The Revenge
Plot
Inside the
battle at the Justice Department to get Trump what he wants.
By Andrew Rice, a
features writer at New York Magazine
In January 2025, as Donald Trump
prepared to retake office, the federal prosecutors handling the January 6
trials carried on with the grinding work of justice. Knowing the new president
would likely undo some or all of their convictions through pardons, they were
trying as much as anything else to create a court record for posterity. The
record reflects that a defendant named Jared Wise was one of the last J6ers to
go on trial. Wise was alleged to have followed the mob into the Capitol and was
caught on body-cam footage shouting encouragement to rioters as they assaulted
the police. The government made the case that these crimes were particularly
egregious because Wise was a former FBI agent: He knew the law and had betrayed
an oath to uphold it. “The evidence over the course of the trial,” prosecutor
Taylor Fontan said in her closing argument to the jury, “showed that it was
Jared Wise that was attacking our country, our Constitution, the country that
he swore to protect.”
The case rested on the evening of
January 17, a Friday, and the jury was set to begin deliberations after a
three-day weekend. But that Monday, January 20, Trump took the oath of office
in the rotunda of the building Wise had stormed and went to work on turning the
Department of Justice inside out. By Tuesday morning, when Wise returned to the
federal district courthouse in Washington, D.C., an incoming Trump official, Ed
Martin Jr., had ordered the prosecution to move to dismiss all the charges. “I
hope that is it,” the judge said as he gaveled the hearing to a close. Wise put
a MAGA hat on his bald head and approached Fontan. “Have a nice life,” he said,
and then he walked out of the courthouse, free. Ten days later, Fontan was
fired. “The sequence of events,” Wise soon wrote on X, “could not have been
more miraculous.”
Most defendants stay quiet as they
prepare for trial, but Wise had been displaying an unrepentant attitude since
the previous November, starting with a celebratory post on X the day Trump won
the election. His account, @TheWiseJared, decried the “tyrants in the Biden
Administration,” “partisan DOJ prosecutors,” and his former colleagues in the
Bureau, which he described as rotten from top to bottom. (“The ‘rank and file’
are just as complicit,” he wrote.) By drawing attention to his case, Wise
seemed to be seeking more than clout — he was raising his hand for future
service.
“As the only #J6 defendant who also
happens to be a former FBI agent, I would love to somehow be part of this
effort to expose misbehavior, corruption and political bias inside the FBI,”
Wise posted the day after his case was dropped. “These people have been abusive
to the American citizenry for too long, and it’s time.” When another user
reposted him and tagged Elon Musk and Kash Patel, Trump’s designated FBI
director, Wise responded, “I’m ready!!”
In Trump’s first term, there had been
a constant struggle within the Justice Department over the proper limits of the
president’s authority and the rule of law. It came to a head a couple of days
before January 6, when almost the entire DoJ leadership threatened to resign en
masse over Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. With his comeback, the
argument was resolved. In the new Justice Department, there was no dispute that
Trump was boss; the only question would be who got the credit for satisfying him.
His first day, Trump signed an executive order that told the Justice Department
and intelligence agencies to reverse “an unprecedented, third-world
weaponization of prosecutorial power.” In addition to absolving the
perpetrators of crimes committed on his behalf, he moved to investigate the
investigators of those crimes, directing the snake to eat its own tail.
The term weaponization was
one of Trump’s rhetorical tricks, a fancy way of saying “I know you are, but
what am I?” So what if prosecutors had indicted him on four occasions and
convicted him of 34 state felony counts? That just meant the government was
criminal. During his campaign, Trump had promised retribution. They had tried
to get him, so he would get them back. Within MAGA circles, people talked of a
“Grand Conspiracy,” a yearslong “deep state” plot to take down Trump that
encompassed multiple FBI directors, spy chiefs, special counsels, and all the
other hoaxers, probers, and impeachers who had tried to hold Trump accountable.
These so-called weaponizers could now be forced to face consequences.
Much to his frustration, even as
president, Trump couldn’t just wish it to be. He needed detectives to dig up
evidence, however flimsy, and lawyers to draft warrants and indictments,
however crackpot, and a new group of yes-men and yes-women.
Trump restaffed the upper echelons of
the Justice Department with veterans of his legal-defense team. At the top was
Attorney General Pam Bondi, who had represented him in impeachment No. 1. She
was never a strong presence inside Main Justice, the department’s Washington
headquarters — even before Trump fired her after months of mounting discontent.
The person who has been effectively running the department all along is Acting
Attorney General Todd Blanche, who had learned how to respond to Trump’s moods
during the many weeks he was his lead attorney in his Manhattan trial. (He has
now been given the top job on at least an interim basis.) As deputy AG, Blanche
oversaw Patel, the former podcaster and grand-jury witness in Trump’s federal
criminal case in Florida, who was installed across the street at the J. Edgar
Hoover Building.
