The Upside Down World of the Buffoonish Ed Martin

INSIDE: Todd Blanche ... Tulsi Gabbard ... Steve Bannon

Feb 05, 2026

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.

Hoisted on His Own Petard

In the roughshod world of the Trump Justice Department, politicized prosecutions are fine, but Ed Martin apparently crossed the line when he allegedly improperly leaked grand jury materials in the bogus mortgage fraud investigation of Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), CNN reports.

That finding by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche fueled what I suspect Blanche already wanted to do: sideline Martin further. Martin was removed as director of the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group at the end of 2025.

But what’s notable is what didn’t happen: Sharing grand jury information with unauthorized persons is a criminal offense, but Martin is not facing criminal charges; and, while he’s expected to leave DOJ soon, he remains U.S. pardon attorney.

For his part, Blanche offered a lawyered public statement (note the use of the present tense): “there are no misconduct investigations into Ed Martin. Ed is doing a great job as Pardon Attorney.”

Georgia Ain’t Gabbard’s First Rodeo

A team working for DNI Tulsi Gabbard led an investigation in the spring of 2025 into cockamamie claims that Venezuela had hacked voting machines in Puerto Rico, Reuters reports: “Her team took an unspecified number of Puerto Rico’s voting machines and additional copies of data from the machines as part of its investigation, a spokesperson for Gabbard’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence said.”

Fulton Co. Wants Its Voting Records Back

Georgia’s Fulton County launched a legal effort to get its 2020 ballots and other voting records back after they were seized by the FBI last week in a politicized investigation to prop up President Trump’s baseless claims that he only lost the election because of voting fraud.

The Provocation …

Steve Bannon cranked up the midterm voter intimidation dial to an 11:

… and the Smart Way of Responding

Disinformation expert Kate Starbird offers a smart thread on how to respond to Bannon’s provocation without amplifying it and doing his voter suppression for him (click for the full thread):

MUST READ

The transcript of Tuesday’s hearing in Minnesota federal court in which one overwhelmed government attorney begged to be held in contempt so she could finally get some sleep is worth reading as a window into chaos inside the Trump administration.

A few follow-up notes:

The attorney, Julie Le, on loan from ICE, was sent back to ICE after the court hearing. It’s not clear if she still has a job at ICE.
The other government attorney in the hearing, Ana Voss, the chief of the civil division in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office, has reportedly tendered her resignation but at least as of Tuesday was still on the job.

Mass Deportation Watch: Minnesota Edition

Declaration of War: A great MPR piece on the work of ICE observers in the suburbs of the Twin Cities includes this Minnesota-style declaration of war by a suburban mom-turned-observer: “I don’t even care if I ruffle feathers.”
‘Softer Touch’: President Trump says he ordered the withdrawal of 700 federal agents from Minnesota as he tries a “softer touch.” That still leaves some 2,000 federal agents in the state, according to White House border czar Tom Homan.
‘Bad Publicity’: President Trump dismisses the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents as “bad publicity”:

Mass Deportation Watch: Nationwide Edition

TEXAS: ICE is now bypassing the El Paso County medical examiner who ruled a death at the Camp East Montana detention center at Fort Bliss a homicide. After the latest detainee death at the tent facility, the autopsy was performed at Fort Bliss’ William Beaumont Army Medical Center, which doesn’t release autopsy reports to the public, the Texas Tribune reports.
VIRGINIA: New Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) ordered state law enforcement agencies to dissolve any partnership agreements with federal immigration enforcement operations.
WEST VIRGINIA: I can’t get enough of the civics lessons that federal judges are now baking into their court orders. The latest I’ve seen comes from U.S. District Judge Thomas E. Johnston in the Southern District of West Virginia, a Bush I appointee, in a habeas cases filed by a Venezuelan national who was illegally detained after a traffic stop on Interstate 77:

The Destruction: Civil Service Edition

A new rule stripping civil service protections for some 50,000 senior government workers (an echo of Trump’s first term proposal for a “Schedule F”) is set to be unveiled today.

For Your Radar …

With the U.S. retreating from NATO, Europe is reassessing the imminence of the Russian threat:

The earlier belief in Berlin and other capitals was that Russia wouldn’t be able to threaten NATO until 2029 or so. There is now a growing consensus that such a crisis could come much sooner—before Europe, which is expanding its own investment in defense, is in a position to fight back.
“Our assessment is that Russia will be able to move large amounts of troops within one year,” the Netherlands Defense Minister Ruben Brekelmans said in an interview. “We see that they are already increasing their strategic inventories, and are expanding their presence and assets along the NATO borders.”

RIP CIA World Factbook

The CIA World Factbook, an indispensable pre-internet resource, is no longer.

J. David Bamberger, 1928-2026

He made his fortune with Church’s Fried Chicken, but J. David Bamberger will be most remembered for his conservation work in the Texas Hill Country. Inspired as a boy by Louis Bromfield’s “Pleasant Valley,” Bamberger used his fast-food fortune to buy the crappiest piece of land he could find and spent the next half a century restoring it to some semblance of ecological balance: