Residents grill D.C.'s new MAGA prosecutor in first public meeting

“How many gun shops does D.C. have?”

It was something of a trick question, but Lamont Mitchell was trying to make a point.

“I don’t know the answer,” conceded Ed Martin, the interim U.S. Attorney for D.C.

“It’s none,” responded Mitchell, the chairman of the Anacostia Coordinating Council, a 42-year-old community organization that seeks to revitalize neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River.

The exchange came early in the council’s monthly lunch on Tuesday, where Martin was invited to speak to a room packed with 60 residents, business owners, community activists, and journalists. It was Martin’s first public foray into the city where he now serves as the top federal prosecutor (a position he’s held since January 20, though he still awaits confirmation by the Senate), and his first chance to lay out his priorities to the people who would be most affected by them.

Mitchell’s query about gun shops came after Martin pledged to bring the full force of the federal government down on gun violence in D.C. In 2024 the city recorded 568 incidents involving guns, 153 of them resulting in deaths. But Mitchell wanted it to be clear: All those guns are coming from places outside D.C., most of which have much more lax gun laws than the city does.

The exchange highlighted the complex and sometimes convoluted world that Martin now occupies. Under D.C.’s distinct bifurcated criminal justice system, almost all violent crime is prosecuted by the presidentially appointed U.S. Attorney, while the city’s elected attorney general handles misdemeanor and juvenile offenses. The system has its advantages (the significant resources of the federal government) and drawbacks (a lack of accountability to the city’s residents), but Martin enters as both an unknown and a controversial quantity.

While most of his predecessors were staid career prosecutors of some variety, Martin is a fiery Republican political operative with few local roots. In 2020 he was among the Donald Trump loyalists who falsely claimed that the presidential election had been rigged, and later defended the January 6 rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol. (Ironically, this month he tweeted “Hit a cop, you’ll pay for it” in reference to a separate incident. A number of D.C. police officers were assaulted on January 6, but Trump pardoned their attackers.)

Since being nominated to the post by President Trump, Martin has drawn fierce criticism for referring to his office as “President Trump’s lawyers”, for threatening the Georgetown University Law School over its diversity initiatives, for demoting prosecutors who worked on January 6 cases, and for seeming to take cues for possible investigations from baseless complaints from conservative activists on social media. Senate Democrats have called for an investigation into Martin, while Elon Musk has called for him to be confirmed.

Mitchell told Martin that despite the crowd’s personal feelings toward Trump (only 6.5% of D.C. voters cast ballots for him, after all), they were interested in what he planned to do on crime. “We try to stay away from politics,” he said. “You’re in that seat and you’re going to impact lives east of the river.”

Martin quickly sought to convey the image of a prosecutor taking his charge seriously. He said he has done police ride-alongs with officers in each of the city’s seven police districts, has developed a good relationship with Mayor Muriel Bowser and D.C. Police Chief Pamela Smith, and even praised the D.C. Council as “phenomenal” in how it was responding to concerns raised by his office on specific city laws. He also went more personal, telling the crowd that he had visited Frederick Douglass’s home in Historic Anacostia and was looking to D.C. residents to help direct his office’s work.

“I’ve been trying to listen to what’s going on in our community, not what’s happening on Capitol Hill, but what’s happening in our neighborhoods,” he said. “Our families deserve to be safe, our kids deserve to be safe, our laws deserve to be prosecuted, and we need to be better at that.”

That could be welcome news for some D.C. residents and officials, notably because of criticisms that were leveled at Martin’s  predecessor Matthew Graves, who in 2023 declined to prosecute some two-thirds of cases brought by D.C. police. (Graves said D.C. shared some of the blame because of issues with its crime lab and questionable arrests.) 

Martin also pledged to urge Congress to work more quickly to confirm judges for D.C. Superior Court – where high numbers of vacancies have led to significant backlogs in prosecutions – and doubled down on his “Make D.C. Safe Again” plan, which seeks to move  gun cases into federal court where sentences are stiffer. That happened during the first Trump administration, falling most heavily on three majority-Black areas of the city. (Martin said 18 gun cases have so far been charged in federal court.)

“I do work for President Trump,”  Martin said. “But his charge is to make D.C. safe. We intend to put people who are committing crimes in our communities, especially with guns, we’re going to get them off the streets.”

Martin also said he was looking to prosecute more 16- and 17-year-olds as adults, which he said was a point of friction with D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb. (Current D.C. law already leaves it up to the U.S. Attorney, not Schwalb, whether or not to prosecute 16- and 17-year-old offenders as adults.) In a statement, a spokesman for Schwalb said that his local prosecutors “are charging both violent and nonviolent cases at higher rates – including over 90% of homicides, 87% of carjackings, and 85% of gun cases last year.”

Martin seemed to stumble along the way, though, notably when he brought up foreign aid – an issue that might fire up Republicans but seemed far beside the point in Southeast D.C. 

“When USAID sent hundreds of millions of dollars to Central Africa, didn’t you ask, ‘Why don’t you send it to 7D?’” he said, referring to D.C.’s Seventh Police District, which encompasses the majority of Ward 8 east of the Anacostia River. “No!” shouted the crowd. “Well, you should,” he responded as they quieted down. “I did.”

“You need to learn your politics,” scolded Cora Masters Barry, the former wife of the late mayor and councilmember Marion Barry.

Martin also pondered sending more juveniles to federal prisons far from D.C., prompting quick pushback from attendees who said that having D.C. inmates serving their sentences in federal facilities many states away from home makes it harder to keep connections with their families – and could possibly increase recidivism once they are released. 

And while some residents agreed that prosecuting gun offenses was necessary, they questioned what might come of Martin and Trump’s more aggressive approach. “Will this turn into the same thing the war on drugs did where we locked up countless Black men, women, and children for nonviolent crimes and created mass incarceration that destroyed my community and separated families?” asked local activist Ron Moten. 

Martin did not directly address Moten’s concerns; he instead opined on USAID’s foreign spending. But the exchange spoke to residents’ worry that in seeking to correct what Republicans argue was a soft-on-crime approach during the Biden administration, Trump and Martin will swing too far in the other direction. In one example, Martin has already hinted that he will discontinue the longstanding practice of disclosing to defense attorneys when police officers have faced misconduct cases.

As the event drew to a close, Martin and his entourage quickly escaped to a waiting convoy of SUVs, dodging followup questions from the press. 

Attendees told The 51st that Martin did what they expected: he delivered the talking points on Trump’s pledges to make D.C. safer, while generally avoiding delving too deeply into details after he was asked challenging questions.

“It’s the argument every conservative talks about: arrest, arrest, arrest and not focus on rehabilitation, not focus on diversion, not talk about the root causes of crime. I don’t walk away any more excited or any more sad about [Martin] being there,” said Darrell Gaston, who owns three restaurants and said he was both sympathetic to the view that prosecutors should take a harder line on gun offenses – while also not abandoning alternatives to prison for first-time offenders.

Phil Pannell, a longtime activist and political figure in Ward 8 who also serves as the executive director of the Anacostia Coordinating Council, said he hopes Martin will follow the lead of his predecessors, who made it a point to regularly attend community meetings and hear feedback from D.C. residents.

“You can see his political background. He really did not answer the hard questions,” said Pannell. “But he was able to leave with some folks having a good feeling that if he listens, maybe he’s educable.”

Mitchell, who had asked about gun shops in D.C., offered Martin one piece of advice: “Do your job, run your office. Leave the politics for when you get home.”

In short, don’t bring up USAID again.