Nearly 20 years after she last had a job as a working prosecutor, former Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro is officially on board and running all criminal prosecutions, local and federal, in the nation’s capital.
Pirro, who until last month was a co-host of Fox’s The Five panel program and previously hosted her own weekend show, took the oath of office on Wednesday in an Oval Office ceremony attended by President Donald Trump.
Trump praised her as someone who’d “devoted her life to the pursuit of justice, the defense of freedom and the fair, equal and impartial rule of law” and called her “a tireless warrior on behalf of the most vulnerable people in our society.”
The president also said her time on television had made her “one of the most beloved political figures” because she’d been “very, very successful” as an on-screen personality.
“She got out of what she was doing, and frankly, she does them both great, but she’s really, to me, she’ll always be known as a great lawyer and a great prosecutor, which is what she’s doing now,” Trump said.
“So Jeanine Pirro, I have no doubt, will be an exceptional US Attorney for the District of Columbia, one of the truly most important positions in our country, of any position where she will restore public safety in our nation’s capital, break up vicious street gangs and criminal networks and ensure equal justice under the law.”
After U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi administered the oath of office, Pirro thanked Trump for having “remained as steadfast as one of my earliest supporters and champions” dating back to her early political career.
“Today, Mr. President, you bring me back to my roots, and it is a larger arena, but no less, an arena where we need justice, where we need to send a message that justice will be honored in the District of Columbia,” she said.
“My voice should be heard loud and clear: No more tolerance of hatred, no more mercy for criminals. Violence will be addressed directly with the appropriate punishment, and this city will again become a shining city on a hill in an America that President Trump has promised to make great again and will make safe again.”
The swearing-in formalized her appointment as Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, a position that had been held by Trump ally and GOP activist Ed Martin until it became clear that he lacked the support needed to be confirmed to the role on a permanent basis.
Unlike Martin, whose nomination was doomed by Republican senators’ concerns over his lack of experience and prior representation of Jan. 6 rioters as a defense attorney, Pirro has experience as a working prosecutor and as a judge hearing cases in criminal court.
She worked as an assistant district attorney in New York’s Westchester County from 1975 to 1990, when she was elected to a county judge position as a Republican. Three years later, she sought and won election as the Westchester County District Attorney, a position she would hold for more than a decade by winning subsequent elections in 1997 and 2001.
But Pirro’s political fortunes took a dramatic turn just before she left the DA’s office at the end of 2005. In August of that year, she announced that she would seek the Republican nomination in New York’s 2006 Senate race against then-Sen. Hillary Clinton.
After an awkward announcement speech during which she froze after misplacing a full page of her speech, she failed to gain enough support to convince party elders of her viability. She withdrew from the Senate primary and instead ran unopposed for the GOP nomination as New York’s Attorney General, facing off against Andrew Cuomo, the son of former governor Mario Cuomo who had served in the Clinton administration as Housing and Urban Development Secretary.
Pirro’s campaign was dogged by a tabloid-ready scandal arising out of a federal criminal probe into her push to have a boat belonging to her then-husband, Al Pirro, bugged as a way of finding out if he was cheating on her.
According to the New York Post, federal prosecutors working for then-U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia investigated “allegations recently brought to our attention by other law-enforcement agencies” alongside the FBI and Pirro’s former office in Westchester. She could have faced illegal wiretapping charges that carried a five-year prison sentence.
Pirro was caught up in a separate probe of ex-New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik. Investigators who were monitoring Kerik’s phone calls heard her urging the ex-commissioner to order workers at his private security company to place listening devices on her boat.
When he said his employees were reluctant to do so, she told Kerik: “I’ll put the f***ing thing on myself.”
Pirro maintained that no illegal taping had ever taken place, but she went on to lose that election to Cuomo by double digits.
Two years later, she returned to the judge’s bench — sort of — as the host of an eponymous weekday courtroom program on the CW television network called Judge Jeanine Pirro. In 2009, the show’s second season earned her a Daytime Emmy Award, but by 2011 it was canceled due to poor ratings.
Pirro wasn’t off television for long, however. Her legal background and Republican bona fides earned her a place on Fox News, where her Justice with Judge Jeanine weekend show premiered in January 2011.
For the next 11 years, Pirro offered incendiary commentary that was often heavy on bombast but short on facts, landing her and her employer in one controversy after another.
One March 2019 episode of her show was spiked after she was suspended by Fox for making offensive comments about Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar in which she suggested that Omar, a practicing Muslim who wears a head covering, wasn’t fully loyal to the United States. At the time, her suspension led President Donald Trump to speak up on her behalf.
Writing on what was then known as Twitter, Trump wrote: “Bring back @JudgeJeanine Pirro. Stop working soooo hard on being politically correct, which will only bring you down, and continue to fight for our Country.”
Her show resumed at the end of March 2019, but a year later she ran smack into another controversy while broadcasting from home during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
It was March 2020, and Pirro missed the first 15 minutes of the program. When she did appear, she was disheveled and was speaking in a slurred manner leading some observers to suggest she was drunk on the air.
At the time, a Fox spokesperson claimed her less than polished speech was due to a non-functioning teleprompter rather than intoxication, but that didn’t stop the perception of drunkenness from becoming part and parcel of Pirro’s image in popular culture.
She was also frequently parodied on NBC’s Saturday Night Live by Cecily Strong, whose portrayal of Pirro always included a glass full of what appeared to be red wine.
Regardless, Pirro remained a staunch defender of Trump to the point where she was one of the fiercest advocates of his false stolen election claims after he lost the 2020 presidential race to Joe Biden. That support was rewarded when Trump, at her request, pardoned her ex-husband on tax evasion charges shortly before leaving office after his first term.
Pirro was among the Fox personalities named in a February 2021 defamation suit from voting machine maker Smartmatic, which she and others had accused along with Dominion Voting Systems, of making machines that were designed to help Democrats rig elections.
In the wake of the lawsuits, Fox pulled her show off the air and reassigned her to be a co-host on The Five.
The network settled a similar suit from Dominion for $787 million in 2023. Smartmatic’s litigation against Fox is still ongoing.
