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Well, that didn’t take long.

Earlier this month, this page issued an apology to America on behalf of Missouri for the rise of Ed Martin in the Trump administration. The former Missouri political gadfly, we warned, would become a magnet for controversy, incompetence and shoddy ethics as President Donald Trump’s interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C.

Fewer than three weeks later, at least three new controversies have arisen around Martin:

National media reporting has exposed that Martin was lying when he claimed last week that he didn’t know about the antisemitic activities of a Nazi sympathizer and Jan. 6 rioter he has publicly defended for years. Martin has also been called out recently for sending threatening letters to top medical journals regarding their articles, in apparent violation of the First Amendment.

Meanwhile, new reporting about Martin’s old legal feud with the late Phyllis Schlafly’s organization reveals that he once secretly coordinated an online trolling campaign against a judge presiding over a case in which he was a defendant — a clear violation of attorney ethics standards.

There will be much more of this, America, if the Senate makes the gargantuan mistake of confirming Martin permanently to this key U.S. attorney position.

Martin is the former Missouri gubernatorial chief of staff who once embroiled that office in a damaging and expensive scandal over its violations of open-records laws and a politically motivated firing.

Later, as chairman of the Missouri Republican Party, he deeply divided the state GOP by attacking fellow Republicans he dubbed insufficiently loyal to the tea party movement. Later still, as head of Schlafly’s organization, he allegedly convinced the elderly conservative icon to embrace Trump’s MAGA movement, creating a bitter rift in her organization that ended up being hashed out in court.

Given Trump’s habit of nominating unqualified sycophants to important posts, Martin was perhaps a natural choice for the top federal prosecutor in the nation’s capital: no prosecutorial experience and a résumé rife with controversy and chaos.

In Martin’s brief time , he has improperly failed to report his frequent guest appearances on Kremlin-controlled Russian media outlets, has threatened to investigate members of Congress for criticizing Trump and has saber-rattled at the free press for coverage he dislikes.

Add to that sad litany some new reporting in recent weeks from various national media outlets:

• reported last week that Martin was apparently lying last week when he claimed he didn’t know about the grotesque activities of Nazi sympathizer and pardoned Jan. 6 riot defendant Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, whom Martin has praised as a friend for years.

In fact, the Post reports, Martin has since at least 2023 referenced those activities by way of defending Hale-Cusanelli on podcasts as being unfairly “slurred and smeared” regarding those antisemitic activities. Hale-Cusanelli’s past has included supporting Nazi ideology and photographing himself posting as Adolf Hitler.

• reports that Martin has used his power as interim U.S. attorney to send letters to the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine and other similar publications with accusatory and “vaguely threatening” language, suggesting without evidence that the journals have expressed bias and external influence in articles.

In addition to the irony of this deeply anti-science administration setting itself up as an arbiter of science journals is the First Amendment issue. Legal experts quoted by the Times noted that those journals are protected by the same near-total constitutional protection from government strong-arming as are newspapers.

• reported last week that in 2016, as Schlafly was being sued by the Schlafly organization over his hostile takeover of that entity, Martin secretly coached a woman who was peppering the judge in the case with social media and direct condemnation and insults.

The publication reported that Martin went so far as to buy a laptop for the woman and that he literally “ghostwrote” some of the attacks himself. Legal experts to the site that Martin’s conduct was “a clear violation of ethical norms and professional rules” that prohibit lawyers from contacting judges outside of court cases they are involved in and other forms of judicial interference.

All this after Martin has been in office barely three months. Imagine what the next four years could bring.

It’s rare for the Senate to hold public confirmation hearings for U.S. attorney nominees — they are generally just advanced by the on a voice vote — but leading Democrats are properly for Martin to air these and other issues. If the Republican majority instead rubber-stamps this grossly unqualified candidate, expect this opening parade of toxic controversy from his office to be only the beginning.