He also oversaw Emil Bove, the most
combative cross-examiner for the defense team at the Manhattan trial, who acted
as his hammer inside Main Justice for the tumultuous first few months, helping
to conduct a massive purge of career civil servants at the DoJ and FBI. Over
the past year, the Trump team has started to refill the law-enforcement
bureaucracy with opportunists and true-believing recruits — the many foot
soldiers whose names are unknown to the public. Some of these people have deep
personal vendettas of their own. Last spring, @TheWiseJared went quiet, then
private. The man behind the account had been hired for a job at Main Justice,
working as a senior adviser in Blanche’s office. Wise was assigned to a newly
constituted entity called the Weaponization Working Group.
Bondi created the working group in a
departmental memo, giving it a list of targets with three of Trump’s prior
legal pursuers at the top: Jack Smith, the special counsel who twice indicted
him; Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who convicted him; and New
York attorney general Letitia James, who had brought a civil fraud case against
him and his family. The group operated from Blanche’s office space on the
fourth floor of Main Justice, but its amorphous membership brought together
officials from other parts of the department who were interested in more
general varieties of persecution, such as the alleged weaponization of the FBI
against religious conservatives and school-board protesters. Wise was looking
into the prosecutions of J6ers like himself. The group’s final objectives were
left vague. Trump’s executive order had called for “appropriate action to
correct past misconduct,” but the department would determine whether that
action would take the form of more firings or something more serious. Everyone
knew what the president really wanted: arrests.
The day-to-day management of the
working group was handed over to Martin, a conservative lawyer and champion of
the J6 defendants. He needed a place to land after a stint as acting U.S.
Attorney in D.C. (His bludgeoning behavior — he invoked his prosecutorial
authority to threaten universities, medical journals, and Senator Chuck Schumer
— made it impossible for him to stay permanently in that Senate-confirmed
post.) Martin initially described himself to the press as the “captain” of the
group and suggested that exposing weaponization might be an end in itself. “If
they can’t be charged, we will name them,” he said, “and in a culture that
respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed.” But shame was not all
Martin had in mind.
Neil W. McCabe, a national reporter
for the Real America’s Voice television news channel who worked as an aide to
Martin at the Justice Department until last December, says Martin told
higher-ups he needed an investigative staff to pursue prosecutions. His
attempts to muscle up the working group met immediate resistance from Blanche’s
staff members, including Bove, who supervised the group’s activities until he
left the department to take a seat as a judge on the federal bench. They made
little secret of their contempt for Martin, a serial failed candidate for
office whose most important previous job in government, as chief of staff to
the governor of his home state of Missouri, ended in a scandal related to
accusations of workplace retaliation. “They didn’t respect Ed as an attorney,”
says McCabe. “It wasn’t informed by anything other than their innate
obnoxiousness.” Martin studied at a Jesuit university in Rome and had prepared
for his weaponization role by reading books in Italian on the methods used to take
on the Mafia. He talked with Trump frequently on the phone and understood his
orders. “People on Blanche’s staff, and maybe Blanche himself, didn’t
understand that this is a guy who is catching arrows for Trump,” McCabe says.
Someone who both served as a federal
prosecutor in Trump’s first term and has been identified as a potential target
of retribution in the second tells me he divided the current leadership into
“competent and incompetent villains.” Whereas in the first go-round, Main
Justice was populated by plenty of starchy Federalist Society members who saw
Trump as a crude means to advance an ideological project, in Trump II, the
conservative bar was no longer sending its best. Besides Martin, the
weaponization meetings at times included a former West Virginia secretary of
state who claimed the CIA had stolen the 2020 election; a former J6 defense
attorney who had described federal prosecutors as “evil people” who would “put
you on a cattle car to Auschwitz”; and a former Oregon judge who refused to
marry gay couples before being suspended from the bench for alleged incidents
of misconduct, such as invoking his legal authority during an argument with a
referee officiating his son’s soccer game.
Martin set himself up in an office
that he named the “Freedom Suite.” Blanche worked down the hall in a room
decorated with World War II propaganda posters warning that loose lips sink
ships. In an adjacent ceremonial conference room, he hung giant gilt-framed
photographs of himself in the Oval Office and portraits of a pair of attorneys
general from Lyndon Johnson’s administration. The décor seemed designed to
display both his proximity to the president and his conversion narrative:
Famously, Blanche had been a registered Democrat before he took Trump as a
client and saw the evil of weaponization. To some, this sowed doubt about the
depth of his belief. At a going-away party last year, a former top aide to
Bondi gave a speech in which he joked he had always heard Republicans and
Democrats couldn’t get along but that wasn’t true because he had worked with
Blanche. The deputy AG flipped him the bird.
When it came to weaponization, his
allies say, Blanche was totally committed to carrying out the president’s
order, but he wanted to be careful about it. “How do you hold people
accountable for the terrible, awful behavior and the violation of other people’s
rights to serve a political agenda without becoming the weaponizers yourself?”
says a department official involved in the initiative. “This is where the
source of tension comes in.” This did not mean Blanche was a squish. Real
prosecutors put points on the board by securing indictments and winning
convictions. The potential retribution target classifies Blanche as a competent
villain and says he thinks that “Blanche wants to put people in jail.”
