This Law School Dean Sure Is Associated With Lots of Trump’s Alleged Co-Conspirators

Mark Martin — a law school dean who advised former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and taught seminars with Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito after January 6 — does not make a personal appearance in new evidence filed against Trump last week in one of his federal criminal cases.

But special counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page brief includes a number of unindicted characters with ties to Martin, and at key moments, Martin was right there alongside them, records from the House Select Committee on January 6 and other sources show.

(As with previous articles, Martin and High Point University in North Carolina, where he is the inaugural law school dean, did not respond to questions.) 

The connections start with Martin’s one-on-one chats with Trump himself after the 2020 election, including on the evening of January 6, 2021, when the president called Martin for a nine-minute discussion. Neither has ever divulged what they talked about, but Martin was one of a select few lawyers Trump spoke with that evening — including Rudy Giuliani, who appears throughout Smith’s brief as “CC1” for Co-Conspirator 1, and Cleta Mitchell, aka “P31” for “Person 31,” who was part of Trump’s infamous call with Georgia’s secretary of state a few days before the insurrection. (Mitchell later told the January 6 committee that she didn’t recognize Martin’s name.)

Next is John Eastman (aka “CC2”), who is identifiable based on references to the various court cases in which he represented Trump. One of these cases, Texas v. Pennsylvania, was Martin’s “brainchild,” according to another attorney, Don Brown, who worked with Martin as they shepherded it to the Supreme Court in late 2020. During his disciplinary hearings last year, Eastman testified that Martin was part of “a group of lawyers that were assembled and working on the project,” and that they “were all working as part of a single legal team.”

Martin reportedly came into Trump’s orbit via another fellow North Carolinian, Mark Meadows (“P21”), who’s identifiable by his title as Trump’s chief of staff. That’s the theory recorded in testimony to the January 6 committee by former White House attorney Eric Herschmann (“P9”), arguably the hero of Smith’s brief because he tried to rebut Eastman’s fringe theories. “People were calling him,” Herschmann told the committee of Martin’s role advising other attorneys supporting the Trump campaign. The January 6 committee also wanted to ask Meadows himself about Martin, records show, but Meadows defied the subpoena.

Although Martin did not sign any of the briefs in Texas v. Pennsylvania, he helped recruit Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (“P62”) to file the case to the Supreme Court in early December 2020. And Trump quickly took an interest, per the newly filed evidence. The day after Paxton filed the ridiculous challenge, Trump gave him a call, then rang up another Republican attorney general: Chris Carr in Georgia (“P26”). Along with Pennsylvania, Georgia was one of four states whose election results Paxton was trying to challenge.

“I hope you’re not talking to your AGs and encouraging them not to get on the lawsuit,” Trump warned Carr, according to the brief. Trump then called Missouri’s then-attorney general, Eric Schmitt (“P63”), who filed an amicus brief supporting Paxton’s challenge. 

The Supreme Court quickly rejected Martin’s “brainchild” because Texas lacked standing to challenge other states’ election procedures. But that didn’t end his involvement in Trump’s various maneuvers. 

In early December 2020, Eastman forwarded Martin and other attorneys a memo written by Ken Chesebro (aka “CC5”). This memo was the starting point for “a corrupt strategy to overturn the legitimate election results,” the special counsel’s brief alleges, namely the “fake electors” scheme for which Eastman and others face criminal charges in Arizona and Georgia. Chesebro took a plea deal in the Georgia case last year, is reportedly cooperating with Arizona prosecutors, and was hit with new charges in Wisconsin this summer.

“This is huge and hugely important,” Eastman wrote in his email about Chesebro’s memo, according to transcripts from the January 6 committee’s investigation. The committee asked Chesebro if he ever spoke with Martin, Eastman, or the other attorneys on the thread about his memo. But as with many other questions, Chesebro declined to answer, citing the Fifth Amendment and the attorney-client privilege. 

Many of the witnesses the January 6 committee asked about Martin also make minor appearances in Smith’s latest filing. The committee named Martin in subpoenas to Mike Flynn (“P68”) and Peter Navarro (“P69”), and committee investigators also asked about him in interviews with Ivanka Trump (“P14”), Greg Jacob (“P58”), Christina Bobb (“P19”), Kayleigh McEnany (“P60”), and Nick Luna (“P15”).

Other witnesses the January 6 committee asked about Martin, however, are nowhere to be found in Smith’s latest brief. This is likely because of the Supreme Court’s decision over the summer that Trump has broad immunity for actions he took in his “official” capacity. Smith’s original indictment alleged Trump attempted to use the federal Justice Department to lean on state officials with unsubstantiated claims of election fraud. But in the 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled Trump has total immunity for how he decided to use his authority over the DOJ, regardless of whether he did so to benefit his campaign. Smith’s latest filing thus omits references to many of the Justice Department officials who Trump and his allies targeted after the 2020 election.

This includes two former top DOJ officials, who told the January 6 committee about Martin’s apparent endorsement of another plan to leverage the Justice Department. In meetings in late December 2020, Trump and Meadows both invoked Martin’s support for using the DOJ to file another Supreme Court challenge modeled on Paxton’s failed briefs, these witnesses testified.  

When the committee asked a third former DOJ attorney, Jeffrey Clark — who was “Co-Conspirator 4” in Smith’s original indictment — if he spoke with Martin about the same plan, Clark pleaded the Fifth, as he did in response to all other questions.

The latest evidence against Trump paints a stark picture of the lengths to which a small army of attorneys and campaign operatives went to keep him in power. Though some — such as Eastman, Giuliani, and Chesebro — have faced sanctions for their efforts to overturn the election, Martin has not had to publicly account for his role. Even in Smith’s filing, Martin doesn’t get any credit or scrutiny.

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