Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk have floated rehiring a DOGE staffer who resigned over controversial social media posts.
WASHINGTON—Ed Martin, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, has written to Elon Musk that those “who appear to be stealing government property and/or threatening government employees” may face consequences as he begins an inquiry.
“If people are discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them and we will chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable,” Martin wrote in an open letter to Musk and Steve Davis, a recruiter for Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), on social media platform X.
President Donald Trump named Martin the district’s new U.S. attorney, replacing Matthew M. Graves, an appointee of President Joe Biden who prosecuted individuals involved in the U.S. Capitol breach on Jan. 6, 2021. Twenty-six FBI confidential human sources were present in Washington in connection with those events, according to a 2024 report from the Justice Department’s inspector general.
Martin, former president of Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, was sworn in as U.S. attorney shortly after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
Martin’s Feb. 7 letter follows a Feb. 3 statement in which he said an early assessment “indicates that certain individuals and/or groups have committed acts that appear to violate the law in targeting DOGE employees.”
“We are in contact with FBI and other law-enforcement partners to proceed rapidly,” Martin said.
The FBI is now under the leadership of Acting Director Emil Bove, who was a member of Trump’s legal defense team.
Martin’s statements come after WIRED reporting disclosed the identities of a number of employees working for DOGE, a time-limited commission housed in the Executive Office of the President as a repurposed version of the U.S. Digital Service.
Amid protests and other pushback against DOGE, including legal action from 14 states, anonymous forums and social media websites have hosted multiple threats aimed at those men and other individuals that have been linked to DOGE.
