Photo: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times/Redux
When Jeanine Pirro took over as United States Attorney for the District of Columbia in May of last year, she was surprised to learn that her workspace came with a full bathroom. Even more surprising was what her predecessor, Ed Martin Jr., had left in the shower. “A crucifix,” Pirro whispers with a shudder. “I never shower in it. He had some holy stuff in there.”
We are sitting in an office overlooking Judiciary Square decorated with photos of President Donald Trump and cluttered with awards Pirro has won over the years. (“I should bring my Emmy,” she tells me.) When Martin, the district’s acting U.S. Attorney for the first four months of Trump’s second term, failed to get enough Republican support for confirmation, Trump picked Pirro, his longtime friend and a Fox News personality. Martin, a former Stop the Steal organizer, had been on a crusade to purge lawyers who had prosecuted January 6 rioters. Pirro, in contrast, doesn’t seem to have that same religious zeal. “It was all before me,” she says, crossing her eyes comically when I ask her about Trump’s early decision to pardon J6ers. “I got no comment. None. It was all before me.”
She arrived at her new job with work to do. “I come in here on my first day and there’s, like, nobody,” Pirro says. “I was like, Where is everybody? Then I realized the office was short 150 lawyers. No one was in charge. People had been fired, demoted; senior staff were leaving.”
Pirro turns toward her spokesman, Tim Lauer, who worked for her at Fox News and now sits in the corner minding us. “Is it bad to say it was a mess?” she asks him.
“It was neglected,” he says.
It might have been a tad worse than that. “It was like somebody drilled a thousand holes in the ship and literally themselves took water and poured it into the ship,” says a former member of the office. “That’s what Ed did. And then she became the captain of the sinking ship. She was, at the very least, trying to keep it afloat.” (“One captain’s sinking ship is another captain’s ship in dry dock,” a person close to Ed Martin says.)
Almost a year into the job, Pirro has plugged some of those holes, hiring more than 100 prosecutors and doubling the number of criminal investigators. She touts lower crime under her watch and a “historic” number of charges brought by her office. It helps that, before becoming a television star, Pirro spent decades as a prosecutor in Westchester County. Former and current members of her team describe her as competent and hardworking. “She’s smart and reads the briefing materials,” a former prosecutor who worked for her tells me. “You’ll brief her and she’ll say, ‘You think I’m stupid? I fucking read that.’” Her brashness can, on occasion, rub people the wrong way. “If something didn’t sit right with her, she could go off like a powder keg,” a former employee says, adding she brought a “divalike” energy to the job. “Once, I went into her office and she was holding a picture of herself. And she said, ‘The fans want me to autograph it. You know how many of these I get in a day?’”
The transition to Washington was something of a culture shock for Pirro, who abandoned a nearly $3 million salary to get paid about $200,000 a year for this job. “I was living the good life at Fox,” she says, leaning forward on her desk, the shoulder pads on her gray blazer jutting out like little wings. “Think about it: hair and makeup every day.”
So why did she leave? In truth, her latter years at Fox were marred by her role in the lawsuits brought against the network and its parent company by the voting-machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion, which partly stemmed from Pirro’s wild claims on her show that the 2020 election was rigged. “There’s no way she left to be a mid-level appointee in D.C.,” a former Fox News host tells me. “She probably just figured, The runway isn’t clear at Fox, so we’ll just try this other airport for a while.”
Pirro says she left Fox to pursue justice but so far has struggled to get her biggest new projects off the ground. After six Democratic lawmakers enraged Trump by filming a video reminding active-duty members of the military that they were obligated to refuse illegal orders, it was Pirro who tried to indict the politicians. Her team failed to get even one member of the grand jury to go for it, a highly unusual and embarrassing result. And in March, a judge blocked Pirro’s attempts to subpoena Federal Reserve records as part of her investigation into central-bank chief Jerome Powell, who has angered Trump by refusing to lower interest rates. “There is abundant evidence that the subpoenas’ dominant (if not sole) purpose is to harass and pressure Powell either to yield to the President or to resign and make way for a Fed Chair who will,” the judge wrote.
