Martin's Out. Pirro's In. Incompetence Reigns.
Being less flagrantly unfit than the last guy doesn't make you fit.
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This afternoon, Jeanine Pirro will be sworn in as interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, becoming the 23rd Fox News personality to join the Trump administration.
Pirro is grossly unqualified for this job, and the fact that she is less unqualified than her predecessor Ed Martin cannot magically transform her into someone with the experience and qualifications — not to say judgment — to run the largest US attorney’s office in the country.
And while Martin’s bumptious threats to Trump’s political enemies came to nothing, Pirro knows just enough to be actually dangerous.
Time of death: May 8
Last week, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis acknowledged what was clear to everyone in DC weeks ago: Ed Martin, the interim US Attorney for DC, did not have the votes to get confirmed to a full term.
With the clock ticking down on Martin’s 120-day interim appointment, Tillis announced that he wouldn’t vote to advance Martin out of the Judiciary Committee, sparing the president the ignominy of failing to resuscitate a moribund nomination.
After insisting that he absolutely could have gotten it done if only he weren’t so busy doing important president stuff, Trump promised to replace Martin with someone “great.”
Hours later he nominated Pirro, burbling “she’s in a class by herself.”
And that’s true, as far as it goes. Pirro is not in the same class as other attorneys who have held the vital position she’s about to occupy. Not least because none of her predecessors, excepting Martin, publicly called for the leadership of the DOJ and FBI to be taken out in handcuffs.
Matthew Graves, who headed the US attorney’s office in DC during the Biden administration, spent nine years there as a prosecutor, eventually serving as acting chief of the public corruption section, punctuated by periods in private practice where he worked as a white collar defense lawyer. During the first Trump administration, the position was first held by Jesse Liu, who spent four years as an assistant US attorney in DC, and another four years at Main Justice.
When Liu refused to magic away the prosecution of Roger Stone, Attorney General Bill Barr replaced her, first with Michael Shea, who held various roles at the Justice Department going back to the George H. W. Bush administration, and then with Michael Sherwin, another Justice Department veteran. In short, everyone who has run this office has experience as a federal prosecutor, most in the very office they were tapped to run.
Pirro has none of that.
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What happens upstate, doesn’t stay upstate
“Judge” Jeanine Pirro never served as a federal prosecutor, or in any role at all in the Justice Department. She was the elected district attorney in Westchester County, New York, and served as a county judge for three years during the ‘90s, although she does not appear to have practiced law at all in the past two decades.
Instead, Pirro spent a year trying and failing to get elected statewide. She dropped out of the New York senate race in 2006 after polling showed her getting clobbered by Hillary Clinton, and instead opted to run for state attorney general. She lost that race to Andrew Cuomo by 19 points.
Pirro always faced long odds against two political juggernauts in a blue state, but her personal life is what really torpedoed her. Her husband Albert Pirro is a lobbyist who served 11 months in federal prison after being convicted of tax fraud in 2000 for deducting $1.2 million of personal items as business expenses, including two Ferraris. He also fathered a child with another woman. In 2005, Pirro became convinced that her husband was using the family boat for romantic trysts, and she tried to get Rudy Giuliani’s security consigliere Bernie Kerik to bug the boat to catch her husband in the act.
Kerik had legal problems of his own and would himself plead guilty in 2006 to tax fraud. He and Albert Pirro would both be pardoned by Trump in his first term. But in 2005, when Kerik’s pal Jeanine was demanding help to nail her cheating husband, his phone was being wiretapped by the feds. During the election, it emerged that she’d been recorded shouting “What am I supposed to do? I can go on the boat. I’ll put the f-----g thing on myself.”
But if Pirro’s personal life was too salacious for public office, it was not too salacious for TV.
In 2008, she began a gig on the CW Television Network as the host of a Judge Judy-style show called “Judge Jeanine Pirro.” Three years later, she moved to Fox, where she spewed nonsense and stoked rage. Muslims were a particular target, and Pirro was broadly supportive of Trump’s Muslim ban in 2017. The previous year, she advocated for “a conversation about surveillance in mosques.” And in 2019, she was temporarily yanked off the air for bigoted comments about Rep. Ilhan Omar.
