Jeanine Pirro took on the role of the top prosecutor in Washington, D.C., with two personas: a bombastic Fox News host willing to pursue politically charged issues with zeal, and a former Westchester County prosecutor and judge who wants to run a U.S. attorney’s office with a sense of normalcy.
President Donald Trump’s botched Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool project put those sides at odds — and her job at risk.
Pirro is now facing what so many Trump loyalists have experienced: public criticism from the president when their expertise clashes with the stance from the Oval Office.
Over the past 14 months, Pirro has had no equal in pursuing the issues most closely tied to Trump’s personal spats. She launched an investigation into then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, tried to indict six Democratic lawmakers, and has trumpeted arrests as part of the president’s crackdown on D.C. crime that included deployment of National Guard troops.
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But her office has struggled to deliver the results Trump wants. She was forced to drop the Powell probe. A grand jury declined to indict the lawmakers, part of her record that includes other failures to get indictments. There have been rebukes from federal judges about charging decisions and the abrupt dropping of charges involving alleged assaults on federal officers.
Pirro in January touted a “huge downturn in the crime statistics in just a short period of time” and said the safety of D.C. residents remains her office’s top priority. Her office, in a brief statement Thursday, said there were double-digit drops in violent gun crimes, homicides and robberies in the District on her watch, reductions that “represent meaningful progress in the areas that most directly impact community safety.”
Property crime in Washington, D.C., is down so far in 2026, according to Metropolitan Police Department statistics. Yet the district has seen a sharp spike in violent physical assaults involving a dangerous weapon, and as a result, violent crime is up this year, MPD data shows.
Her 14 months in office hasn’t been enough time to assess her record for the whole office by the numbers. There are too many cases still ongoing, and Justice Department data only captures the early days of her time there. There’s another blind spot too: Her office stopped releasing monthly reports about its local cases at the start of the second Trump administration.
Pirro’s office said Thursday it has charged 68% more cases than the previous year in D.C. Superior Court.
Pirro’s relentless enforcement of Trump’s political agenda has exhausted many assistant U.S. attorneys, led to errant prosecutions, and fueled doubt among judges and jurors in Washington that her office can be trusted to bring worthy cases, several former Justice Department officials said.
“In terms of faith and public trust in the justice system, it’s causing damage that’s going to take a long time to repair, if it can be repaired at all,” said Randall Eliason, a law professor and former federal prosecutor in Washington.
“For a prosecutor, your credibility is everything,” Eliason said. “Judges are now much more willing to entertain claims of government misconduct, and that’s going to be true for juries as well.”
Pirro’s office prosecutes local violent crime through the D.C. Superior Court, the district’s version of a county court. Those cases included those against alleged pool vandals and the felony indictment against a former Olympian, David Hearn.
When asked at a press conference in early July if she charged the case harshly because Trump had called for a felony charge for what he claimed was vandalism, she defended the decision. “This is a case with tremendous evidence, and this is a case where the evidence dictates where we land,” she said.
Weeks later, she filed a motion dismissing the cases and directly contradicting the president, writing that “the damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism.”
The filing sharply criticized the Interior Department for failing to turn over information showing the contractor, not Hearn, was responsible for the damage. Prosecutors said they had made dozens of requests before officials “slowly started trickling” the details to them. Had Interior officials been forthcoming with the information, they said, they would not have sought a grand jury indictment.
Trump nevertheless took Pirro to task, saying she had made a mistake in moving to drop the case. Pirro soon after met with Trump at the White House and could be seen carrying a white box and rolling briefcase as she crossed the grounds.
Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor, said it was clear from the government’s court briefs that Pirro never should have charged Hearn. The evidence was so thin, he said, that prosecutors conceded in their motion to dismiss that they never could have gotten a conviction.
“She ultimately did the right thing in that case by asking the court to dismiss the prosecution,” he said. “We can imagine other prosecutors who would have died on the hill with Trump there, even if it meant getting the scorn of judges and juries.”
But Pirro’s forceful refutation of the case may have also helped her office escape deeper scrutiny — perhaps even a bar referral for bringing a case that appeared to lack probable cause, Butler said.