If Pirro is famous for anything these days, it’s her willingness to obey Trump. “She’ll do what Trump wants,” the former prosecutor says. “I don’t think she’s malicious like Ed Martin. I don’t think she’s evil like Pam Bondi. She’s an opportunist who likes the limelight.” Her tenure is less Martin’s vendetta-driven holy war than an audition for a job that will allow this 74-year-old to enjoy one last triumphant star turn. Now that the much-beleaguered Bondi has been fired, people who know Pirro say she wants the job of attorney general. “The judge is very close to the president, talks to him all the time,” a source familiar says. “And she’d been trying to put the knife in Bondi, saying she’s not a prosecutor and doesn’t have control of the building.” Trump is considering replacements for Bondi, including EPA administrator Lee Zeldin and acting attorney general Todd Blanche.
When asked if Pirro is on the list to replace Bondi, Trump tells me over the phone that both women are “great people. Jeanine Pirro’s fantastic, but they’re both great people.” And Pirro denies such ambitions. Taking this post wasn’t so much about her future, she says, as her past. “Everyone said to me, ‘I can’t believe you gave it up,’” Pirro says about the career change. “But what they don’t understand is that it wasn’t what I gave up; it was that I got to go back to who I was. I get to be Jeanine again.”
As Westchester County DA in 2002.
Photo: Ben Baker/Redux
In 1977, Pirro was a 26-year-old deputy DA and already a pioneer. She had learned that the Carter administration planned to establish bureaus specifically designed to prosecute domestic-violence cases, and her boss, Westchester district attorney Carl Vergari, let her run the county’s unit — one of just four in the country. Domestic violence, at the time, was often thought of as a family matter rather than as a criminal one, and Pirro dedicated her life to changing that.
Seventeen years later, on her first day as Vergari’s successor, the newspaper heiress Anne Scripps Douglas was found bludgeoned in her Bronxville home and died shortly thereafter. For Pirro, leaping into action meant not only running the investigation but also becoming a regular presence on television, first to talk about the case, then to talk about pretty much any true-crime story of national interest: the O. J. Simpson trial, the JonBenét Ramsey murder. “She always played hardball seeking publicity,” Vergari told this magazine in 1999. “She’s a bright and capable woman. But she’s also very self-centered in everything she does. She was aggressive about the breadth of her responsibilities in the office, and that caused conflict.”
Pirro was a Republican, but the Pirro of this period would hardly fit in with the party today. She was a pro-choice Catholic who made a concerted effort to diversify her office in terms of race, gender, and political affiliation. She was known to outhustle her colleagues. “She worked seven days a week, from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m.,” David Hebert, a former assistant DA and spokesman for Pirro, tells me. “When I would get in, there would be somewhere between 10 and 15 phone messages from her of things I needed to get done that day.”
Pirro was accustomed to the good life, having married her law-school sweetheart, Al Pirro Jr., in 1975. Al was a local power broker owing to his role as Donald Trump’s real-estate lawyer. “I called them ‘the King and Queen of Westchester,’” says Bennett Gershman, a former prosecutor. Trump kept Al on retainer to help develop golf courses and battle zoning regulations. In 1996, Trump left the sixth and final game of the World Series to attend a costume-party fundraiser for Jeanine at which the DA was dressed as Spain’s Queen Isabella in a black velvet gown. “I was at the ball game with George Steinbrenner and it was great, just great,” Trump said, according to a New York Times report. “But this,” he said, gesturing to the crowd, “is just great, too.”
“He used to call at all hours of the night looking for Al,” Pirro tells me. “And I remember saying, This guy doesn’t sleep. He was charming and engaging and always trying to build you up.” In 1999, Trump told New York that Pirro was “sexy as hell.”
As it turned out, the Pirros’ royal lifestyle was partly built on ill-gotten gains. In 2000, Al was found guilty of taking improper tax deductions — including for a $123,000 Ferrari, $13,250 for a Chinese rug, and $1,800 for a wrought-iron fence for the couple’s Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, Wilbur and Homer — totaling $1.2 million. Al was sentenced to 29 months in prison. “She signed all the returns,” Gershman says. “Did she know what her husband was doing? I’m positive she did. The federal government just didn’t want to bring her in because it made the case against Al more complicated.” (Pirro was not charged with wrongdoing and, according to her spokesperson, was declared an innocent spouse by the government.)
Trump went “above and beyond” to help Pirro and her two young children while Al was locked up, according to Hebert. When Al was sent to prison in Florida, Trump flew with Jeanine and her family to Palm Beach on his private plane. “We had the Pirro table on the plane for the Pirro kids,” she tells me. “They put a leather cover on it because my kids were little and he didn’t want the table to get messed up.” Pirro also mentioned visiting Mar-a-Lago since before it was turned into a private club. She loved the opulence of the place, taking a special interest in the kitchen cabinets stocked with china. “They had this ladder you pushed across the floor,” she recalls. “I just kept opening the cabinets — dishes with coral, dishes with lapis and turquoise, dishes with gold, dishes that were painted. It was unbelievable.”
