martin’s monologue was less a defense of any specific pardon than a lament for a revolution interrupted. He wanted Trump to be remembered as the president who broke the clemency mold—who treated mercy as a right,not a favor—and he wanted the administration to be remembered asa force that had truly dismantled the administrative state,not merely trimmed it. Instead,he fears,the media will remember only the grifters,and history will remember a government that pulled its punches. Yet he refused to end on despair. By comparingthe pardon scandal to the Russia hoax,he signaled thathe believed this,too,would collapse under the weight of its own dishonesty. And by attacking Biden with such ferocity,he made clear thathe considered the old order not merely incompetent but malevolent—and therefore unworthy of mercy. Martin stepped down,but his voice remains that of a movement impatient with the limits of power,unsatisfied with its own accomplishments, and convinced that the only mistake was not going further. In six paragraphs,that’s the story::a true believer leaving office not with gratitude,but with a hunger for a deeper revolution—and an abiding fury at those who,in his view,stood in its way. The pardons, the bureaucracy, the special counsels—all were secondary to the core grievance,which was simply thatthe revolution had not been allowed to finish what it started. And until it did,men like Ed Martin would keep talking,keep fighting,keep insisting thathe media had gotten it all wrong—and thatthe only real crime was hesitating.
