The DC US Attorney isn’t usually the face of the president’s policy agenda. But over the past four months, Jeanine Pirro, the former judge and Fox News host-turned-US Attorney, has become a central character in Donald Trump’s effort to federalize law and order in American cities.
Pirro, the District of Columbia’s top prosecutor, has carried out President Donald Trump’s surge of arrests in the nation’s capital with gusto. Her office is now pushing for harsher charges or time in jail for even low-level offenders. Cases are flooding the courts, with hearings in DC’s local criminal court routinely lasting late into the night and federal prosecutors awakened for new cases.
Though she originally told an associate she took the DC job as a favor to the president, in a wide-ranging phone interview with CNN, Pirro said she saw it as a chance to return to her roots as a former prosecutor and to help tackle DC’s crime problem.
Still, she said she did not make the decision lightly.
“It was a lot of soul searching but this is who I am,” Pirro told CNN. “This is my wheelhouse. I’m honored to be here.”
Pirro has since harnessed her bully pulpit, holding near-weekly press conferences and often castigating judges and local leaders who may be at odds with Trump’s law enforcement crackdown. The approach has at times positioned her more as a national voice – with one recent press conference on drug trafficking taking place in Texas alongside other federal officials.
Asked about her role, Pirro said she has sought to use press conferences to recognize people in her office who normally don’t receive accolades, and also to show the public what’s being done to improve safety.
Yet Pirro’s elevated profile comes amid real troubles for the office she oversees, according to more than a dozen people with knowledge of its inner workings.
Under her predecessor Ed Martin, Trump’s initial pick for the job, the office was hit by a wave of firings that were widely viewed as political retribution targeting attorneys who worked on January 6 Capitol riot cases.
As a result, morale has cratered, sources say.
“Who’s going to be the next to be fired?” one person from the office told CNN recently about the dominant feeling among attorneys in the office.
People have started leaving on their own accord, with a number of high-profile trial attorneys and supervisors resigning in the past several months.
“How am I the last one standing here?” another person said about the departures and firings across the office.
The recent surge in arrests in DC has also meant more work for office prosecutors, who are often stuck with weaker cases and facing more skeptical judges and jurors.
In recent weeks, the city’s grand jurors have refused to approve a handful of federal indictments in cases Pirro’s office presented, a sign that DC’s residents aren’t buying into Trump’s crackdown rationale.
Pirro makes no apologies for her approach and dismissed criticism that her office is trying to boost its crime statistics by bringing harsh charges on a variety of low-level arrests.
“I don’t care about numbers. I care about accountability,” Pirro said. Asked if that means bringing cases that are weak, Pirro replied, “Damn right,” adding, “My job is to prosecute.”
Pirro pushed back on reports of flagging morale, saying, “I’ve lived long enough to not worry about anything like that.” Though she did acknowledge the office was short staffed.
“The workloads are too high,” she said. “I’m lifting every stone to hire more people. I hope they understand I am doing everything I can to hire more people.”
Pirro said the office should have 781 employees, including 414 lawyers. She’s currently short some 70 lawyers – a sizeable gap but better than the 90 lawyer-shortfall she says inherited when she took over the job earlier this year. The shortfall on support staff is worse, with the office down 150 paralegals, investigators and legal assistants, Pirro said.
“I want a steady ship. People know I appreciate them if they work hard and do the job. If I’m here from 8:30 to 8:30 every day, then I want everyone to work hard.”
‘She’s so much smarter than him’
Conversations with people familiar with the office suggest it’s still reeling from the impact of Martin, who from January to May led the nation’s biggest office of federal prosecutors by wielding a wrecking ball — firing those who worked on January 6 prosecutions and Trump-related cases, launching social media rants and threatening legal action against Trump critics.
Martin became so controversial he couldn’t get confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate.
Pirro has resoundingly been considered an improvement. She’s widely viewed by judges she’s met with, prosecutors working for her and others in Washington’s legal community as a more serious prosecutor than Martin, who had never served as one before nis nomination.
“Given what preceded her, she’s so much smarter than him, and so much more well-versed in the law,” said one former justice official, who still views Pirro as unqualified for the job.
A member of Martin’s staff who assisted in the transition said that Martin and Pirro are “good friends” and that Martin “bent over backwards to make sure it was a fine transition.”
A former prosecutor in Westchester, New York, Pirro was a rising star in the state’s Republican political circles until allegations surfaced that she discussed bugging her then-husband’s boat to catch him in an affair. In recent years, she rose to popularity as a bombastic Trump supporter on Fox and was lampooned as a character on “Saturday Night Live.”
Given that image, some current and former officials say they’ve been surprised — even impressed — by how she has handled the job, including the high-profile double shooting attack that killed Israeli embassy staffers outside the city’s Jewish museum.
At a recent press conference, Pirro announced the indictment against defendant Elias Rodriguez, who has pleaded not guilty and is on a path to potentially be one of the first defendants to be tried with a possible death sentence in the District of Columbia in decades.