“At a time that was very difficult for Jeanine, he was a person that overextended himself to her, caring for her, loyal to her and supportive to her and her family,” Hebert says. “I appreciated that she had people like that in her orbit.”
Pirro appreciated it too. “Donald Trump is as loyal as they come,” she says. “He was a kind man. I grew to — I don’t want to use the word love — to really respect and like him.”
With Donald Trump in 2001; Pirro chose to share the image on Instagram in 2015, publicly affirming her long-standing relationship with the then-candidate.
Photo: @Judge_Jeanine/Instagram
“She was really cool back then,” says the writer Lisa DePaulo, who profiled Pirro for The New York Times Magazine in 1999. “She was a really fun, cool chick.” DePaulo’s article was a sympathetic account of life inside the Pirro marriage: Al’s embarrassments, Jeanine’s resilience, the whole operatic mess. The story functioned, DePaulo says, as both a portrait of a serious career woman and a “fuck husbands” fable. After it was published, Pirro invited DePaulo over for dinner at her Westchester manse, where they were joined by other New York luminaries like gossip columnist Cindy Adams and Governor George Pataki. “It was a really fun dinner party,” DePaulo says. “She cooked everything.”
It didn’t take long for the two to become friendly. “I remember standing in front of Elaine’s smoking, and she was talking about how she didn’t have sex for so long,” DePaulo recalls. “And then she said, ‘You know what? The less you have, the less you want.’ She was funny and wise, a real girl’s girl.”
Pirro’s political career never found its second act. In 2005, she announced she was going to run against Senator Hillary Clinton as a Republican moderate. But the headlines after her first campaign event focused on an awkward 32-second pause that resulted from a missing page in her speech. By the year’s end, she had dropped out of the race. Worse still were headlines that emerged a year later, when Jeanine was caught talking about planting a recording device on her husband’s boat to catch Al in the act of cheating. “Bug This Love Boat,” read the Daily News cover. (She separated from Al in 2007.)
Pirro parlayed her talking-head experience into a syndicated court show and then a role as an anchor on Fox News. Adding to her stardom was the newfound interest in real-estate heir Robert Durst’s suspected murder of his first wife, Kathie, who had disappeared in 1982. As DA, Pirro had reopened an investigation into Durst. The case got renewed attention with the 2015 smash-hit HBO documentary series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. A book deal followed. “She called and said, ‘I want you to write my book with me,’” DePaulo recalls. “It was going to be a great experience. And it wasn’t.”
That summer, with a deadline looming, DePaulo moved into the basement of Pirro’s sprawling Westchester home. When she was getting her makeup done, DePaulo says, Pirro would pad around the house wearing nothing but “panties, high heels, and these little stickers that she put on her nipples,” which DePaulo found amusing. But her stay turned out to be a less-than-comfortable experience. DePaulo had to deal with mice in the basement (a problem that, according to DePaulo, Pirro demanded she keep to herself since Pirro was trying to sell the house); seven guns stashed around, which, DePaulo recalls Pirro saying, were all loaded; Pirro barring her from touching the Fiji water in the pantry, saying it was for guests only; and Pirro’s obsession with keeping household expenses down (DePaulo says Pirro once berated her for leaving a hallway light on overnight).
Worst of all was that DePaulo started to feel like the help. There were numerous times, she says, when Pirro asked her to clean up dog feces deposited by Pirro’s enormous poodles. (“My dogs, when they poop, it’s, like, sick,” Pirro tells me.) According to DePaulo, there was also the time that she was invited to a wedding held at the house and told to clean the windows before the guests arrived. “That was demeaning,” DePaulo says. “I was dressed for the wedding, and she hands me this big thing of Windex and paper towels, pushed them into my hands, and said, ‘Do it!’”
Ultimately DePaulo’s partnership with Pirro unraveled because of the work. In a lawsuit filed by DePaulo, the writer argued that Pirro had “little regard for truth and accuracy” when writing her Durst book. DePaulo also claimed that Pirro was in breach of contract and owed her $28,750. “Lisa DePaulo is a disgruntled former employee,” Pirro’s agent said at the time. “She was fired for nonperformance. She’s doing this for the money and it’s sad.” A judge moved the case to arbitration, and DePaulo never recovered anything.
