Bill Pulte and Ed Martin's shitposting legal strategy
It's
backfired so spectacularly that now *they're* the ones being investigated.
Nov 26, 2025
Pulte
during his confirmation hearing in February. (Ricky Carioti/WaPo via Getty)
The end of the Jim Comey and Letitia James cases was a
humiliation for the Justice Department. It was also an object lesson in the
danger of relying on incompetent nitwits.
After weeks of watching Florida insurance lawyer Lindsey
Halligan flail around like a toddler trying to teach calculus, the cases
canceled out to a big fat zero. In some sense, this was a blessing, since it
spared Halligan the ignominy of watching some of the best attorneys in the
country dissect her hilariously botched prosecutions.
·
Nov 25
And it should serve as a warning about the perils of
crowdsourcing legal research to literal randos on the internet. But it
won’t.
Garbage in
Two of those self-appointed crowdsourcers are Federal
Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte and Justice Department hack of all
trades Ed Martin.
Pulte is the nepobaby of a homebuilding empire whose own
family has been loudly distancing itself from him for years. His latest fumbles
involve sharing confidential mortgage pricing
data between Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — two agencies he purports to lead
simultaneously — and talking the president into supporting
50-year mortgages, an idea so unpopular that the administration immediately
memory-holed it.
At 37, Pulte has no experience in the mortgage industry,
and it shows! But that’s not really relevant, since Pulte’s main job appears to
be pawing through confidential financial documents to invent crimes to pin on
Democrats. With his access to mortgage records of virtually every American, his
spelunking has led him to make “criminal referrals” of longtime Trump foes
Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff, Federal Reserve Board Member Lisa Cook, and
Rep. Eric Swalwell.
Real criminal referrals are made to the Justice Department
confidentially, but Pulte prefers to post his on X.
Despite his performative menace, though, none of Pulte’s
allegations have led to criminal prosecutions. After James’s lawyer Abbe Lowell
publicly dogwalked Pulte’s flimsy claims about his client, Halligan charged
James in connection with an entirely different property in Virginia.
The efforts to indict Schiff have come up empty, as well,
with federal prosecutors in Maryland pointedly refusing to charge the
California senator with the mortgage fraud Pulte trumpeted. US Attorney Kelly
Hayes reportedly expects to be fired for
failing to deliver the required political scalp, as was Halligan’s predecessor
Erik Seibert in Virginia.
Pulte’s trusty sidekick for this retribution roadtrip is Ed
Martin, a lawyer so patently unstable that the Republican Senate refused to
confirm him as US attorney for DC.
Ed Martin's
peculiar view of pardon power
·
Nov 14
Martin refers to himself as “Eagle Ed” after a disastrous association with Phyllis
Schlaffly’s Eagle Forum that led to a schism that pitted the doyenne of bigotry
against her own children. After a brief stint as interim US attorney in the
nation’s capital, he was shunted off to Justice Department headquarters and
given several titles, including United States Pardon Attorney, Special Attorney
for Mortgage Fraud, and Associate Deputy Attorney General Director of the
Weaponization Working Group.
Martin’s calling card is a vaguely menacing threat letter
posted to X citing “requests for information, clarification, and official
comment” and demanding that the recipients confess to various crimes against
woke. Recipients include Georgetown Law School, Chuck Schumer, and a medical
journal of pulmonary disorders called CHEST. He once threatened Wikipedia’s tax
exempt status for corrupting AI models by leaving biased information where
ChatGPT might scrape it.
“Hey @Wikipedia: you can run but you can’t hide!” he tweeted gleefully.
(As this newsletter was being finalized, Anna Bower of
Lawfare noted that Martin used his X account
earlier this month to boost a conspiracy theory accusing a woman who turned out
to be innocent of being the J6 pipebomber.)
In August, Martin sent AG James a letter saying he would
take it as “an act of good faith” if she would resign from office for the good
of the nation. He also showed up outside her Brooklyn home for a photoshoot with the New York Post.
