Hey, It’s A January 6 Lawyer You Haven't Even Met Yet!
Meet Mark Martin, a rarely noticed tool from Trump's box.
Nearly four years later, there’s still a lot of garbage juice swirling around the bottom of the January 6 insurrection dumpster. Questions that haven’t been answered, and characters who managed to evade scrutiny and cucaracha-scurry away, leaving only traces of frass.
Now Shawn Musgrave, reporter at the Intercept, has dug up a new figure you probably haven’t heard of. He is Mark Martin, not the NASCAR driver or Clarence Thomas’s grandnephew, but a retired chief justice of the North Carolina state supreme court, and currently a dean of the law school at High Point University in North Carolina, somehow.
Oh, and look at this! Martin also “taught a three-day seminar on constitutional law with US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for Regent University Law School in Virginia, where Martin was the dean at the time.” In 2021, three weeks after the Capitol riot! It’s all fishier than Martha’s lagoon. And Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow was also on the faculty.
Martin is the guy who apparently came up with the insurrectiony idea of “plenary theory,” which supposes that state legislators have absolute power to do whatever they want, regardless of what any inconvenient laws might happen to say, including state attorneys general suing other states to force them to install Donald J. Trump as Lord Emperor. Lord Emperor Trump apparently liked what he heard, and so Martin quickly became a favorite of his.
“He’s a real ‘scholar.’ He knows about this stuff,” Trump reportedly gushed to then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Rich Donoghue. And Trump chitchatted with Martin in the days leading up to January 6, and for nine minutes that evening. Martin was of the mind that Mike Pence had boy-wonder powers as vice president to throw out the genuine Electoral College certificates, and substitute them with the fake ones, a ridiculous idea that Trump and Rudy Giuliani used to relentlessly harangue Mike Pence with.
Texas v. Pennsylvania, remember that one? That was the clownshow lawsuit wherein Texas AG Ken Paxton tried to ask the US Supreme Court permission to sue these four swing states — Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — to force them to install Trump. It was a flaming bag of dogshit that was quickly dismissed for lack of standing, but apparently the misguided concept behind it, and the phrasing, was Martin’s.
REMEMBER?
“Well, Mark Martin and John Eastman, who are, you know, these great legal scholars, think it’s a great idea,” Jeffrey Rosen told the House January 6 Select Committee about that crash-and-burn stupid lawsuit.
Martin was a pal of Mark Meadows, and he posted a picture of their boiled-ham-looking heads together on Facebook in 2013.
In 2019 he appeared with a pruny, shrinking Pat Robertson on CBN, twice, “debunking” potential obstruction charges against Trump, and claiming Bill Barr could end Special Counsels. Aileen Cannon must have been tuning in while she was painting her nails. And in 2020, Martin became a core part of Trump’s election-denying legal team.
Martin has stayed pretty under the radar, but popped up in John Eastman’s disbarment hearing as part of “a small group” working on the case, and in Ken Cheseboro’s Jan 6 committee transcript, where Eastman urges everybody to “make sure the various 24 State electors are aware of the absolute necessity of meeting on the 14th, casting their 25 votes, and otherwise complying with the transmittal requirements of Federal law.”
Though Ken Paxton appears to have been the only taker, Martin apparently shopped his “plenary theory” nonsense to multiple states, including in Arizona, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Texas. And attorney Kurt Olsen, CC-ing Martin, even asked Trump campaign lawyers and Steven Miller (not a lawyer) to work on the language and “make the complaint more persuasive.” Hey, wasn’t the whole point of the complaint that state legislatures are strong and independent as any federal government, and no daddy can tell them what to do? Except maybe other states? Look, the theory never made any sense in the first place.
Somehow Mark Martin managed to avoid being grilled by the January 6 committee at all, or seemingly questioned by anyone. Mighty strange, considering that he spoke to the loser president for nine minutes on that very day. Super mysterious!
The whole piece is worth a read, don’t miss it!
[The Intercept archive link]
OT, but I keep seeing insane posts claiming that Hurricane Helene was a man-made event, put together so that the government can get access to lithium deposits in eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina. I need to start taking better drugs, because I’m a relatively creative person who ingests a lot of THC, and even in my most incredible moments of being stoned I’ve never been able to come up with something that wacky. I wonder if these conspiracy theories are meth-based?
In other news, WaPo has a big long profile on the GA school shooter, the 14 year old. HOLY SHIT. Both parents were physically abusive addicts, aunt and grandma begged CPS to intervene and nothing came of it outside of a stint in jail for mom when she went after dad, when he made a credible shooting threat on Discord the officer who responded couldn't figure out how to open the pictures on his phone and so decided to take the kid's word that he didn't even know what Discord was (pics would have shown it was the dad's guns in that house), a neighbor reported him not attending school more than once, and getting locked outside at night, the grandma despaired that he missed all of eighth grade but was put in ninth due to a lack of records, mom tied up grandma in her home at one point and left her there intended to kill dad and maybe the future-shooter, grandma was found 22 hours later by aunt, by then mom was arrested. Dad let mom move back in post-jail. Kid started having massive paranoia whenever he left the house and an interest in school shooters which grandma assumed was just like her own interest in True Crime and didn't see as a red flag.
There's so many failures. Like, over a dozen over the course of at least five years. Holy fucking shit.