President Donald Trump on Thursday said he is appointing Jeanine Pirro — a Fox News host whose misstatements about the 2020 election were cited in two defamation lawsuits against the network — as the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
Pirro, a former New York judge and district attorney, is to replace Ed Martin, Trump’s initial nominee as D.C.’s top prosecutor who has spent 15 tumultuous weeks in office. Trump, in a Truth Social post, described Pirro as “incredibly well qualified for this position.”
Brash and often blunt-spoken, Pirro has stood out among a stable of conservative Fox commentators as a passionate defender of Trump, whom she got to know during his years as a developer in New York.
Her false statements about the 2020 election were cited as evidence during the Dominion Voting System’s litigation against Fox that resulted in the network paying a $787.5 million settlement in 2023.
An episode of her show after the election “was cancelled because executives were worried about her discussing conspiracy theories,” the Delaware judge overseeing the case concluded.
Pirro is currently a defendant in the $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit filed against Fox by another voting technology company, Smartmatic. That case could go to trial later this year in New York.
Michael Caputo, an adviser to Martin and a former Trump strategist, said that the president’s ties to Pirro are rooted in New York, where they traveled in high-level GOP circles.
“Once when I was with the president and she walked up, it was almost like they were from the same block,” Caputo said during a phone interview. “She’s a force of nature.”
But Caputo also predicted that Pirro’s history as a commentator would be fodder for rigorous scrutiny from Democrats if Trump seeks to nominate her as the U.S. attorney.
“There’s lots of material,” Caputo said.
The president did not specify the duration of Pirro’s term, nor when he would nominate a permanent successor to lead the nation’s largest U.S. attorney’s office, and among its most important. The office has more than 350 prosecutors and unique authority to prosecute both local and federal crimes in the nation’s capital, as well as public corruption, national security and other sensitive matters in the seat of the federal government.
Before beginning her television career, Pirro served as a judge in Westchester County in New York in the early 1990s, earning the “Judge Jeanine” moniker that is still a central part of her on-screen appeal. She was elected district attorney of Westchester County in 1993, a role she held until 2005. She ran a short-lived campaign for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in 2006, hoping to take on then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, but dropped out amid pressure from her party.
Pirro joined Fox News as a legal analyst in 2006 and began hosting her own show on Saturday nights, “Justice with Judge Jeanine,” five years later. In 2022, she became a co-host of the conservative-leaning talk show “The Five,” offering her a daily presence on the network.
Anchor Bret Baier was the one to break the newsof Pirro’s appointment to Fox viewerson Thursday. “She will be leaving Fox to take this position,” he said on-air. “We obviously wish her well.” (An hour earlier, Pirro did not appear on her daily Fox show as usual.)
A Fox News spokesperson said that Pirro’s departure from the network is effective immediately.
“Jeanine Pirro has been a wonderful addition to The Five over the last three years and a longtime beloved host across FOX News Media who contributed greatly to our success throughout her 14-year tenure,” a Fox spokesperson said.
Pirro has long described herself a friend of the Trump family, and wrote in her 2018 book “Liars, Leakers and Liberals” about joining them on flights back to Florida, recounting an incident in which she made Eric Trump queasy after taking a turn in the cockpit.
She also wrote that Trump liked to promote her before she became a television personality, describing how when they would encounter police officers and construction workers on New York streets he would “point to me and say, ‘You know who this is? It’s Jeanine Pirro! She’s the D.A. from Westchester!’ ”
At the end of Trump’s first term, Trump pardoned Pirro’s ex-husband, Albert J. Pirro Jr.,an attorney who had been convicted on tax evasion charges when she was district attorney. Trump had hired Albert Pirro during the 1990s to represent him in a deal in which he sought to turn an estate into a golf course in Westchester.
Pirro has long been mentioned as a potential Trump appointee because of her loyalty to him and prominent role in the conservative media ecosystem. In 2018, she denied she was under consideration for the Supreme Court, although she acknowledged in an appearance on ABC’s “The View” that she spoke with Trump “quite often.”
Around the same time, Politico reported that Pirro had lobbied to serve as Trump’s attorney general. This past January, Pirro denied that she would accept a role in the second Trump administration, after his director of presidential personnel, Sergio Gor, seemed to suggest she would do so during an inauguration weekend ball. Gor had been joking, Pirro said through a Fox News spokesperson.
Pirro’s Fox News career ran into trouble in 2019 when, she said, she was suspended by the network for incendiary comments about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota). Trump came to her defense at the time, writing “Bring back @JudgeJeanine Pirro” on Twitter.
Pirro is only the latest Fox News employee — and the third full-time host after Pete Hegseth and Sean P. Duffy — to get appointed to Trump’s administration, leaving the network with several holes to fill.
So far, at least 20 current or former Fox employees have accepted roles. Trump has also appointed three current Fox employees to roles that did not require them to leave their jobs at the network. Weekend host Mark Levin was named to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, and hosts Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo were appointed to the board of the Kennedy Center.