Through the summer and fall, the
Weaponization Working Group gathered evidence on Trump’s targets. The idea was
that Wise and his colleagues would put together a series of investigative
reports, including one on January 6, that could potentially build a public case
for redress and prosecutions. The team interviewed J6 defendants, Stop the
Steal activists, former FBI agents who said they had been fired for their
beliefs, and other people who had grievances against the government, such as a
lawyer for the widow of a locally prominent Arkansas gun enthusiast who was
killed in a federal raid on his home. They coordinated with a similar team at
the FBI, which was scouring records of its multiple investigations of Trump
under previous leadership. Reviewing Smith’s case alone meant going through
terabytes of data.
Meanwhile, the scope of weaponization
kept expanding. Trump’s executive order dictated a whole-of-government attack,
so a parallel “interagency” initiative was launched, looping in like-minded
appointees at the White House, IRS, Department of Homeland Security, Office of
the Director of National Intelligence, and CIA. Wise was included in some of
these gatherings. For as dramatic as its ambitions were, the interagency effort
mostly amounted to meetings and resolutions to have more meetings. The work of weaponization
was slow, and Trump was growing impatient.
“He is bitching about ‘Where are the
fucking perp walks?’” says Steve Bannon, the talk-show host and informal Trump
adviser, himself a former federal-prison inmate, thanks to his refusal to
testify before the January 6 committee. (Blanche ordered the department to drop
its opposition to Bannon’s appeal of the contempt charge he was convicted on.)
It’s not like there weren’t real investigations underway. The U.S. Attorney in
northern Virginia was building a case against former FBI director James Comey
for allegedly lying to a congressional committee in 2020. Prosecutors in
Maryland were preparing to indict former national security adviser John Bolton
on charges of mishandling classified documents — an irony Trump had to
appreciate. But, as always, he wanted more action, more bombast. And he knew
where to look for it: the Freedom Suite.
In August, a source close to him says,
Martin was at a meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building when he was
summoned across the street to the White House for an audience with the
president’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. The weaponization czar was given an
additional title: special attorney for mortgage fraud. (The DoJ says the
authority came not from the White House but from Bondi.) Tish James had won a
huge civil judgment against Trump related to mortgages on his real estate.
Martin could help Trump screw unto others.
DoJ special attorney Ed Martin checks
out Tish James’s Brooklyn home in August 2025. Photo:
EdMartinDOJ/X
In a break from typical Department of
Justice conduct, Martin made a show of his detective work. He took an excursion
to inspect a Brooklyn brownstone James owned while wearing a trench coat on an
88-degree day. Photos ended up in the New York Post. (He said
on X it was a tribute to an actor relative who once played the character
Lieutenant Columbo in a play.) He sent a letter to James’s attorney calling on
her to resign “for the good of the state and nation.” His X feed was littered
with vengeful Bible verses and cryptic signals to his followers (“It’s time”).
Later in August, Martin offered a
bright greeting on X. “Good morning, America. How are ya’?” read his post, and
below the text was a photo taken in his office. He was talking across a
conference table to an attentive co-worker: Wise. Almost as quickly as the post
went up, though, Martin deleted it. Wise’s involvement was apparently one thing
he did not want to advertise to the world.
wise had been an FBI agent for 13
years, from the high point of the “War on Terror” to the beginning of the first
Trump term, a period coinciding with the Bureau’s blundering entry into the
2016 presidential election and all that has flowed from it: Hillary Clinton’s
email-server problems, the Comey letter, the Steele dossier, the Strzok and
Page texts, Robert Mueller’s report, the Ukraine impeachment, Hunter Biden’s
laptop, the Mar-a-Lago raid, the whole ever-morphing mess that continues to
this day. The downward arc of Wise’s career intersected with the rise of the
MAGA movement and its conspiratorial obsession with the “deep state,” which
eventually led him into the Capitol.
Before he became one of the accused,
though, Wise had moments of distinction as an agent. A former Bureau official
who worked with him describes Wise as smart, detail-oriented, and “passionate
when he had his mind set on a project.” He concludes, “If that project is going
after Donald Trump’s political enemies, he’s certainly capable of doing it
well.”
Wise comes from a strict religious
background. His family, which owns a nut farm in Modesto, California, belonged
to a sect called the Old German Baptist Brethren, who wear modest clothing and
shun television and other influences of modernity. But Wise broke away, went to
college, and worked in finance in Silicon Valley. He was an M.B.A. student on
9/11 and was one of the many thousands of young Americans who applied to work
at the FBI amid the patriotic flush that followed. In this period — as it had been
since the days of J. Edgar Hoover — the Bureau was a conservative, hierarchical
organization not unlike a church, with its own doctrines and a mission to act
as the first line of defense against foreign threats to the homeland.
