In a fiery press conference earlier this year, Jeanine Pirro spelled out her prosecutorial philosophy.
“I’ll deal with the devil, I’ll take a case from the devil, if you can give me information that will lead me to possibly find a crime,” she said. “It doesn’t matter where a case comes from.”
As US attorney for the District of Columbia, Pirro is the top federal prosecutor in Washington — and number one enforcer of Donald Trump’s legal crusade in the US capital.
The 75-year-old Pirro has been friends with Trump for decades, dating back to at least the 1990s, when her then husband, Albert Pirro, was one of Trump’s real estate lawyers and she was an elected district attorney in the New York City suburbs.
More recently, “Judge Jeanine” — a moniker that has stuck since she started hosting an arbitration-based reality court TV show in 2008 — has been one of Trump’s most vociferous political supporters.
During Trump’s first term, Pirro was a Fox News firebrand and staunch defender of the president, including after the 2020 presidential election, when she parroted Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that the election was rigged against him.
In Trump’s second term, this loyalty was rewarded with a high-profile political appointment.
Pirro took the reins of the US attorney’s office in Washington last May and carried out Trump’s directives to crack down on local crime and expel career prosecutors who helped investigate the president and his allies. She also went after the president’s perceived enemies, including former Federal Reserve chair Jay Powell.
But now Pirro’s relationship with Trump is on thin ice, after her office rejected the president’s claims of vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, concluding damage to the Washington landmark had been caused by a bungled renovation overseen by the president himself.
The decision called into question one of Trump’s flashiest attempts to reinvent Washington in his image — leading to speculation that Pirro might soon hear the president’s Apprentice catchphrase: “You’re fired.”
In a post on Truth Social last week, Trump said he disagreed “100 per cent” with Pirro’s decision. On Monday, he told reporters Pirro had “choked” and “folded like an umbrella”, adding: “I don’t know what the hell happened.”
Later that day, Pirro was seen charging into the West Wing, wearing a bright red blazer and carrying boxes of evidence to present to the president. She emerged hours later still in the job.
But Pirro could be running out of time. Asked whether her job was safe on Tuesday, Trump replied: “I haven’t made a determination.”
Pirro’s allies say she has the grit to hold on. “She’s a force of nature,” says Kieran Mahoney, a longtime friend who managed Pirro’s ill-fated campaign for the US Senate against Hillary Clinton back in 2005.
“She’s been through a lot in the course of the 30-plus years I have known her,” Mahoney added. “Each time she has been through it, she has moulted the skin she is wearing and come out stronger on the other end.”
Born in June 1951, Pirro grew up in a working-class family in upstate New York, the daughter of Maronite Catholic immigrants from Lebanon. She attended the State University of New York at Buffalo and Albany Law School, where she met her future husband.
Jeanine and Albert married in 1975 and moved to Westchester, north of New York City, where she earned a reputation as a hard-charging prosecutor with a special interest in domestic violence cases and a penchant for self-promotion. In 1993, she became Westchester’s first female district attorney.
“She swore like a sailor,” recalls Richard Portale, a lawyer who worked for her at the time. “She reminds me of a male Navy admiral, trapped in a petite female body. You know, brilliant, tough as nails, smart as heck.”
The Pirros were married for nearly 40 years and had two children together. But their relationship unravelled in 2000, after Albert was convicted on 34 counts of conspiracy and tax evasion, and sentenced to more than two years in federal prison. They divorced in 2013.
Eight years later, on the last day of his presidency, Trump issued Albert a full pardon. It was an acknowledgment of a relationship with the pair that had spanned decades.
“Long before I was on television, Donald was promoting me,” Pirro recalled in her 2018 book, Liars, Leakers and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy. “Every time we’d pass a cop, a hard-hat, or someone gawking at him, he’d point to me and say, ‘You know who this is? It’s Jeanine Pirro! She’s the DA from Westchester!’”
This history makes some observers sceptical Pirro will get the axe.
“They have a long, a 40-year-old relationship, and I can’t see Trump throwing her under the bus,” said Bennett Gershman, a Pace University law professor.
Others say Pirro’s willingness to buck Trump is emblematic of how she has approached her entire career. “She’s very direct. She’s very blunt. She sometimes curses. She’s kind of in your face,” said one former senior Fox News producer. Her willingness to go against Trump was “in line with the person I know”, the producer added. “If she thinks something is right or wrong, she will say it, and act on it.”
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Additional reporting Anna Nicolaou and Kaye Wiggins
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