Republicans Advance Election Denier Jeanine Pirro for Key Prosecutor Post

Former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro’s election denialism and Islamophobia were no reasons for Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject her nomination for U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. 

The panel advanced her nomination to the Senate floor unanimously Thursday after Democrats walked out of the vote in protest over the rushed debate on former Donald Trump attorney Emil Bove’s nomination to a federal appeals court.

On her radio show in January, Pirro agreed that January 6 prosecutors should face criminal charges. If confirmed, she will call many of them her employees. 

President Donald Trump named Pirro the acting U.S. Attorney for D.C. in May, plucking her from Fox News, where she spent more than a decade as a host. While there, Pirro spread conspiracies about the 2020 election, leading her to be named in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit that Fox ultimately settled for $787 million. 

Ahead of the vote, Judiciary Committee ranking member Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) released a statement imploring his Republican colleagues to reject her nomination. 

“She’s a January 6 apologist, siding with violent insurrectionists over law enforcement by supporting criminal charges against line prosecutors handling insurrection-related cases,” Durbin wrote. “She’s an election denialist, recklessly peddling President Trump’s Big Lie despite even her own Fox News producers and executives warning her to reel it in.” 

As it became clear that Trump had lost in 2020, Pirro pointed to vote shifts as ballots were counted as evidence of a conspiracy. “The Dominion Software System has been tagged as one allegedly capable of flipping votes,” Pirro alleged on air. 

Pirro repeated those claims a week later in a monologue. “The president’s lawyers alleging a company called Dominion, which they say started in Venezuela with Cuban money and with the assistance of Smartmatic software, a backdoor is capable of flipping votes,” she said.

Pirro, like most U.S. attorney nominees, did not face questioning at a Judiciary hearing, but she did answer questions in writing. In her responses, obtained by Democracy Docket, Pirro claimed to be unaware that Trump gave full pardons to January 6 rioters convicted of assaulting police officers. Around 600 of the nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 defendants were charged with assaulting or obstructing law enforcement. 

Asked if Trump lost in 2020, Pirro echoed the carefully constructed response that many administration nominees have given: “Former President Joseph Biden was certified as the winner of the 2020 presidential election.”

At Fox, Pirro developed a reputation as a sycophantic defender of Trump, calling for criminal investigations into his political enemies. The station suspended her in 2019 after she accused Rep. Illhan Omar (D-Minn.) of being more loyal to Sharia law than the U.S. Constitution. Fox reinstated her shortly after Trump called out the station on Twitter. As he left office in 2021, Trump pardoned Pirro’s ex-husband, who was convicted for tax evasion in 2000. 

Prior to her stint in TV, Pirro had a lengthy career in law enforcement, serving as an assistant district attorney, district attorney and judge in New York. 

Opponents of Pirro’s appointment had hoped her election denialism would have disqualified her in the eyes of Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who had opposed Trump’s first pick for the office, Ed Martin, over his defense of the January 6 attacks on the Capitol. But Tillis, who announced he would not run for reelection before he voted against Trump’s legislative package, was not similarly troubled by Pirro’s cheerleading of the election denialism that inspired the rioters. 

According to Newsweek, Pirro is the 23rd current or former Fox News host nominated by Trump in his second term in office.