Wise started in the Washington field
office in 2004, working public-corruption cases, but soon won a coveted
assignment to a counter-terrorism squad. He studied Arabic. He traveled to more
than a dozen countries on assignments, some as a member of the Fly Team, a unit
that responds to crimes overseas. By Wise’s account, he “was deployed to Libya
and led” the FBI investigation after the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in
Benghazi. (Some former colleagues dispute the importance of his role in this
operation.) He spent several months in Yemen, where the U.S. was regularly
conducting drone strikes, an experience that appeared to leave him disturbed.
In the summer of 2016, Wise left a
post in Jerusalem to be a supervisor on the Joint Terrorism Task Force in the
New York field office. That September, he was grilling with a friend on the
terrace of his Chelsea apartment when he heard an explosion. In flip-flops and
shorts, he rushed to a crime scene on 23rd Street, where someone had planted a
pressure-cooker bomb beside a dumpster. No one was killed, but 30 bystanders
were injured. Wise coordinated the initial FBI response and managed a squad
that helped track down a suspect named Ahmad Khan Rahimi, a radicalized U.S.
citizen. Prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, led by Assistant
U.S. Attorney Emil Bove, convicted Rahimi, who was sentenced to two life terms
in prison.
Still, some of Wise’s superiors at the
FBI had problems with his work as a squad supervisor. “A number of things fell
through the cracks,” says a former colleague. Wise also felt he deserved
something better than the position he had been assigned monitoring homegrown
extremists. “This happens in the Bureau all the time,” says the former
colleague. “It’s called orders.” Wise made it known around the
office that he was willing to take the job and shove it.
Outside the office, the contest
between Trump and Clinton was in full swing. The FBI, which usually at least
pretended to stay out of politics, was conducting simultaneous investigations
involving both candidates. (“Crossfire Hurricane,” its counterintelligence
probe into Trump’s links with Russia, was opened that July.) Plenty of agents
were Trump supporters, but Wise was unusually open about it. He dropped in on
Trump’s victory party in Manhattan that Election Night and sent friends photos
of himself from one of the inauguration balls.
Wise would later claim in court papers
that his pro-Trump views contributed to his divorce from the Bureau. He alleged
he had overheard “members of the FBI senior leadership disparage Trump” while
preparing to brief him prior to his taking office. He claimed he’d had a
conflict with his immediate superior over his advocacy for one of the agents on
his squad, who had been blocked from accepting an offer to work for Trump aide
Sebastian Gorka in the White House. His resentments festered to the point that one
day in April 2017, according to co-workers, Wise put his gun, badge, and
government-car keys on his desk and walked out the door to go to a bar — a
shocking departure from the protocol for quitting the FBI.
Wise moved out to Bend, Oregon, where
he worked on a tech start-up with some old friends from Modesto. He had a big
white dog and liked to go hiking in the mountains. Someone who was friendly
with him at the time recalls he was always listening to conservative talk
radio, ingesting its obsession with the FBI and the Russia “hoax.” Wise would
send out mass texts spouting conspiracies involving Comey and his successor,
Chris Wray. “I was like, ‘Jared, I work here,’” says a former colleague who
stopped talking to him at this point.
In early 2018, around a year after
Wise quit the FBI, he found a new outlet for his energies as an investigator.
He took a job as a contractor working for Project Veritas, the video sting
operation run by right-wing stuntman James O’Keefe, who was trying to
transform his media organization into something resembling a
political-intelligence service. With mercenary entrepreneur Erik Prince,
O’Keefe had hired a British former spy to build out a network of undercover
operatives. Wise was one of them; a Signal message O’Keefe later shared online
indicates Wise’s code name was “Bend Ghazi.”
In April 2018, a bearded man with
floppy hair and glasses approached the receptionist’s desk at the Ohio
Federation of Teachers Building in Cleveland. The individual said something
about wanting to report an incident of child abuse. The receptionist thought he
seemed evasive and told him to make an appointment for a meeting, but he never
returned. The suspicious incident turned out to be part of a broader Project
Veritas operation meant to embarrass the teachers union. The Cleveland Plain
Dealer printed a fuzzy still of the unidentified man taken from
security-cam footage. It was Wise wearing a ludicrous wig. He later complained
to O’Keefe that the operation was “reckless” and said he did not want to be
“utilized in a careless manner.” Feeling his cover was blown, he quit, and the
collaboration between Project Veritas and Prince’s group soon dissolved in
acrimony.
Wise spent the next couple of years
bouncing between Bend and an apartment in Texas, where he liked to spend
winters. He told acquaintances that he thought the U.S. was headed for another
civil war. When Trump, claiming the vote was rigged, refused to concede his
loss in the 2020 election, it seemed the crisis had arrived. Wise bought a
plane ticket to Washington as soon as Trump tweeted out that he would be
holding a rally to protest the certification of his defeat, promising it would
“be wild.”
Wise and a high-school friend watched
Trump’s speech on January 6 from a spot near the Washington Monument and then
walked to the Capitol to check out the protest. When they arrived at the
western front, where the stage for Joe Biden’s inauguration had been erected,
they heard explosions, which turned out to be stun grenades hurled by the
Capitol Police. Wise’s friend hid behind a tree, then went to a McDonald’s to
get away from the scene. Wise moved in the direction of the explosions. He
climbed some stairs behind the scaffolding, and at 2:23 p.m. — ten minutes
after the Capitol was first breached — he entered through an open door and
thrust his arms in the air.