“I watched the press conference with an eager ear to find out if she’ll over-expose (case details) at the defendant’s expense. That’s a real temptation of the more political prosecutors,” said Jim Trusty, a former longtime Justice Department prosecutor who became a personal attorney to Trump during the classified document mishandling and January 6-related investigations. “I think she walked that line very well.”
In contrast to Martin’s freewheeling approach, Pirro immediately made clear she wouldn’t tolerate social media or other comments that could harm ongoing investigations. She’s also seen as being far less focused on political retribution than Martin and has reversed some of his decisions that were unpopular among many in the office.
Along with firing several experienced prosecutors who had worked on January 6 cases, Martin also moved some of the most high-profile prosecutors to a misdemeanor crime unit, a major demotion.
Under Pirro, one of the demoted prosecutors has been brought back to handle more important criminal cases in federal court. She also demoted a less-experienced prosecutor whom Martin had elevated to help with his confirmation.
Yet those changes have done little to ease the turmoil the office has felt.
“I’m sure it’s demoralizing,” said Jim Eisenmann, who represents a handful of fired federal prosecutors in their employment complaints. “This is an attempt to destroy the civil service, that’s based on performance and merit … You won’t have institutional knowledge.”
‘People don’t stay here forever’
The office has also shed experienced prosecutors at an unusual rate in recent weeks, with at least 10 attorneys in the past month announcing they were leaving. Recent resignations include multiple supervisors or former supervisors.
Two of the three prosecutors on the Rodriguez capital murder case have also resigned in the past few days to take jobs outside the government. Asked about the rate of departures, Pirro said it was all part of a natural cycle of turnover.
“It’s not unusual for prosecutors. They come to this office for trial experience. And it’s not unusual for them to go out and find law firm jobs and make money,” Pirro said. “People don’t stay here forever,” she said.
Part of the changes in culture inside the office come from Pirro herself, who is more heavily involved in daily decision-making than some line prosecutors had expected, sources tell CNN.
Inside the office, Pirro has been attentive and has sought to be hands-on with the biggest cases, according to multiple people familiar with the office’s inner workings. Dismissals of cases that line prosecutors may have decided on their own in the past are now put before office leadership for approval, the sources said.
Behind the scenes, Pirro is also exacting and tough with staff when interacting with them in person, especially in meetings, those sources say. Her leadership style, honed by the bluntness of cable news, has been polarizing as well.
Some prosecutors appreciate her New Yorker-style straight-talk, sense of humor and legal chops, especially compared to Martin. But others have bristled, the sources tell CNN.
Those who stayed say they are facing grueling workloads, with prosecutors who previously worked primarily dayside needed for 24-hour or overnight shifts to handle incoming federal cases.
For instance, over the past month, the office has had to schedule supervisors and line prosecutors overnight for incoming federal cases because of Trump’s surge, prompting some to be called to work in the middle of the night to field new arrests, two people familiar with the shift told CNN.
In the past, federal court cases were almost never dealt with overnight, a source familiar with the approach and Pirro’s changes to it told CNN.
‘That’s not how it’s supposed to work’
At the same time, Pirro has run into headwinds in a city where the Trump takeover is highly unpopular and, in some cases, legally questionable.
Two magistrate judges handling new criminal cases lashed out at Pirro and leaders of the US Attorney’s office last week for shaky approaches they’ve taken in cases.
This week, federal Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh noted that Pirro’s office has sought the dismissal of at least 11 cases it charged since the beginning of Trump’s surge against crime in DC.
“It seems like one takeaway could be the government is filing these charges and investigating them afterward,” Sharbaugh said, according to local news station WUSA’s coverage of hearings Tuesday. “That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”
Another federal Magistrate Judge in DC, Zia Faruqui, has been angry that prosecutors kept a man in jail for 10 days on a charge of threatening the president, and after a grand jury rejected the charge, seeking to bring a lesser charge in the local Superior Court.
“It’s not fair for me to say they’re losing that credibility, we’re past that point,” said Faruqui in DC’s federal court recently.
Pirro shot back at Faruqui on social media, saying “he has allowed his politics to consistently cloud his judgment.” She also accused the judge of going easy on felons.
In her interview with CNN, Pirro made a point of calling out DC’s issue with juvenile crime, which she blames for an inordinate share of armed robberies and carjackings. The problem, according to Pirro, is that most of the city’s juvenile crimes are handled by family court, leaving them off limits for her office of federal prosecutors.
“As a result of that we have individuals who are committing half of the crimes that I cannot prosecute,” said Pirro, who is now leading the push to expand her jurisdiction over some juvenile defendants as young as 14 who are accused of crimes such as murder, rape and armed robbery.
The House this week passed legislation that seeks to grant Pirro’s office that expanded jurisdiction.
Pirro cited 29 teens killed in Washington, DC, in 2024, all of them African-Americans.
“Seventy percent of cases are not solved,” Pirro said. “I’m going to change the closure rate.”
CNN’s Hannah Rabinowitz contributed to this report.