Trump picks Fox News host after Tillis’ opposition ends Ed Martin’s nomination
Sen. Thom Tillis’ opposition quashed President Donald Trump’s nomination of Ed Martin to serve as Washington’s top prosecutor.
Trump said Thursday he would announce another candidate for the role in the next 48 hours and find something else for Martin to do within the administration.
“He’s a terrific person and he wasn’t getting the support from people I thought,” Trump said, adding that crime is down in the District of Columbia. “To me it was disappointing. I’ll be honest. I have to be straight. I was disappointed. A lot of people were disappointed, but that’s the way it works sometimes.”
Later Thursday, Trump announced on Truth Social that Jeanine Pirro, a Fox News host and former New York county judge and district attorney, would serve as interim U.S. attorney. She has been host of “The Five” on Fox News. Fox anchor Bret Baier said on air Thursday that she’ll leave the network to take the attorney position, The Washington Post reported.
Martin currently serves as interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. His term expires after 120 days — May 20 — and the Senate Committee on the Judiciary had not so far scheduled a hearing to take up Trump’s nomination of Martin for a permanent role.
Trump said that Martin “wasn’t rejected.”
Tillis, a Republican from Huntersville, serves on the committee, which needed to vote on Martin’s nomination before it moved to the Senate floor for a vote of the full chamber. And Martin could not lose a single Republican in order to be move forward.
Tillis told reporters Monday he called the White House to let the president know he could not support Martin. Tillis’ opposition of Martin stemmed from Martin’s actions surrounding the defendants in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Martin was an organizer of the Stop the Steal movement, which promoted the false belief that President Joe Biden lost the 2020 election. That belief eventually helped lead to people storming the Capitol as they tried to stop the election certification and called for the deaths of several politicians.
When Martin took his post in Washington following Trump’s inauguration, he immediately dismissed pending Jan. 6 cases and dismissed staff who worked on the prosecutions.
Tillis said he opposed Martin because Congress needed to be clear that what happened on that day “was wrong.”
This was the first time during Trump’s second term that Tillis went against a Trump nominee.
“I’m very disappointed in that,” Trump said from the Oval Office on Thursday, as he announced a trade deal with the United Kingdom. “I have so many things I’m doing now with the trade. I’m one person. Boom. I can only lift that little phone so many times in a day.”
He added that “Ed is unbelievable.”
“Hopefully we can bring him into, whether it’s DOJ or whatever, in some capacity because he’s really outstanding,” Trump said.
There are many roles within the administration that can be filled without Senate approval.
This story was originally published May 8, 2025 at 1:54 PM.