It’s easy to forget, given the decade-plus she spent shouting and slurring her words on Fox News, that Jeanine Pirro was once a real jurist. She spent years going after criminals—and courting controversy—as a judge, and later the district attorney, in Westchester County, New York. We’re now seeing the value of that experience, particularly to President Trump’s authoritarian goals. Since Pirro took over as the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., in late May—and especially since Trump launched a federal takeover of the nation’s capital in response to a nonexistent crime wave earlier this month—it’s become clear that she’s not just a partisan hack who yells on television: She knows what a prosecutor’s office does, and over the last three weeks she has emerged as one of the most ruthless and genuinely scary figures in the administration.
That is in sharp contrast to her predecessor, Ed Martin, who served as the interim U.S. attorney before Trump dropped his nomination because of a backlash from Republicans. Like Pirro, Martin is a dyed-in-the-wool partisan and lawyer. But Martin had no real prosecutorial experience, having spent most of his legal career working on behalf of conservative causes. He had courted controversy by attempting to wield the U.S. attorney’s office against Trump’s enemies and on behalf of his allies, notably by dismissing pending charges related to the January 6, 2021, insurrection against hundreds of defendants. But he didn’t actually know what he was doing, and his nomination faltered in large part because he kept doing and saying stupid things, often on television. (These included praising an avowed Nazi who stormed the Capitol on January 6.)
Pirro would seem an odd choice to replace a man best known for putting his foot in his mouth. Anyone who has glimpsed “Judge Jeanine” on Fox News over the last 15 years—or, for that matter, encountered Cecily Strong’s alcohol-fueled impression—knows that she’s also quite familiar with the taste of her own feet. Watching her on television was like being cornered by the groom’s wine-drunk aunt at a wedding. But she was nevertheless fully confirmed on August 3 in a party-line vote—with her ties to Fox News and her experience as a prosecutor seemingly playing equally pivotal roles for the Republicans who backed her nomination.
Since losing the “interim” tag she had held since May, Pirro has been a staunch backer of the president’s crackdown on D.C. Asked on August 13 to justify the presence of National Guard troops and mine-resistant military vehicles on the streets of D.C., given that violent crime is at a 30-year low in the District, Pirro launched into a lengthy soliloquy. “It’s never enough. This changed. This changed,” Pirro said, as she pointed to a series of photographs of D.C. crime victims. “It’s never enough. You tell these families, ‘Crime has dropped.’
“You tell the mother of the intern who was shot going out for McDonald’s near the Washington Convention Center, ‘Oh, crime is down,’” she continued, referring to a 21-year-old intern for a Kansas Republican who was killed as a bystander during a shooting earlier in the summer. “You tell the kid who was just beat the hell and back with a severe concussion and a broken nose, ‘Crime is down,’” Pirro added, referring to the assault of a Department of Government Efficiency employee known as “Big Balls” on the streets of D.C. “No, that falls on deaf ears, and my ears are deaf to that, and that’s why I fight the fight.”
It was an answer that sounded a lot like the “Judge Jeanine” on Fox but with distinct authoritarian overtones. Pirro didn’t acknowledge that crime was going down; she instead suggested that the existence of any violent crime at all necessitated combat vehicles and troops armed with AR-15s in the streets of the capital.
Displays like that are, of course, a big reason why she’s in the job. Television experience is a prized asset in the second Trump administration, and experience on Fox News is especially important. Pete Hegseth is secretary of defense because Trump liked watching him on television. Pirro is no different. And, like Hegseth, Trump wants important positions filled with people who can appear on television and deliver performances he likes. It also helped that Pirro was one of the president’s most steadfast backers before she joined the administration. A Washington Post report published earlier this week found that Pirro had told Republican officials she was determined to aid Trump, even though she was prohibited from doing so by Fox News. “I’m the Number 1 watched show on all news cable all weekend,” Pirro told Ronna McDaniel when McDaniel was head of the Republican National Committee. “I work so hard for the president and party.”
Back then, most of that work was yapping on TV. But Trump and his cronies want results too, and Pirro is there to deliver them. She is there to back the occupation of D.C., which appears as though it will go on indefinitely. And she has already begun to use her powers in disturbing ways. She has directed prosecutors to seek the maximum penalty for anyone arrested during the crackdown. Like others in the administration, she is turning these arrests into a spectacle. After a small mob of heavily armed officers arrested a man who threw a Subway sandwich at a federal agent, Pirro announced in a video on X that the perpetrator had been charged with a felony. “So there!” she said. “Stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else.”
At the same time, she has directed her office to stop charging residents caught in possession of rifles and shotguns with felonies. Her office claims this reversal was in response to recent Supreme Court decisions, but the timing is curious, as it directly contradicts the administration’s insistence that the city is in the midst of a massive crime wave that requires the deployment of heavily armed federal troops. The decision, like the federal takeover broadly, has been met with criticism from local residents, and yet the administration continues to wrongly claim that Washingtonians are welcoming all of the camouflaged troops and masked agents as liberators.
Pirro has been waiting for this moment her whole professional life. She was an ambitious prosecutor and judge—elected, in both cases—who aspired to higher political office, only to lose time and again at the polls. New York voters did not want her as lieutenant governor, U.S. senator, or attorney general. But she spun those failed campaigns into a lucrative, successful TV career that eventually brought her to the attention of the most powerful politician of our era. She herself is now more powerful than she’s ever been, and she didn’t need voters to get there. She just needed to flatter the right people, from the right perch. Rest assured, she’ll now do anything Trump wants—no matter how authoritarian and lawless—in order to keep her newfound power. There might even be a promotion in it for her.