Beyond the Senate crypt, a ceremonial
space, some police officers had set up a defensive line — Vice-President Mike
Pence was being evacuated at that moment — and they pushed Wise and the other
rioters back. At this point, Wise turned around and left the building, exiting
via a broken window. But he roamed the exterior of the property for a couple
more hours. “I’m former law enforcement,” Wise taunted one officer. “You’re
disgusting. You are the Nazi. You are the Gestapo. You can’t see it because
you’re chasing your pension, right?”
Wise ignored commands from the
officers to move away. When the riot police came forward a minute later holding
plastic shields and swinging truncheons, he watched the mêlée from the fringes.
He later testified that the scene was “1,000 times worse” than anything he
witnessed in his counterterrorism work overseas. “I think I was as angry as I
have ever been in my entire life,” he said. “I couldn’t believe that people
would be attacked like that in America.”
One of the police officers fell and
was pummeled by a rioter. “Yeah, fuck them!” Wise shouted. “Kill ’em! Kill ’em!
Kill ’em!”
Ed Martin’s mortgage-fraud crusade was
instigated by an unlikely agent of retribution: the Federal Housing Finance
Agency. Its head, the Florida homebuilder Bill Pulte, made a series of
criminal-mortgage-fraud referrals to the Justice Department alleging false
representations in second-home purchases by Trump irritants or enemies,
including Adam Schiff, the senator from California, and Lisa Cook, one of
Biden’s appointees to the board of the Federal Reserve. In late summer, Martin
was in regular contact with the U.S. Attorney in Maryland, where Schiff owned a
residence, and FBI agents in Atlanta, where Cook had purchased the condo that
is at the center of Trump’s effort to fire her. (A lawsuit over her removal is
with the Supreme Court; Cook has not been charged with a crime.)
Tish James, however, was the trophy
Trump really wanted on the Oval Office wall. When compared with the pattern of
deceit she had alleged against the Trump Organization, what she was suspected
of doing was trifling. In taking out a $109,600 mortgage for a house in
Norfolk, Virginia, James had signed a document representing it as a vacation
home, thus making it eligible for a favorable interest rate, when in fact her
great-niece ended up living in it and paying a small amount of rent. But Martin
went to work on turning the technicality into a felony case, in collaboration
with FBI, IRS, and federal housing agents.
After Martin was appointed to head the
mortgage-fraud probes, Blanche summoned him for what a source familiar with the
events describes as a “‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ meeting.” (The DOJ
says Martin was reprimanded for “not producing any results. For leaking. And
for other significant missteps.”) But Martin’s presence in the Freedom Suite
had to be tolerated so long as Trump wanted him there. Erik Siebert, the U.S.
Attorney in northern Virginia, the office that initially handled the James investigation,
opposed a prosecution. The evidence suggested that the error she made in her
loan paperwork could be defended as a mistake, and the amount of money she had
saved was tiny, just $800 the first year. Siebert, a career prosecutor, was
close to Blanche, and he signaled to his subordinates that the deputy AG was
backing his decisions. But Martin and Pulte were rumored to be pushing Trump in
the opposite direction. It didn’t help that Siebert was also moving cautiously
with the Comey case. (Complicating matters, Comey’s son-in-law was a prosecutor
in the northern Virginia office.)
One Friday afternoon, Siebert
announced to his shocked staff that he was resigning. “He didn’t quit, I fired
him!” Trump posted that night on Truth Social. The next day, the president
drafted a direct message to Bondi. In what was reportedly a moment of confusion
about how to use his own social-media platform, he posted it on Truth Social:
“Nothing is being done. What about
Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia [sic]??? They’re all guilty as
hell,” Trump complained. He had decided to replace Siebert, “A Woke RINO, who
was never going to do his job,” with Lindsey Halligan, an insurance attorney
who had previously played a minor role on his legal team. “We can’t delay any
longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice,
and indicted me (5 times!)” — technically, it was four — “OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE
MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!! President DJT.”
Halligan made sure indictments of
Comey and James were returned lickety-split. She presented the Comey case to
the grand jury herself, making some beginner’s mistakes. A federal judge later
found the record showed “a disturbing pattern of profound investigative
missteps,” and a different judge declared Halligan had been unlawfully
appointed, resulting in the dismissal of the cases against both Comey and
James. But the department did not give up. It is actively pursuing an appeal of
the dismissals and has sent every signal that it will try to revive the cases
if the courts rule in its favor. Halligan tried to reindict James twice.
Citizens on grand juries voted to reject the charges both times.
These reversals did not put a stop to
Martin’s efforts to make the president happy. He just skipped to another one of
Trump’s pet issues: “election integrity.” Over the course of October and
November, Martin huddled again with the FBI in Atlanta as well as with attorney
Kurt Olsen, a 2020 election denier working in the White House, and Thomas
Albus, the U.S. Attorney in St. Louis, where Martin had deep political ties. It
would later emerge that Albus had been appointed to reinvestigate the 2020
election.
