The tough-on-crime, former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro — President Donald Trump’s new pick for interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. — led a political committee that repeatedly flouted election laws and stiffed numerous creditors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Pirro’s 2006 U.S. Senate campaign failed for years to file mandatory financial reports with the Federal Election Commission, despite repeated warnings from regulators, federal records show.
The Pirro committee’s $600,000 in total debts involved nearly two-dozen creditors, including Mercury Public Affairs ($37,640), Verizon ($1,859.28) and the U.S. Postal Service ($1,627.30).
Pirro’s campaign committee owed more than $222,500 to the Lukens Company, a prominent marketing agency based in Virginia and the committee’s single-largest creditor. (Lukens did not respond to a request for comment.)
Pirro briefly sought the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in hopes of challenging then-U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton but dropped out of the GOP primary before the vote took place.
In 2019, the Pirro for Senate committee attempted to terminate itself without paying the debts, arguing in a handwritten letter to the FEC that “these debts, based on contract, are not collectable as the [New York state] 6-year [statute] of limitations has long passed.”
But for more than five years, the FEC refused to allow the Pirro for Senate committee to terminate itself. Federal regulators continued to send threatening notices when Pirro’s committee failed to comply with federal financial disclosure requirements.
“The failure to timely file a complete report may result in civil money penalties, an audit or legal enforcement action,” FEC Assistant Staff Director Debbie Chacona wrote as recently as April 30, 2024.
Finally, in May 2024, the FEC allowed the Pirro for Senate committee to stop filing accounting reports with the agency. But it noted that “administrative termination of your reporting obligation does not relieve the committee of any legal responsibility for the payment of any outstanding debt or obligation.”
Asked why the FEC relented, agency spokesperson Myles Martin told NOTUS on Friday that the campaign finance enforcer and regulator “cannot comment on specific committees,” although “committees may be approved for administrative termination once they meet the required criteria.”
Generally, federal political committees may terminate themselves only after they’ve paid off their debts or obtained forgiveness from creditors, according to FEC rules. There are exceptions, and criteria for indebted political committees wanting to dissolve include “steps taken by the committee to repay the debt” and “efforts made by the creditors to obtain payment,” according to FEC guidance.
The FEC itself has fallen on difficult times of late, having temporarily lost many of its powers because it doesn’t have enough commissioners to function.
The White House and a Pirro committee representative did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday.
“The committee has no money to pay them off now anyway,” Pirro campaign spokesperson Jeff Buley told the Westchester Journal News in 2019. “Back when we tried to settle these things in ’11, we still had some money, and I was trying to settle it for quarters on the dollar but not everyone would agree.”
As a Fox News host, Pirro has fashioned herself an advocate for the law.
“Law and order are the only things that separate us from barbarism and anarchy,” she told students at Liberty University in 2017.
In announcing Pirro’s appointment Thursday, Trump described the former assistant district attorney for Westchester County, N.Y., as a “powerful crusader for victims of crime” and “incredibly well qualified for this position … in a class by herself.”
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Dave Levinthal is a Washington, D.C.-based investigative journalist.