“The defense was threatening to petition the court for the complete grand jury proceedings and perhaps she didn’t want that record exposed,” he said. “The D.C. federal bench has not been reticent in holding prosecutors accountable.”
Eliason agreed that dropping the case not only helped avoid another high-profile dismissal or acquittal, but may have helped Pirro ward off a situation where the court would have had a chance to expose potential prosecutorial misconduct before the grand jury.
That “could be not only embarrassing but could lead to professional sanctions against her and her prosecutors,” he said.
A spokesperson for Pirro declined to comment on questions related to the Reflecting Pool case, her conversations with Trump and criticisms of her office’s casework.
Pirro’s office is currently juggling several of the most high-profile criminal cases of the second Trump administration: pursuing the death penalty against the man accused of gunning down two Israeli embassy employees last year, prosecuting the man accused of trying to attack the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner this year and charging a person accused of being the failed pipe bomber who’d become the obsession of MAGA-world conspiracy theorists.
Internally, some career prosecutors who worked at the office have focused on this: At least she’s not Ed Martin.
Martin, a “Stop the Steal” MAGA activist who defended insurrectionists, laid waste to the District’s U.S. attorney’s office when he fired prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases — wiping out an entire class of young prosecutors who had just undergone special training and were about to take on everyday street crime cases in D.C.
Martin also reassigned senior attorneys as punishment, demoting Jason McCullough, a veteran prosecutor who helped secure convictions against Proud Boys leaders like Enrique Tarrio. Martin lasted less than four months and lost the job when Trump couldn’t get Senate approvals.
But that meant Pirro inherited an office that was short on experienced staff — and facing a sudden wave of cases that came as a result of Trump’s decision to flood Washington with law enforcement and National Guard troops. Pirro promptly reconfigured the ranks, re-elevating experienced prosecutors like McCullough, who was once again made a supervisor. (McCullough did not respond to a NOTUS request for comment.)
“At first, there was a sense that we may not love her but she kind of understood this sort of basic prosecutorial function,” one former employee said. “She was trying to run a district attorney’s office, and she’d done that before. Some people were like, ‘We don’t hate her, actually.’”
Two sources who worked in that office told NOTUS that there were two Pirros: one trying to run the office with a sense of normalcy and another willing to do the president’s bidding — to a point. A former employee said Pirro wasn’t willing to resist administration pressure the way federal prosecutor Danielle Sassoon did when she resigned last year after briefly leading the Southern District of New York.
“She wasn’t that person. … She was willing to do the White House work,” the former employee said. “Now she’s looking at clear evidence from the Interior Department, and she’s not going to perjure herself. She’s willing to be a public advocate, but she doesn’t want to perjure herself.”
Her record also reflects that, compared to the last Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney to run the office, the former Fox News host spent more energy touting her office’s efforts. During the Biden administration, U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves at the same point in his tenure filed 467 cases in federal court marked as “criminal” and touted the office’s work in 304 press releases, according to a NOTUS review of federal court dockets. Pirro has filed fewer cases (381) and issued twice as many press releases (674).
Pirro’s approach to the job also stands in sharp contrast to her predecessor in the first Trump administration, Jessie Liu, who led the U.S. attorney’s office without significant drama for more than two years and maintained the office’s independence from the White House.
“I think a lot of people, including judges, thought that she was actually pretty reasonable. She was like a typical U.S. attorney who would be appointed by a Republican president,” Butler, the former prosecutor, said of Liu, who received a unanimous Senate confirmation vote in 2017.
When Trump swore in Pirro in May 2025, he said he remembered her “as good as anybody I’ve seen” during her time as a district attorney. “And that was a serious prosecutor, and she went after real criminals, not fake criminals like we seem to do today, nowadays, people that shouldn’t be prosecuted,” Trump said.
After Pirro’s office dismissed the Hearn case, Trump said she choked. “I was disappointed with Jeanine Pirro, really disappointed with Jeanine Pirro,” Trump said. “She, uh, she folded like an umbrella, and people get away with things, and it’s a disgrace.”
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