In November, Martin appeared on War
Room, Bannon’s show, where the host urged him “to adjudicate 2020.”
Martin, wearing his trench coat, said he was on the case: “Inside DoJ, myself
and a couple of others have been working on” it. He voiced his suspicion that
election officials in Fulton County had shredded ballots to conceal the truth.
“If they want to prove that the election was fine, show it to us.”
Martin’s Columbo antics were going
over poorly with the experienced attorneys inside and outside of Main Justice.
“I love Ed Martin, he’s a warrior for the Constitution, but he didn’t have
experience as a prosecutor when he took the job,” says Mike Davis, a Republican
attorney with close ties to the White House. Blanche had assembled a staff of
hungry young deputies plucked from outside Washington, including Colin
McDonald, his point man on many high-priority matters, such as weaponization,
until he moved into a newly created anti-fraud position; Jordan Fox, a
Bove protégé just a few years out of law school; and Aakash Singh, a former
line prosecutor in Fort Lauderdale who now oversees all U.S. Attorneys.
(Bloomberg Law reported Singh had instructed them to act as if Trump were their
“chief client” or resign.) Though green by Main Justice standards, they’re
still real lawyers.
McCabe, Martin’s former aide, said
when he and others were trying to figure out how to seize the Fulton County
ballots, they were resisted by Fox and another Blanche aide. “They tried to
shut it down,” McCabe says. He told one of the staffers, “ ‘It’s important that we’re trying to achieve the
Trump agenda, and we needed his help to achieve the Trump agenda.’ And for those remarks, I
earned my first verbal reprimand.”
The dismissals of the cases in
Virginia proved to Blanche’s faction that proceeding carelessly was not only
unlawyerly — it was counterproductive. “That’s how big wins end up as gigantic,
embarrassing losses,” says someone familiar with Blanche’s thinking on the
subject. In mid-November, the New York Times reported that
Martin was himself facing investigative scrutiny from the department over
allegations of leaks and improper conduct related to the mortgage case against
Schiff, who was never charged with a crime. Martin might have had Trump’s phone
number, but Blanche had his own personal relationship with the president. For
Thanksgiving, he flew with Trump on Air Force One to Palm Beach, where Blanche
also has a home. He made his move on Martin around this time. Martin was
informed that he was being stripped of all his roles except one: head of the
department that reviews pardons. He was banished from Main Justice to the
pardon attorney’s office in a satellite building.
As word of Martin’s marginalization
reached his outside allies, they unleashed a campaign of invective against
Blanche. “Now we see what Todd Blanche’s true colors are,” says Peter Ticktin,
an attorney who represents a group of J6ers suing for restitution, who says he
met with both Martin and Wise. “He still has a Democrat mentality.”
While Martin was looking into
mortgages and ballots, the working group was making progress on preparing
reports. Besides the January 6 project that Wise had started on, there was one
on prosecutions of anti-abortion protesters and another about religious bias
and a 2023 FBI memo notorious among conservatives for proposing that
“radical-traditionalist Catholic” ideology be monitored as an extremist threat.
But Martin’s allies were unimpressed. “We need as many reports as we can get,”
one of them told me, sarcastically, “instead of action.” To the zealots,
weaponization wasn’t working unless the handcuffs were clicking. They thought
the retribution campaign was being slow-walked, and they blamed Blanche.
“Ed Martin loves our president,”
Ticktin says. “He was unable to do his job because he was stopped in every way,
every measure, by somebody who Donald Trump trusted.”
The FBI didn’t learn of Wise’s
presence at the Capitol on January 6 right away. After the riot, he left the
Capitol grounds and took the Metro back to his hotel in northern Virginia. He
returned to Texas as the J6 investigations — the largest set of criminal
prosecutions in DoJ history — cranked to life. Maybe seeking an escape, later
that January, Wise decided to invest in land overseas and allegedly gave nearly
$200,000 to an acquaintance, a television screenwriter, to contribute to the
purchase of a French château, along with 95 acres of chestnut forest that had
previously been the site of a nudist camp. It took another year for the
authorities to discover his January 6 involvement. Wise believes the
screenwriter tipped off the FBI in order to steal his interest in the
nudist-camp property; Wise has sued him repeatedly for fraud, most recently in
January in a federal court in Texas. (The screenwriter shared bank statements
to support his claim — disputed by Wise — that he repaid the money in early
2025.)
Wise would express remorse about the
“terrible words” he used on January 6 in his testimony at trial. “A lot of us
lost our temper on J6,” he wrote in an X post last February. But his anger
seems to have lasted longer than a fleeting moment. In 2024, he sent an email
with the subject line “Demon” to the screenwriter and another acquaintance,
forwarding a link to a J6er propaganda video. “If either of you dimwitted,
ignorant fools actually wants to learn something and see what really happened
on January 6, watch this five minute video to understand some truth,” Wise
wrote, “although I know that’s a foreign concept to both of you fascist
bootlicking commies.”