The closest Pirro got to a courtroom in that time was when she was deposed by lawyers for Dominion Voting Systems about the patently defamatory things she said on air after the 2020 election. Pirro’s wild claims, along with those of her colleagues, cost the network $787 million. A suit by Dominion’s competitor Smartmatic is ongoing, although Pirro herself has been dropped as a defendant.
Less worse than the last guy
When Trump named Pirro as Martin’s replacement, Tillis gushed about her “long and storied career as a prosecutor,” calling her “a great choice by @POTUS to serve as U.S. Attorney for DC!”
The Atlantic’s Gilad Edelman wrote that “Pirro had a legal career that — at least on paper, and by the feeble standards set by Trump’s other appointments — prepared her for her new job as DC’s top prosecutor.” But that’s grading the Trump administration on the steepest of curves. If Democrats nominated someone with no experience as a federal prosecutor to run that office, Republicans would howl that it showed contempt for the rule of law. And they would be right!
And while Pirro’s CV is less inappropriate than Martin’s, she’s still a wildly inappropriate choice for the job.
Ed Martin is a ridiculous loudmouth. In his brief four months on the job, he threatened everyone from Wikipedia, to the New England Journal of Medicine, to Georgetown Law School. He tried and failed to indict Sen. Chuck Schumer, and he got laughed out of court by a magistrate judge when he sought a warrant to seize clean energy funds held by Citibank. But his buffoonery came to nothing, serving only to highlight the deterioration of the DOJ under Attorney General Pam Bondi (who also had no federal experience before taking over from Merrick Garland, a former prosecutor and federal judge on the DC Circuit). Martin’s only success was in hollowing out the office he presided over, purging lawyers who worked on the January 6 cases and driving away scores of competent, experienced attorneys.
Jeanine Pirro is also a ridiculous loudmouth whose own producer described her as a “reckless maniac” who “should never be on live television.” She’s expressed deep distrust of career staff, lauded the January 6 rioters as patriots, and made clear that she will use the office to protect Trump rather than advance the interests of justice. And although she’s likely to send out fewer idiotic letters, there’s no indication she’ll run the US attorney’s office in DC in a professional manner.
That’s a shame, because the office plays a vital role in both federal and local law enforcement. Since DC is not a state, the US attorney is responsible not only for prosecuting federal crimes in the nation’s capital, but also “state-level” crimes in the city. Ironically, that’s the part of the job for which Pirro is least unqualified, having run a county prosecutor’s office in New York a generation ago. She may know nothing about national security law or white collar crime, but she did make domestic violence her signature issue, and is presumably competent to handle street crime prosecutions in the District.
Perhaps the old muscle memory will kick in, and she’ll at least prosecute muggings and burglaries like a normal person. On the other hand, she seems to have forgotten about the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process.
“You cannot be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process,” she vamped during a recent episode of The Five, reading from her prop pocket Constitution. “It says nothing about illegals. So cut the crap.” (Watch below.)
Cut the crap, indeed. This woman is not qualified to supervise a high school civics class, much less a US Attorney’s office. And comparing her to her even-less-qualified predecessor doesn’t change that.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Not sure why it seems so surprising or that we spend so much time kvetching about the incompetence and corruption of each and every Trump pick for a cabinet or other senior post. Trump/Miller and all the rest have no interest in appointing ‘subject-matter experts.’ Those people would be too close to the ‘deep state’ enemy within.
All of Trump’s appointments are simply of consiglieri. Their job is to identify and persecute the enemy (non-MAGA) within and under the purview of these agencies and offices — and to identify and promote those who are and will reliably remain Trump loyalists. It can also be simply to disable, dismember, and destroy the agency or office. That’s it.
Pirro is not being nominated to do that job in any way that has heretofore been considered well done. Neither was Hegseth or Patel, or Bondi, or Rubio, etc., etc. Her (their) job, which she undoubtably will gladly accept, is simply to become a consigliere — part of Trump’s ‘muscle’ — responsible for purging the chumps and libs — and promoting and protecting the loyalists.
"Kerik had legal problems of his own and would himself plead guilty in 2006 to tax fraud. He and Albert Pirro would both be pardoned by Trump in his first term."
The most shocking and perhaos saddest thing about this sentence is how unsurprising it is. Like, of course Trump found some of the guiltiest, least deserving people to pardon and then pardoned them. Of course....