Former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro was confirmed as the US attorney for Washington, DC, on Saturday—a crescendo in her and President Donald Trump’s decades-long friendship.
Their friendship has included Trump donating to her once-active aspirations to run for office, pardoning her ex-husband, and advocating for her show to remain on Fox, and Pirro writing a fawning book about him, echoing his Big Lie about the 2020 election, and serving as a mouthpiece for his current anti-immigration campaign.
Pirro has been serving as interim US attorney since May. On Saturday, the Senate voted 50 to 45 to formalize her role, with all the Democrats present opposing her confirmation.
Despite their mutual support, Pirro was Trump’s second choice for the role. The president originally opted for interim US attorney Ed Martin, but removed his support after the longtime right-wing activist faced opposition from Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee, due to Martin’s close connections to the January 6 insurrection.
As NBC News reported in May, Martin had been serving as the interim attorney for Washington since Inauguration Day. And, during his time, oversaw the firings of Jan. 6 prosecutors and demoted others, and opened an investigation into the office’s handling of the Capitol riot investigation.
Once Martin lost the gig, Trump named Pirro, a former New York state district attorney and county judge, to the post.
Pirro joins other Fox News alums who have made their way further into Trump’s Washington. According to a May roundup from Newsweek, Pirro is the 23rd current or former Fox News employee Trump has recruited for his administration since taking office earlier this year. This group includes, among others, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Dan Bongino, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and “border czar” Tom Homan.
Pirro and Trump’s friendship began over three decades ago when Trump hired her ex-husband, Al Pirro, to be a real estate lawyer. As Kenzie Bryant reported for Vanity Fair, they were in the same party circuit in New York and both had political ambitions. In 2005, Pirro sought the GOP Senate nomination to race against Hillary Clinton—a campaign that Trump, according to The New York Daily News, donated to. Pirro would eventually drop out of that race to become the Republican nominee for New York attorney general in 2006, a race she lost to Andrew Cuomo, who would go on to be the state’s governor before resigning in disgrace and launching a New York City mayoral bid.
After her stint running for office, Pirro had a Judge Judy–esque daytime TV show on the CW, which was cancelled in 2011. That’s when Pirro made her way to Fox, a role that she held during Trump’s first run for office almost a decade ago. She lauded Trump on TV, verbally eviscerated his perceived enemies, and, as Bryant wrote, “torpedoed any previous bipartisan respect.”
In 2018, Pirro penned the book “Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy.” The Washington Post, in a review of 6 pro-Trump texts, called Pirro’s work “the most gushing.” In it, she railed against “Fake News,” “Crooked Hillary,” “LIAR Obama,” and “LIBERAL haters” while celebrating Trump’s “Kryptonite-proof aura of invincibility.”
When Trump ran again and lost in the 2020 cycle, Pirro was a vocal supporter of his unsubstantiated Big Lie that the election was stolen from him. She was later cited in a defamation lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems for her role in spreading this disinformation. In December 2023, Fox reached a $787.5 million settlement with Dominion and was forced to acknowledge that Pirro, along with others at Fox, had peddled false claims about Dominion.
The support came the other way too, from Trump to Pirro.
In March of 2019, Pirro sparked outrage on her Fox show, Justice with Judge Jeanine, when she questioned if Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota could be loyal to the United States because she wears a hijab. “Is her adherence to this Islamic doctrine indicative of her adherence to Sharia law,” Pirro asked her audience, “which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution?” Fox News distanced itself from the remarks, but Pirro didn’t. The following week, her show didn’t air at its regular Saturday night slot.
“Bring back @JudgeJeanine Pirro,” Trump wrote in a post on then-Twitter. “The Radical Left Democrats, working closely with their beloved partner, the Fake News Media, is using every trick in the book to SILENCE a majority of our Country. They have all out campaigns against @FoxNews hosts who are doing too well.”
In the beginning of 2021, as he was less than an hour away from leaving the White House, Trump announced he was pardoning Pirro’s ex-husband, who in 2000 was convicted at a trial in New York federal court “of conspiracy and tax evasion in connection with illegally deducting $1.2 million of personal expenses as write-offs for his business,” according to CNBC.
On Saturday, Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, celebrated Pirro’s confirmation.
“You may hear my Democrat colleagues criticize Ms. Pirro for some of her colorful remarks during her time as a TV personality,” he said, acknowledging that “yes, she has a larger-than-life personality.”
Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, was quick to denounce his Republican colleague’s decision, calling Pirro’s record “deeply troubling.”
“President Trump has been using the Justice Department to protect his allies and go after his enemies, and Ms. Pirro has proven to be a willing accomplice in weaponizing the justice system,” he said in a statement. “She is not fit to be the U.S. attorney for our nation’s capital, and I believe it’s a grave mistake my Republican colleagues voted to confirm her.”
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