In pretrial motions, Wise claimed he
was under “extreme amounts of surveillance” by the FBI between 2022 and 2023
and was trailed by undercover agents in an effort to show he “was part of a
larger conspiracy.” But the real conspiracy, Wise said, was against him. He
believed his case was linked to office rivalries from his time at the FBI and
claimed the Bureau moved to arrest him only after he contacted James O’Keefe to
connect him with an FBI agent who opposed the treatment of J6ers.
Early in the morning of May 1, 2023,
law-enforcement agents — 17 by Wise’s count, many armed with rifles —
surrounded his house in Bend, handcuffed him, and took him to a courthouse for
processing. “Nothing will ever convince me,” Wise later wrote, “that my arrest
was not purposely designed to be extreme so that ‘The process is the
punishment’ would apply to me.”
“The process is the punishment” is a
saying among criminal-defense attorneys, who know that even an investigation
that yields nothing can be ruinous to a target’s reputation and finances. The
principle works in both directions, and now it is Trump’s adversaries who claim
they are being crushed by prosecutorial power — on grounds far less justifiable
than those cited against Trump or the J6ers. Take the case of Tish James. Even
after three failed indictments in Virginia, the Trump administration keeps trying.
In January, the Times reported the FBI was working to flip a
new witness, James’s hairdresser. Last month, Pulte made two more criminal
referrals related to her properties, one of them — significantly — to U.S.
Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Jason Reding Quiñones.
Martin’s removal from Main Justice has
not put a halt to Trump’s retributions. If anything, the bull-in-a-china-shop
approach to prosecution has spread to Trump-friendly states, where ambitious
local U.S. Attorneys have discovered it’s a way to impress the boss. In
Florida, Reding Quiñones has raised expectations among Trump and his followers
by initiating a probe of the “Grand Conspiracy.” The lawyer Mike Davis, who is
also a well-connected MAGA activist friendly with Reding Quiñones, posted a
photo of them together on November 7 of last year with a message reading
“Justice is coming.” The same day, a subpoena was issued to John Brennan, the
final CIA director under President Obama, who was one of at least 30 current
and former intelligence officials who were served at that time. Since then,
additional rounds have gone out to everyone from low-level NSA and CIA
employees to — inevitably — James Comey.
“What they’re doing here is exactly
what they accused the former administration of doing,” says someone the FBI has
contacted for information about its earlier investigations of Trump. “Taking
that tinge of what they want to believe and turning that into a criminal
prosecution.” Prosecutors from Miami have come to Main Justice to review files
connected to the special counsel’s work on January 6 and the Mar-a-Lago
classified-documents case. Conveniently, the theory of an ongoing conspiracy
that culminated in the search of Mar-a-Lago could get around
statute-of-limitations issues that normally prevent the prosecution of people
involved in more distant events. In December, Brennan’s attorney sent an
unusual letter to the chief judge in South Florida questioning the legitimacy
of the subpoena, which was related to the agency’s assessment that Russia had
meddled in the 2016 election. The attorney voiced suspicions that Reding
Quiñones was maneuvering to present the case to a grand jury in Fort Pierce at
the home courthouse of Trump’s favorite federal judge, Aileen Cannon.
An attorney for another person who
received the Florida subpoena described it as “performative” but said he was
still concerned. “After the Comey indictment,” he said, “I’m not as sanguine
anymore that just because there’s no crime there’s not going to be an
indictment.”
Maggie Goodlander, a member of
Congress from New Hampshire who worked for Attorney General Merrick Garland
during the Biden administration, discovered earlier this year what it’s like to
be subject to Trump’s punishing process. She is one of six Democratic
lawmakers, all military veterans, who made a video in November reminding
soldiers that their code of justice dictates they should obey only lawful
orders. The video infuriated Trump, who attacked it as “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR”
that was “punishable by DEATH!” In February, she was on the floor of the House
participating in a vote when she says her “phone started blowing up” with
concerned text messages. News had leaked that federal prosecutors in Washington
attempted to indict her that day for violating a law prohibiting interference
with troop morale. The grand jury had voted against an indictment, but
Goodlander knew better than to assume that was the end of it. “Sadly,” she told
me, “these people in the most powerful positions of law enforcement in our country
are boundless in their capacity for retribution, corruption, and abuse.”
Some of the investigations Martin set
in motion have continued without him. In late January, after months of pressure
and the forced departure of the FBI agent in charge of the Atlanta field
office, agents finally served a warrant on Fulton County’s election operations
center and seized the 2020 ballots stored there. The search-warrant application
came from the office of Albus, the prosecutor in St. Louis, and cited a variety
of debunked conspiracy theories about election machines to support its claim of
probable cause. Everything about the raid — starting with director of national
intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s presence at the scene and a call Trump reportedly
placed through her to the FBI agents involved — was irregular. MAGA was
electrified. Right-wing rumors circulated that the raid had uncovered evidence
to support an outlandish allegation that Venezuela had manipulated electronic
voting machines on Biden’s behalf. “We got Maduro,” says Ticktin. “Hopefully
he’s going to be singing like a canary.”
