Donald Trump’s first choice to serve as the U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., was Ed Martin, a hyperpartisan Republican lawyer whose nomination collapsed in the face of bipartisan opposition.
After Martin’s bid failed, the president assured the public that his second choice would be “great,” and soon after, Trump announced that he wanted Jeanine Pirro — perhaps best known for work as a Fox News host — to be the top federal prosecutor in the nation’s capital.
Shortly before leaving for their summer break, Senate Republicans rubberstamped the White House’s choice. The New York Times reported:
The former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, whose false statements about the 2020 election were part of a lawsuit against the network, was confirmed as the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., on Saturday. Ms. Pirro has been serving as interim U.S. attorney, and the Senate voted 50 to 45 on Saturday to formalize her role, with all Democrats present opposed.
Five senators — two Democrats and three Republicans — missed the vote. With unanimous GOP support for the nominee, their participation wouldn’t have affected the outcome.
Revisiting our earlier coverage, Democratic concerns about Pirro’s background are easy to understand, especially given her work on Fox News. Before her television career, Pirro served as a judge in Westchester County, New York, in the early 1990s. She went on to serve as the county’s district attorney for roughly a decade until 2005. She later hosted a weekday television show on The CW network before joining Fox News in 2011.
It’s unrealistic to try to summarize her rhetorical record in a single blog post, but broadly speaking, there are two key elements of Pirro’s career as a television personality to keep in mind.
The first is that Pirro, during her tenure as a Fox News host, was as much of a sycophantic Trump loyalist as anyone in conservative media. As The Washington Post noted after the president announced her nomination, “Jeanine Pirro has long stood out as one of his most reliable backers, often taking his critics to task in stark and colorful language.”
The affection has been mutual. In 2019, when the network found it necessary to publicly condemn anti-Muslim statements Pirro made, it was Trump who leapt to her defense.
This kind of partisan unity between the president and Pirro helped explain why she was nominated, and why GOP senators were eager to confirm her, but it’s hardly reassuring given the powers of the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C.
The other angle of note is that the Republican lawyer’s worldview appears to be rooted in a series of outlandish conspiracy theories. Way back in 2014, for example, Pirro launched into a truly unhinged rant against Barack Obama, suggesting to viewers that the Democratic president was secretly training ISIS radicals, prompting BuzzFeed to publish a memorable headline: “Is This The Craziest Rant A Fox News Host Has Ever Done?”
In the years that followed, Pirro continued to peddle one ludicrous conspiracy theory after another. Indeed, after Trump’s 2020 election defeat, it reached the point that Fox News felt the need to temporarily remove Pirro from the air. According to court filings, one executive who oversaw her show at the time privately explained, “I don’t trust her to be responsible.”
As Media Matters noted, internal Fox communications revealed by court filings also showed that her executive producer described Pirro as a “reckless maniac” who is “nuts,” promotes “conspiracy theories” and “should never be on live television.”
In theory, these details might give senators pause before backing her nomination to serve as one of the United States’ most important prosecutors. Republican senators — including Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, the chamber’s so-called GOP “moderates” — did what Trump told them to do.
MSNBC’s Barbara McQuade, a University of Michigan Law School professor and a former U.S. attorney, recently made the case that the president will use Pirro “as a tool of retribution in our nation’s capital.” Given that she has, among things, endorsed possible criminal investigations into Jan. 6 prosecutors, it’s an unsettling prospect.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
