Video Casts Doubt on Ed Martin’s Apology for Praising Nazi Sympathizer

The Washington Post

12:26 JST, April 27, 2025

Interim D.C. U.S. attorney Ed Martin apologized this week for praising a pardoned Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot defendant who supported Nazi ideology and photographed himself posing as Adolf Hitler, saying he didn’t know about the man’s extremist statements.

But in videos and podcasts, Martin has defended the man since at least 2023, calling him a friend who was “slurred and smeared” by antisemitism allegations.

Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, 35, was one of the first Capitol riot defendants charged and one of the first to enter the building through a smashed window. Court filings outlined his history of alleged antisemitic statements, posts and affinity for Hitler. At the time, Martin was a conservative activist and a Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” fundraiser and organizer. He defended riot defendants in court, on his podcasts and through a nonprofit led by Hale-Cusanelli’s aunt.

Now he’s working as D.C.’s top prosecutor and is President Donald Trump’s pick to remain in that role.

Neither Martin’s office nor a lawyer for Hale-Cusanelli commented Friday for this article, and Hale-Cusanelli did not respond to a request for comment. But in remarks published Thursday by the Forward, a Jewish publication, Martin apologized for praising Hale-Cusanelli as “an extraordinary man, and extraordinary leader” while presenting him with an honorary award from Martin’s nonprofit group on Aug. 14 at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

“I’m sorry,” Martin told the Forward. “I denounce everything about what that guy said, everything about the way he talked, and all as I’ve now seen it … At the time, I didn’t know it.”

Six weeks before the awards ceremony, however, Martin interviewed Hale-Cusanelli about the allegations and defended him in a more than hour-long episode of his “Pro America Report” podcast, which he hosted from 2020 until early this year. A video of the episode was posted July 2 on a video-sharing platform called Rumble.

“In your case, they used your phone and took a photo and leaked a photo to say, ‘Ah, look … MAGA people are antisemitic,’” Martin said. “You had like a mustache shaved in such a way that you looked vaguely like Hitler and making jokes about it. Again, you know, not your best moment, but not illegal.”

Martin added that he knew of the allegations against Hale-Cusanelli close to when he was charged on Jan. 15, 2021. “When I think of this case, Tim, when it first was ongoing, I thought, wow, it’s almost impossible to, to sort of recover from that.”

Hale-Cusanelli defended himself, noting that his mother has some Jewish ancestry. “I’m not an Aryan like the government would allege,” he told Martin. Hale-Cusanelli told the FBI he was not a Nazi or white supremacist.

Martin in 2021 began serving as one of three top officers of a nonprofit led by Hale-Cusanelli’s aunt, Cynthia Hughes, which advocated and raised money for people charged with crimes related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, tax records show. Martin has told the Senate he stepped down early this year. He also spoke frequently with Hughes, hosting her on his podcast more than a dozen times since 2021.

Martin’s attempt to distance himself from Hale-Cusanelli came as Senate Democrats have attacked their relationship, demanding a hearing and floor votes to force GOP leaders to decide how much time and political capital to spend on the nomination.

“It is well-documented that Ed Martin is a Donald Trump loyalist who has embraced a Nazi sympathizer and attacked law enforcement who kept lawmakers and staff safe during the January 6 insurrection,” Sen. Dick Durbin (Illinois), the No. 2 Senate Democrat and the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement last week before his announcement Wednesday that he will not seek reelection.

Durbin has said Martin’s “shocking conduct” regarding Hale-Cusanelli “necessitates sworn testimony” before Martin’s interim appointment expires May 20, and compounds questions about his prosecutorial “temperament” that have been raised by his initial omission of hundreds of his appearances on far-right and Russia state media outlets from committee disclosure statements.

Hale-Cusanelli, an Army reservist found guilty of misdemeanor trespassing and disorderly conduct in the Capitol riot, was described by prosecutors as subscribing to “Nazi-sympathizer ideologies,” a central theme in court filings in his widely reported case. At the time of his arrest, he was a civilian security contractor at a naval weapons station in New Jersey, where all but 10 of 44 colleagues interviewed by Navy investigators described him as “having extremist or radical views pertaining to the Jewish people, minorities and women,” and his phone contained many examples of antisemitic and racist content, according to a government court filing that March.

One sailor told investigators that he heard Hale-Cusanelli say that if he were a Nazi, “he would kill all the Jews and eat them for breakfast, lunch and dinner,” according to a court filing. A search of his home turned up copies of Hitler’s autobiography “Mein Kampf” and “The Turner Diaries,” an influential 1978 novel for right-wing extremists, among hundreds of books.

“Statements and actions like yours make [Jewish people] less safe and less confident they can participate as equal members of our society,” a federal judge appointed by Trump said at Hale-Cusanelli’s sentencing hearing in September 2022. U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden kept the jury from hearing allegations of antisemitism but called Hale-Cusanelli’s testimony that he didn’t realize Congress sat in the Capitol building “a risible lie.” Video evidence showed he was among the first rioters to enter the building through a smashed window and was part of a group that overwhelmed police in its lower-level crypt.

Martin on his podcast defended Hale-Cusanelli, interviewing him several times between June 2022 and October 2024. Martin has said his guest was wrongly charged by prosecutors with a felony count of obstructing an official proceeding of Congress. He served nearly three years in prison before the Supreme Court overturned that count, leaving him guilty of only misdemeanors. He was among the nearly 1,600 Capitol riot defendants pardoned by Trump on Jan. 20.

In the July podcast, Martin agreed when Hale-Cusanelli said he was a victim of a “smear” campaign, and described him as a friend “over the last few years.” Hale-Cusanelli went on later in the podcast to suggest that Jan. 6 was an attempted “color revolution” by the U.S. military and “a staged fake insurrection.”

“The truth is that those in law enforcement and military, such as the DOD, the DHS, what have you, they’re probably the ones who were involved in orchestrating January 6th,” Hale-Cusanelli told Martin in a September episode.

Martin responded by alluding to the mystery of who placed two pipe bombs on Capitol Hill before the riot.

There are other signs that Martin has known of at least some of the allegations against Hale-Cusanelli. In podcasts in September 2023 and January 2024, Martin said Hale-Cusanelli was “slurred and smeared.”

The nonprofit Hughes Advocacy Foundation, for which Martin served as director under Hale-Cusanelli’s aunt, has a Patriot Freedom Project website that raised money to support and defend Jan. 6 “political prisoners.” The site has a page dedicated to news about Hale-Cusanelli’s case, including a July 2021 article headlined “The Government’s Case Against a ‘White Supremacist,’” which argued that while his actions might not be the easiest to defend, they were not criminal.

In the Forward article, Martin acknowledged that he should have known better than to honor Hale-Cusanelli. “But,” he added, “I certainly didn’t know all the terrible things that he said and how he had acted. I think that’s terrible, and I denounced it completely. I hate it. I hate that it happened.”

Martin told the Forward he is advising Leo Terrell, head of a Trump Justice Department task force to combat antisemitism, and said he was behind the idea of visiting 10 universities for potential civil rights violations.