Blanche has supervised, or at least
acquiesced to, all these moves. “I keep waiting for there to be some red line
that he won’t cross,” says a dismayed former friend from his days as a federal
prosecutor. On Trump’s behalf, Blanche gutted the Civil Rights Division and
Public Integrity Section, which the MAGA movement perceives as pits of woke
opposition. The National Security Division has been “burned to the ground,” a
former prosecutor who worked counterintelligence cases says, and its remnants
were left to spend last fall redacting the Jeffrey Epstein files. Main Justice
has coordinated closely with Stephen Miller and his domestic-policy team on
priorities like expediting deportations in defiance of due-process concerns,
vacuuming up state voting records in search of phantom election fraud, and
enforcing Trump’s executive order to pursue protest groups under anti-terrorism
laws.
One day this winter, workers on a boom
lift hung a vertical banner between a pair of columns at the northeast corner
of Main Justice. The president’s face now scowls down from the building. “It’s
like a scene from Pyongyang or Moscow,” Goodlander says. As attorney general,
Bondi outdid herself in her displays of obsequiousness to Trump at Cabinet
meetings and in televised appearances. In February, she delivered a performance
at a House Judiciary Committee hearing that was punchy even by this administration’s
standards, calling one lawmaker a “failed politician” and another a “washed-up
loser lawyer.” But symbolic fealty was not enough. At a White House gathering
of U.S. Attorneys earlier this year, Trump had one of his eruptions, calling
them weak and demanding to know why they had not acted against his enemies,
reportedly citing the Schiff mortgage case. (Soon after the event, a subpoena
was duly served on a different Trump target, Fed chairman Jerome Powell; it was
later quashed by a federal judge, and a DOJ spokesperson claimed its issuance
was “unconnected to the president’s remarks.”)
On April 2, after months of
intermittent chatter in Washington about Bondi’s job security, Trump finally
pushed the button. Blanche will now have a title equal to the authority he has
already been exercising in practice, at least on an acting basis, a tenuous
position Trump can revoke at any time. Blanche has indicated he is not afraid
to green-light charges against people identified as weaponizers, if they can
stick. The day before Bondi’s firing, the Times reported she
and Blanche had personally pressed to investigate, among others, Brennan and
the star witness of the congressional January 6 hearings, Cassidy Hutchinson.
In January, Smith told the Judiciary Committee that he anticipates the DOJ’s
leadership will “do everything in their power” to indict him for Trump.
At the beginning of this year, the
White House communicated its displeasure with the pace of the Weaponization
Working Group’s progress to Main Justice. Blanche’s aides prodded Wise and his
colleagues to accelerate their work. Some of their reports are said to be
nearing publication. But Wise will no longer be at Main Justice to see the work
emerge. For months, his presence in the building, and the sensitive position he
occupied, grew harder for the department’s leadership to publicly justify. At
her combative hearing in February, Bondi was confronted by Joe Neguse, a
Democrat from Colorado, about Wise. “This is who you choose, as the chief
law-enforcement officer of the United States of America, to hire at the
Department of Justice?” he said. “Someone on video yelling ‘Kill him!’ at
police officers?” (Bondi replied imprecisely: “I believe he was pardoned by
President Trump.”) When I brought up Wise to people who had interacted with him
at Main Justice, even normally talkative sources tried to deflect. They suggested
he had suffered enough scrutiny, or had been walled off from the
reinvestigation of January 6 for reasons of conflict of interest — an assertion
that is at odds with other evidence. Some suggested he wasn’t doing anything
important, though I was able to confirm that Wise had been continuing to
interact with other Trump loyalists at the FBI and within the
intelligence-community bureaucracy. It seemed the “deep state” dissidents were
creating a deep state of their own.
A day after the Justice Department
received fact-checking queries about Wise for this article, and hours before
the news of Bondi’s firing broke, Wise submitted his resignation and reappeared
on X, saying he could only “fully expose the abuses by the FBI and DOJ” if he
were “outside of government.” The work he did on weaponization, however, goes
on — and will surely continue to be carried out by others on behalf of the man
whose grudges guide the mission. How far will it go? That is easy to predict:
as far as Trump can push it, for as long as he holds office. And even then,
that may not be the end of the cycle, a reality that appears to weigh on
Blanche’s mind. “Everybody’s afraid that in the next administration, if we
don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted,” he said at a CPAC
appearance in March. “And why are they afraid? Because that’s exactly what
happened during the last administration.” That may be a distorted reading of
history, but it is reflective of a mind-set we can recognize from other times
and other places where the cynical exercise of power has inverted the rule of
law.
“Americans are in the painful
process,” Jared Wise wrote on X shortly before he went into Main Justice, “of
realizing that our government isn’t so different than the evil ones they’ve
told us about for many years.” Maybe he was staring in the mirror.
