In an unusual email, the U.S. attorney in Washington, Ed Martin, spoke openly about a sensitive investigation into a threat against Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary.
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.