In response, Pirro’s office denies DePaulo’s claims, saying that her home was free of mice, she would never discuss her private life with a reporter or walk around in underwear and heels, and she did not ask DePaulo to clean windows or pick up dog poop. “The woman rarely knew the difference between night and day,” Lauer, Pirro’s spokesman, says of DePaulo.
Still, when DePaulo looks back on that summer now, the mice and Windex and loaded guns feel almost beside the point. Something else was happening in that house. “She was evolving into the Trumper she is now,” DePaulo says. When Trump first announced he was running for president, Pirro would laugh about it, DePaulo says. But as the former reality-TV star went from fringe candidate to legitimate contender for the presidency, Pirro’s posture changed dramatically, according to DePaulo. “She would write her opening for the show with me around,” DePaulo says. “And she started getting progressively more rabid, almost frothing at the mouth. The more it became possible that he could have a chance, the more she glommed on to him.” By the time DePaulo left the basement, she believed the funny, wise girl’s girl she knew was gone. (Pirro’s office denies this recollection and says that DePaulo was fantasizing.)
“It’s sad to me,” DePaulo says. “Did she sell out for Trump, or did the inner Jeanine emerge?”
With FBI director Kash Patel and then–Attorney General Pam Bondi in February.
Photo: Aaron Schwartz/Bloomberg/Getty Images
By 2020, Pirro was the star of her own highly rated weekend show on Fox News. She was also, according to a text from network executive Jerry Andrews, a “reckless maniac.”
For years, she played the role of Trump booster on television. She stood by Trump in the wake of the 2016 Access Hollywood tape, in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women. Trump repaid the favor in 2019 when Fox News briefly pulled Pirro off the air for asking if Representative Ilhan Omar’s wearing a hijab was “antithetical to the United States Constitution.” Trump tweeted, “Bring back @JudgeJeanine Pirro” — a wake-up call to management, a former Fox News employee tells me. “Once they saw how close she was to him, she was kind of protected,” he says. “It was good for her.”
When Trump started claiming that the 2020 election was going to be stolen from him, Pirro amplified the message. “I work so hard for the President and the party,” she texted then–Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel in September 2020, according to filings from the Smartmatic lawsuit. Pirro would regularly parrot conspiracy theories and host key election skeptics like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani on her show, which increasingly freaked out management.
“Bottom line, I don’t trust her to be responsible tomorrow,” Fox News senior VP David Clark texted fellow executive Meade Cooper on November 6, 2020.
“Maybe she does not have a show tomorrow night,” Cooper responded.
Michael Edelman, a friend and former prosecutor who worked with Vergari in the Westchester DA’s office and later did consulting work for Pirro, tried to get her to stop. “I told her, ‘You’re doing a great disservice to the United States,’” he tells me. “She went ballistic, telling me, ‘You were never any good; I never should have used you as a consultant.’ It went on and on.” (Pirro’s office denies this.)
Messages about Pirro were flying behind her back at Fox, which she got to see only once they were made public in legal filings. One Fox executive complained about her “tendency to find random conspiracy theories on weird internet sites.” A corporate board member called a public statement of hers “insane.” It’s not clear she believed any of it; Pirro testified under oath that Trump had lost a “fair and free” election.
“Everybody talked about everybody else, and that all came out. I said some things about people too,” Pirro says with a shrug. One of her texts referred to Sean Hannity as an “egomaniac.”
In 2022, Fox News shuttered Pirro’s weekend show and made her a co-host of The Five. “It was sort of a promotion because The Five had a lot more viewers,” one former colleague says. “But it was also sort of a demotion because the show no longer had her name on it.”
Over the years, Pirro had shown signs that she would be willing to leave the network for the right job. Ahead of the first Trump administration, Pirro had told his aides that she wanted to be attorney general. When it became clear that the job was going to Jeff Sessions, she pushed to be his deputy. Word going around at the time was that the Fox News personality couldn’t pass the laugh test as a serious government official. Fortunately for Pirro, the only test that really matters now is the loyalty one.
In March, reporters asked Pirro how she decided to pursue an investigation into Jerome Powell’s renovation of the Fed’s headquarters, which Trump had claimed was tainted by corruption and incompetence. “I’ll deal with the Devil!” Pirro nearly shouted. “I’ll take a case from the Devil if you can give me information that will lead me to possibly find a crime! It doesn’t matter where a case comes from.”
