Justice Dept. Sidelines Ed Martin as Chief of Weaponization Group

The move represents a consolidation of the authority of the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, in bringing Mr. Martin’s operation inside his office.

Todd Blanche, the Justice Department’s increasingly powerful No. 2 official, has sharply reduced the role given to Ed Martin, the lawyer from Missouri tapped to run a task force to investigate President Trump’s enemies, officials familiar with the situation said.

Mr. Martin, known by the self-bestowed moniker “Eagle Ed,” will retain his title as the department’s pardon attorney, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. But he has been marginalized in his other role as the chief of the so-called weaponization working group, the officials added, because senior department officials saw him as ineffective in pursuing cases Mr. Trump has demanded to be acted upon immediately.

It is not clear if Mr. Martin will remain at the department. He has told people in his orbit that he is considering leaving, possibly for an as-yet-undetermined position in the White House.

People close to Mr. Martin said they believed that Mr. Blanche’s move to marginalize him was intended to prompt his resignation.

The move does not, however, signal a pullback from the department’s campaign to investigate, humiliate and punish targets singled out by Mr. Trump — whose thirst to seek revenge against his perceived political enemies remains unslaked after a year in office.

If anything, it represents a consolidation of Mr. Blanche’s authority, clarification of tangled lines of authority and the removal of an unpredictable and, in his view, ineffectual, underling. His deputies intend to kick-start the mostly dormant task force, with an eye toward bringing more cases in the next several months, according to officials.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on Mr. Martin’s demotion but praised the work he has done as the pardon attorney.

The weaponization task force occupies an odd, at times problematic, place in the department’s organization chart, with Mr. Martin given broad but ill-defined latitude to collaborate with local U.S. attorneys around the country to develop cases.

One of those efforts in particular — investigating Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, for purported mortgage fraud — caused him to run afoul of Mr. Blanche, according to a person familiar with the matter. In a bizarre turnabout, Mr. Martin found himself facing scrutiny late last year for his role in pursuing Mr. Schiff by the very Justice Department he worked for.

(A person close to Mr. Blanche said the Schiff investigation did not play a significant part in the decision.)

It is not clear what purpose the task force, which was created at the instigation of the White House, will have with Mr. Martin out of the picture.

Mr. Blanche already oversees the work of local federal prosecutors, including a Miami-based investigation that Trump allies have cast as a “grand conspiracy” by Democrats and “deep state” operatives. They have claimed, without evidence, that the effort is possibly led by former President Barack Obama, who they say plotted to destroy Mr. Trump.

Nor is it clear whether any of this activity, driven by a president who has demanded retribution without providing evidence of provable criminality, will result in sustainable indictments, much less criminal convictions, whoever is at the helm. The Trump-ordered prosecutions of Letitia James, the New York attorney general, and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, were thrown out of court after a succession of procedural missteps.

Mr. Blanche, a polished and circumspect former federal prosecutor and onetime Trump defense lawyer, clashed almost immediately with Mr. Martin, a colorful, bomb-chucking conservative activist who raised money for the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The two men butted heads from more or less the moment Mr. Martin ensconced himself, early last year, in offices just down the hall from Mr. Blanche at Justice Department headquarters.

Mr. Blanche was incensed by his nominal subordinate’s habit of blindsiding him, like when he sent a threatening letter in the fall to a former F.B.I. agent who had testified, years before, against the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones for spouting lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre.

He later confronted Mr. Martin, demanding to know why he had not given him a heads-up and ordering him to retract the demand.

Mr. Blanche privately ridiculed Mr. Martin’s lack of legal experience. He was particularly annoyed when Mr. Martin would go around him, sometimes to the president himself, sometimes to complain that the department’s leadership was not moving quickly enough to hold Mr. Trump’s enemies to account.

Mr. Martin, for his part, has disparaged the department’s leaders as timid.

The weaponization working group under Mr. Martin had effectively been sidelined late last year.

Mr. Martin first came into the Justice Department at the start of Mr. Trump’s second term as the interim U.S. attorney in Washington. He was handed the task, among other things, of shutting down all remaining Jan. 6 prosecutions and oversaw a purge of prosecutors who worked on the Capitol riot cases.

But Mr. Martin, known for his religious zeal and Columbo-style trench coat, was unable to secure the requisite support in the Senate to hold on to the post full time — in part because of his longstanding work on behalf of the Jan. 6 rioters. Rather than let him go altogether, Mr. Trump put him in charge of the Justice Department’s pardon office and of running the weaponization group, where he quickly set about trying to build cases against some of the president’s most reviled foes.

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