Before President Donald Trump made Jeanine Pirro one of the nation’s top law enforcement officials, her colleagues at Fox News badmouthed her false 2020 election claims as “insane.”
A trove of legal documents made public as part of a defamation suit brought by voting technology company Smartmatic against the network reveal that Pirro, now the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, was a constant headache for executives at Fox News, even as she remained one of the network’s most prominent hosts.
In 2020, Pirro, 74, frequently promoted Trump’s baseless claims that voting technology companies had rigged the presidential election and were to blame for his loss to Joe Biden.
“Reckless maniac,” Fox News executive Jerry Andrews wrote to another colleague about Pirro shortly after the election, according to documents first reported by NPR.
The latest internal messages were made public as part of a $2.7 billion defamation case filed by Smartmatic. In court filings, Smartmatic accuses Pirro and other Fox hosts of amplifying Trump’s election lies for personal gain.
Publicly, Fox executives claimed under oath that Pirro was a credible source of information, NPR reported. Privately, however, their concerns were extensive.
On Nov. 6, 2020, Fox News’ senior vice president for weekend programming, David Clark, wrote to Meade Cooper, the executive vice president over prime time: “Bottom line, I don’t trust her to be responsible tomorrow. Her guests are all going to say the election is being stolen and if she pushes back at all it will just be a token.”
That Saturday, Justice with Judge Jeanine was pulled from the air—prompting outrage from MAGA allies who accused Fox News of censoring one of their own.
Pirro was soon back on the air and resumed her attacks on Smartmatic and Dominion—another voting technology company that Fox would go on to settle a defamation lawsuit with for a staggering $787.5 million in 2023.
.@realDonaldTrump redoing the colonnade at the White House pic.twitter.com/Y83uZVYDCV
— Jeanine Pirro (@JudgeJeanine) August 20, 2025
“It’s rife w[ith] conspiracy theories and bs and is yet another example of why this woman should never be on live television,” Andrews wrote to two other executives on Nov. 20, 2020, about Pirro’s show.
Now Washington’s top prosecutor, Pirro was a leading voice calling for Trump’s supporters to gather on the National Mall on Jan. 6, 2021, which became the bloody Capitol riot.
After the violence that day, Pirro likened the deplatforming of the far-right site Parler to Kristallnacht—the devastating Nazi pogrom against Jews in 1938.
Fox Corp. board member Anne Dias texted fellow board member and former House Speaker Paul Ryan and called Pirro’s Kristallnacht comment “insane.”
Despite such behind-the-scenes condemnation, Pirro continued to rise within Fox News, eventually landing a coveted full-time seat on The Five. She remained there until May, when Trump appointed her to the U.S. attorney role in Washington.
At the time of her appointment, Pirro was the 23rd current or former Fox News figure nominated by Trump during his second term, according to Newsweek. She has since promoted the president’s crime crackdown on D.C., though she’s been unable to secure at least four felony indictments.
The Daily Beast has reached out to Fox News and the Justice Department.
Last month, Fox News said of the lawsuit in a statement to the Daily Beast, “The evidence shows that Smartmatic’s business and reputation were badly suffering long before any claims by President Trump’s lawyers on FOX News and that Smartmatic grossly inflated its damage claims to generate headlines and chill free speech.”
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