No one had asked whether the Devil made her do it, but it remains an open question whether the president had. “He took a little building and spent $4 billion trying to build it — that’s, to me, a scandal,” Trump tells me. “He ruined the building. He took down all of the beautiful walls and the beautiful ceilings and couldn’t put it back together again.” Trump has been trashing Powell for months about interest rates. In early January, Trump invited a group of U.S. Attorneys to the White House and blasted them for failing to pursue his enemies quickly enough. “U.S. Attorneys do not go to the White House,” a former employee who worked in Pirro’s office tells me. “It’s a conflict of interest and presents all kinds of bad optics. But Martin was down there on a regular basis, and Pirro started making those trips as well. The only reason for that would be for Trump or his henchmen to tell the U.S. Attorney who to prosecute.”
The following day, she issued the grand-jury subpoenas to the Federal Reserve. Steven Vandervelden, a special counsel in the U.S. Attorney’s office and one of Pirro’s top confidants, maintains the subpoenas went out independently of any White House pressure and that any implication otherwise is “bullshit.” He says it’s the other side playing politics. In a meeting in late January with the attorneys for the Federal Reserve and Powell, Vandervelden says Powell’s counsel suggested that if Pirro dropped the investigation, Powell would likely leave the Board of Governors after his term as chair concluded. “You’re in the political lane,” Pirro responded, according to Vandervelden. “I’m in the legal lane.” The Fed declined to comment for this story, but in a legal filing from this case, the central bank’s lawyers did respond to this specific allegation. “To the extent that the U.S. Attorney’s Office suggests that chair Powell, through his counsel, offered to resign in exchange for dropping the probe, that is incorrect,” they wrote.
An administration official tells me that Pirro calls the president regularly. “Sometimes when people think a move of hers is a bad idea, she will call the president and position it in such a way that he’ll say, ‘Oh, that sounds great,’” the official says. But Pirro bristles at the implication that she lacks independence from Trump. “Donald Trump is very clear about what he thinks and what he wants,” Pirro tells me. “But my job is to make a decision as a prosecutor about what is worth looking into.” She continues, “I have 32 years in this business; I’m not some fly-by-night dilettante who decided that she’s going to be a prosecutor because she’s good-looking or because she speaks well.” Likewise, Pirro claims the case against the six Democratic lawmakers had nothing to do with the president calling their statements “treasonous” in one social-media post and “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH” in another.
“The whole world is talking about treason and sedition,” she tells me, exasperated. “That’s not where I was.” That the grand jury unanimously rejected the indictment was of little concern to her. “They deliberated for a significant amount of time,” she says and shrugs. “They made it very clear that this was something they had trouble with.” Trump says, “She was put into an area that was very tough and unfair. Judges who are haters. Almost impossible to win a case.”
Her setbacks seem to have bothered just about everybody else. The Powell investigation irked White House officials and led Republican senator Thom Tillis to threaten to oppose the nomination of Kevin Warsh to replace the Fed chairman. “The Powell investigation will probably fail and make her look bad for overpromising and pursuing it, but I’m sure she thinks she will earn goodwill for fighting,” a senior White House official tells me. “In the meantime, it will slow down the confirmation of Warsh. Which means one of her signature efforts to date will be a failure with added downside for the administration. Not a recipe for success.” In March, one of Pirro’s top prosecutors admitted in a closed-door hearing that they had no evidence of misconduct by Powell.
Pirro is unbothered, or at least performs being unbothered with considerable conviction. “Everyone is having a conniption,” she says. “Deal with it!” She claims to pay no mind to the “bullshit” that comes with the job. “I don’t really care about half the nonsense that goes on in this place,” she says.
At this point, I decide to put her independence to the test. “If Donald Trump were to shoot someone in the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue,” I ask her, “would you prosecute him?”
Pirro leans back in her chair and thinks for a moment.
“I’ll use Donald Trump’s own words,” she starts to say before looking over to Lauer, her media handler. “You’re going, ‘No,’” she says to him.
“This should focus on our office and our work,” he says. “I don’t know we should be getting into hypotheticals.”
“Tim’s going to kill me,” she says. “Do you know what I’m going to say?”
“Yeah, I know what you’re going to say,” Lauer says. “It’s off the record, and you’re not using it.”
Pirro looks at me, then back at him. “Then I’m not going to say it if he doesn’t want me to.”
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