Jeanine Pirro’s Qualifications Are Not the Problem

Donald Trump has been widely ridiculed for staffing his administration with unqualified partisan hacks recruited from Fox News. This is not quite fair. Yesterday, Trump named Jeanine Pirro as the new interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. Pirro is a partisan hack recruited from Fox News, but she’s a qualified one.

Millions of Americans know Pirro as a prolific conservative-television pundit, most recently as a member of Fox News’s afternoon talk show, The Five. Even compared with other right-wing TV personalities, Pirro’s record of unwavering Trump support, including at his most vulnerable moments, is distinctive. She came to his defense in 2016 after the release of the Access Hollywood tapes, declaring, “I have been involved in a million situations with him and his children. He has always been a gentleman.” She has been urging Trump to send the Department of Justice after his supposed enemies, including Hillary Clinton, since 2017. And she promoted Trump’s stolen-election conspiracy theories so vigorously that in 2021, she was named as a defendant in a multibillion-dollar defamation lawsuit brought by the voting-machine manufacturer Smartmatic.

Before all that, Pirro had a legal career that—at least on paper, and by the feeble standards set by Trump’s other appointments—prepared her for her new job as D.C.’s top prosecutor. After stints as an assistant prosecutor and a state judge, she served from 1994 to 2005 as the elected district attorney of Westchester County, New York, a jurisdiction larger than Washington, D.C. This distinguishes her from Ed Martin, her immediate predecessor in the D.C. role, whose tenure ended this week after the Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina shot down Martin’s prospects of getting confirmed on a permanent basis. Unlike Martin—a former defense attorney who had no prosecutorial experience before being appointed—Pirro has tried cases, made charging decisions, and managed an office full of prosecutors.

Whether that is good news or bad news is not a straightforward question. The U.S. attorney for D.C. has a big job. The role combines the functions of a federal prosecutor (that is, enforcing federal law) with those of a district attorney: prosecuting everything from low-level misdemeanors to the most serious felony cases. The office also has the power to bring—or decline to bring—cases against the many elected officials and government appointees who live and work in the nation’s capital. Someone with an actual prosecutorial background might be more effective at using the legal system to persecute Trump’s enemies and protect his allies than a similarly devoted but less experienced lackey.

Perhaps Pirro will throw herself into the nitty-gritty work of fighting crime in a big city that has plenty of crime to fight. (Even there, her record of bigoted comments—which in at least one instance, aimed at Representative Ilhan Omar, led Fox News to “strongly condemn” her remarks—does not bode well for her ability to administer justice in a majority-minority jurisdiction.) Then again, perhaps not. Everything suggests that she was chosen for other reasons. Consider the fate of Jessie Liu, whom Trump appointed to the same job in 2017. A traditional pick, Liu had elite conservative-legal credentials and substantial relevant experience. In 2019, Trump nominated her for a top role at the Treasury Department. But her nomination was dropped, and her government career ended, after activists persuaded Trump that Liu was not to be trusted. Among her sins: overseeing the prosecution of Trump’s ally Roger Stone and declining to indict former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, one of the MAGA movement’s most reviled “deep state” villains.

One struggles to imagine Pirro being dismissed for such reasons. The question is less whether she intends to faithfully execute Trump’s will and more whether she’ll be any good at it. Martin’s failure to keep the job stemmed in part from a certain guilelessness: He spoke at a “Stop the Steal” rally on January 5, 2021, and has appeared more than 150 times on RT and Sputnik, the Russian propaganda networks. After assuming the interim D.C.-prosecutor role, he proudly described himself as one of “Trump’s lawyers.” And he seemed to genuinely believe that his position entitled him to act as a roving inquisitor on behalf of Trump, sending buffoonishly unconstitutional letters to the likes of Chuck Schumer, Georgetown Law School, and even the American College of Chest Physicians’ medical journal demanding explanations for insufficiently MAGA-compliant exercises of free speech. Any actual cases brought along those lines would have been laughed out of court.

The politicization of law enforcement works best when the parties involved pretend not to be doing it. Pirro will presumably bring a higher degree of legal competence and a good deal more media savvy to the tasks at hand than Martin did. The tasks themselves, however, may prove all too similar.