James’s lawyers mocked him for sporting an “Inspector
Gadget-inspired beige trenchcoat, in the middle of an August summer day,”
although he seems to be aiming for TV detective Columbo instead.
Martin and Pulte have been cagey about the source of their
investigative leads. Pulte mumbles darkly about whistleblower protections,
although his agency maintains a tipline where anyone can submit accusations.
Martin’s letters allude cryptically to unnamed members of
the public demanding answers. But it turns out that their sources may be even
bigger cranks than they are.
Garbage out
Pulte and Martin featured prominently in James’s motion to
dismiss for outrageous government misconduct. She suggests that the FHFA
director “relied exclusively on a single fringe blogger’s ‘evidence’” and then
went rummaging through her private financial records to support his claim.
That blogger is Sam Antar, the convicted felon who
masterminded the spectacular fraud inside the Crazy
Eddie’s appliance chain. He’s now refashioned himself as a forensic accountant
helping to ferret out fraudulent schemes. His post on Roger Stone’s “Stone Zone” in
March contained many of the allegations that wound up in Pulte’s referral
letter. And he’s very PLEASE DON’T PUT IN THE PAPER THAT I GOT MAD about being
called “fringe.”
(X)
Martin and Pulte’s source for “dirt” on Schiff appears to
be a California realtor and longshot Republican congressional candidate named
Christine Bish. ABC reports that FBI investigators reached
out to Bish, who “expressed confusion about why federal investigators sought to
speak with her again, telling agents that she had repeatedly spoken with a man
she believed worked for the Department of Justice as Ed Martin’s lead
investigator, sources said.”
According to ABC and MSNOW, Bish has messaged with Pulte over X, as
well as with two men who represented themselves as Justice Department employees
working with Martin. One is Robert Bowes, who appears to work in the Office of
Personnel Management; the other is Scott Strauss, a former federal prosecutor
who left the government in 2020. Neither has any authority to investigate
Schiff, and yet both have spoken to Bish extensively about her allegations.
Indeed, Bowes has reportedly accessed grand jury information and discussed it on
right-wing LindellTV.
Bish confirmed to the Washington Post that she supplied the
highlighted Schiff mortgage document posted by Trump in July.
“I’m the author of the report that initiated the DOJ
referral, and I’m the key witness. I would know if this case was going
nowhere,” she tweeted on November 16. “I’ll be in
Maryland next week to lock down the key points.”
At least part of that is true. Bish was indeed in
Greenbelt, Maryland, on Thursday discussing the Schiff case — but not in
precisely the manner she’d hoped. Because all this freelancing by people who
are not part of the investigative team is distinctly unhelpful if
you’re actually trying to build a federal case. Those communications have to be
disclosed to the defendant during discovery, after which they tend to appear in
motions to dismiss for selective and vindictive prosecution and/or
prosecutorial misconduct. The Guardian reports the grand jury is now
investigating the potential illegal disclosure of grand jury materials.
So instead of her star turn as accusatory witness, Bish
found herself answering questions about her communications with Pulte and
Martin and their associated goons. Plus she got a fun party favor to take home
with her.
It’s a subpoena requesting all her communications with the
DO UR OWN RESEARCH crew, as well as any communications with the FHFA inspector
general. By sheer coincidence — or not! — Pulte just fired the FHFA inspector general, along
with multiple ethics officials at Fannie Mae who questioned the legality of
their boss rummaging through the financial records of the president’s enemies.
Multiple media outlets have reported that Deputy Attorney
General Todd Blanche is overseeing the inquiry into Pulte and Martin’s antics.
Turns out having two high profile cases fall apart on the same day makes the
DOJ a little jumpy about unqualified goobers mucking around in their cases.
And meanwhile, Rep. Eric Swalwell celebrated his entrance
into the California gubernatorial race by suing Pulte in federal court for
violating privacy laws and the First Amendment.
There is no universe in which this Justice
Department prosecutes administration officials for leaking grand jury
materials. But if these 4chan escapees wind up boning the DOJ’s political
persecutions, it will be some minute measure of justice.
