We hope that the new interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, is the same Jeanine Pirro who ably served as a Westchester judge and district attorney for many years and not the Jeanine Pirro who is now a Fox News host aiming to please Donald Trump.
The president’s first pick to be the U.S. attorney for D.C., Ed Martin, was an unqualified wreck who was opposed by even Republican senators, causing Trump to replace him with Pirro. Among other lowlights, Martin threatened to prosecute people who criticized DOGE and attempted to launch investigations into sitting lawmakers critical of Trump’s immigration crackdown and other policies.
Once Pirro could incredibly claim to have the qualifications to serve in the office, as a former judge and DA. The problem is that she has spent the intervening years as an increasingly strident defender not only of Trump but his political vendettas and authoritarian power grabs.
It is obvious that Trump did not select her for her prosecutorial or managerial chops, but because she’s a staunch defender of his on TV, the one medium where he takes most of his advice, and will pick right where Martin left off in politicizing the office.
Trump still thinks he is a corporate chief executive, appointing people to carry out his will and firing them when they displease him. Most political appointees do serve at the pleasure of the president and are tasked with on some level carrying out his political agenda, but federal prosecutors have traditionally held onto a good amount of independence, for good reason.
The power of the federal government to investigate, prosecute, arrest and imprison people is an awesome responsibility that should never be politically weaponized or used in furtherance of anything except upholding the rule of law and pursuing justice. The Department of Justice has a long tradition of upholding its independence.
Trump is clearly capable of appointing U.S. attorneys who aren’t pure political operators, as he did with the generally respected Jay Clayton for the Southern District of New York.
Yet he’s also gone the other way, appointing former personal attorney Alina Habba to be the interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey. Clearly only on the qualification that Habba — a small-time lawyer who formerly served as general counsel for a parking garage company — was her sycophantic defense of the president during his criminal imbroglios.
Habba has gotten to work on his agenda, announcing that she planned to charge Newark Mayor Ras Baraka with trespassing for trying to get answers from ICE personnel during a scheduled congressional visit to a detention center in his city.
In fact, Trump views the Justice Department as a tool to uplift his political agenda, undoing the dedicated work of dozens of federal agents and prosecutors with his blanket pardon of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and punishing or firing personnel that had engaged in disfavored inquiries.
We hope Pirro will remember some of her past working on behalf of the public, not one political leader. We won’t hold our breath.
