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The United States of America is still a free country, and every private citizen has the right to speak to anyone, anywhere in the world, about anything. If the propaganda arm of an avowed enemy of the West calls and invites you to bash your own nation in public, you are free to do so. It might not be the most patriotic or sensible choice, but it’s your privilege.
If you also would like to join the Department of Justice as a United States attorney, however, you should expect that appearing on the state television outlet of a neofascist dictatorship and engaging in conspiracy-laden anti-American rants might attract some attention—especially if it seems like you’ve tried to hide those appearances from the U.S. Senate committee responsible for voting on your nomination. And if you’re an ordinary American citizen, you should certainly be wary of any aspiring Justice Department official who gladly contributes to Russian propaganda efforts.
Ed Martin is the Trump administration’s nominee to be the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. A failed political candidate and former chairman of the Missouri Republican Party, he is now a right-wing podcaster and social-media figure—and a January 6 truther who believes that Justice Department lawyers are the president’s personal consiglieri. He has also, however, been a regular commentator on RT America, the English-language flagship for the Kremlin’s propaganda efforts until it was dropped by major content providers after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It has since gone off the air, but in its time, it featured Larry King, among some lesser American lights. (For example, have you been wondering whatever happened to Scottie Nell Hughes, who years ago shilled for Donald Trump on CNN? Me neither, but in watching Martin’s segments, I learned that she ended up at RT.)
Martin, according to The Washington Post, was a guest some 150 times on RT America and its sister outlet, Sputnik, from 2016 to 2024. Now, everyone can make a mistake; public commentators sometimes find themselves on outlets that turn out to be wifty venues, or unexpectedly paired with guests they might otherwise avoid. But to appear 150 times—occasionally partnered up for friendly banter with unsavory characters such as George Galloway, a pro-Putin British politician who was kicked out of the Labour Party more than 20 years ago for, among other things, encouraging Arabs to fight British soldiers, and who has long been accused of various extremist views—suggests a genuinely comfortable relationship with the outlet. (For the record, over the course of my academic career as a professor of national-security affairs, I was occasionally invited to appear on RT America. I always declined.)
Perhaps, one might hope, Martin agreed to appear so that he could be a voice of probity and reason in the face of Russian disinformation, exactly the qualities one would appreciate in a U.S. attorney. Not a chance: He was more often the source of conspiracy theories and anti-American accusations, all delivered with the kind of cheerful confidence that always translates well on television.
I watched several of his appearances, which are still available on RT’s website. One major theme emerges: Russia is usually right and America (at least when led by anyone other than Donald Trump) is usually wrong.
Martin, for example, accused the U.S. government of nefarious doings just before Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine, in 2022; Washington, he said during an appearance in February of that year, was “driving what’s happening in Europe,” while Putin was only trying to seek talks and a “clear peace.” This was apparently part of a long pattern. The Post also documented some of Martin’s statements on RT, including his false claim that a 2017 Syrian chemical-weapons attack—one to which Trump responded with force—was a situation “engineered” in Washington “by the people that want war in Syria.” (If his nomination as U.S. attorney doesn’t pan out, he could always become a spokesperson for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, whose worrisome views he seems to share.)
The day after his defense of Putin, Martin returned to RT to accuse President Joe Biden of seeking war with Russia now that the United States had left Afghanistan. (It makes no sense, of course, that Biden would try to start a war in Europe right after paying such a tremendous political price for ending America’s longest war, but as the frat boys said in Animal House: “Forget it, he’s rolling.”) Biden’s people, Martin said, “have a vision of regime change everywhere they look,” and he castigated then–National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan for creating a crisis by publicly sharing U.S. intelligence about Russia preparing for a massive attack on Ukraine.
Of course, the Kremlin was preparing for an attack, and the Biden administration was trying to deter Putin from moving by showing that the Russians had lost any element of surprise.
Beyond his parroting of Russian talking points about Syria and Russia, Martin also had plenty to say about the United States, which he depicted as a repressive nation in the grip of dark forces. “If you say elections are bad in America in 2020, you’d probably be arrested or de-barred”—I assume he meant disbarred—“or attacked in some very specific way,” he said in December 2023, oblivious to the irony that he was speaking on the television outlet of an authoritarian state. “Big Tech and Big Media are backed up by Big Government, and they’re forcing the message” about a looming war in Ukraine, he said in January 2022. Even that wasn’t the first time he made such accusations. “The largest threat to democracy in the world,” he declared in November 2021, “is the American media,” not least because they bought the “Russia hoax,” which Martin claimed landed ostensibly innocent people in jail. (Here, Martin name-checked the former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who was convicted of multiple crimes, including tax fraud and conspiracy against the United States, before being pardoned by Trump.)
Again, Ed Martin is an American who can speak to anyone he chooses. The University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, who has staked his long and distinguished academic reputation on the now-laughable position that the West is to blame for the Ukraine war, came to Martin’s defense when contacted by the Post: “Although the U.S. government and other governments have been waging war on RT for some time, it is not illegal for an American to appear on its shows.”
Lots of things aren’t illegal, but many things are unwise or even patently stupid. And no one was “waging war” on RT America, unless correctly identifying and opposing it as a relentless source of Russian disinformation is “war.” Major American cable and satellite providers decided to stop paying for it after Russia’s war of aggression began in 2022: Unlike Radio Liberty and the Voice of America, important news organizations with wide followings that are under attack by the Trump administration, RT America had the support of its government but lost its audience.
Mearsheimer has claimed that Martin’s appearances are a matter of free speech, and indeed they are. But 150 hits on Russian media not only reflect poor judgment—unless Martin was unaware of what RT America was, which would be a problem in itself—they also have provided a trove of comments that should be of deep concern to senators who must decide whether to vest him with the power of a U.S. attorney. Martin seems to understand how bad it all looks: According to the Post’s reporting, he somehow avoided informing the Senate about these guest shots when he was first nominated. A spokesman for Martin told the Post that he “disclosed all of the identified links in a supplemental letter to the Senate” over the past two days, but CNN reported this morning that Martin also initially neglected to list several other appearances on right-wing media in the United States.
Of course, in Trump’s political orbit, defending Russia while slagging America is hardly a disqualification for office, especially because the president himself has been doing the same for years. Certainly the Russians seem happy: Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of RT in Russia and Putin’s top propagandist, said yesterday on X that Martin’s record “proves only that appearing on RT 150 times can do wonders for your career.” Getting a pat on the back from a cheerleader for Russian war crimes is not exactly the kind of endorsement that should lead to the confirmation of a U.S. attorney.
Martin’s willingness to become a regular commenter on Russian television is a significant warning sign about his lack of prudence and his evident political extremism. Worse, he apparently gambled that his appalling comments might be forgotten once RT America shut down, a deceptiveness that should give pause to the Senate before it approves a fringe-dwelling conservative media personality for a sensitive position in the United States government.
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Today’s News
- At least one person was killed and six were injured in a mass shooting at Florida State University.
- The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next month on the Trump administration’s proposal to end automatic birthright citizenship, a right enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment.
- President Donald Trump, who has been pushing for the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, threatened to oust its chair, Jerome Powell.
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