The interim U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C., is being derided online after sending a threat letter critics call "nonsensical."
Ed Martin penned the page-and-a-half note to the editor-in-chief of the medical journal for the American College of Chest Physicians, in Illinois, on Monday, asking for information about the "partisan" slant of the journal.
Martin asked, among other things, "How do you assess your responsibilities to protect the public from misinformation?" He also asked for information about "competing viewpoints" in the publication.
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He further requested if the editor knows if "publishers, journals, and organizations with which you work are adjusting their methods of acceptance of competing viewpoints. Are there new norms being developed and offered?"
Martin demanded a response by May 2.
Critics laid into the DOJ official on social media.
University of Minnesota Law School Professor Charlotte Garden said, "1. This is so poorly written that the sentence that is -- I think -- supposed to convey a semi-veiled legal threat is incomprehensible. 2. I'm jealous of whichever lawyer gets to write the response."
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Former Justice Department appointee Eric Columbus posted on Bluesky, "Ed Martin, the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia — who is up for the full-term job — pens a nonsensical letter to the editor of a medical journal, trying and failing to convince him that he’s in trouble."
Writer and freelance journalist Thomas Giery Pudney said, "This letter makes me very curious if Ed Martin knows anything at all."
Criminal defense lawyer Ken White remarked, "This letter is just freakishly incoherent and inappropriate. It’s what you would get if you put, like, Tim Pool or Ben Shapiro into a US Attorney’s chair, made them drink a quart of bourbon, and told them to get angry at something."
Writer and political analyst Arieh Kovler posted on Bluesky, "Demanding 'viewpoint diversity' in peer-reviewed medical science journals is literally just DEI for wrong people. Bad experiments and incorrect analyses shouldn't face discrimination, right?"
"This is the EXACT thing that Republicans accused the Biden Admin of doing during the pandemic. This was the whole Twitter Files thing. They held hearings, demanded criminal prosecutions, ran YEARS of news stories about it. Only this time it's them doing it, and they're not being subtle," Kovler added.
"Behind its flagrant stupidity and hypocrisy, the letter reflects a very insidious idea promoted by people who are much smarter and more sophisticated than Ed Martin. The right wants to destroy the authority of experts and undermine the role that professional organizations play in defining truth," wrote appellate litigator Paul Bernard.
"In a world where no-one's ideas are authoritative, anything and everything can be true (such as "alternative facts"), and power replaces expertise as the arbiter of truth. In this world, fascists rule, and truth is whatever the Dear Leader or (the gang with guns and missiles) say it is," Bernard continued.
