Plucked straight from Fox News, the face of President Donald Trump’s new law-and-order regime in the nation’s capital has run headlong into a series of high-profile court losses, making it clear that the federal takeover of law enforcement in Washington, D.C., is little more than theater with essentially no legal foundation. Jeanine Pirro was parachuted into one of the nation’s most consequential prosecutorial roles because of her loyalty, media savvy and ratings, but as D.C.’s U.S. attorney, she is overcommitting and underdelivering.
“We’re going to make the city safe again,” Pirro told WTOP on Aug. 26, while admitting, “I’m kind of inundated in terms of what I’m doing.”
The resulting cascade on the court system has been compounded by Pirro’s push for prosecutors to bring the harshest charges allowable, even for minor infractions. Now, her aggressive posture is colliding with real-world constraints, exposing both her limitations and the fragility of politicized law enforcement.
It’s easy to see why. Trump declared a crime emergency in D.C. on Aug. 11, deploying hundreds of federal agents and National Guard members to police the streets of the capital. More than 1,000 arrests have been made in the first two weeks. The resulting cascade on the court system has been compounded by Pirro’s push for prosecutors to bring the harshest charges allowable, even for minor infractions. Now, her aggressive posture is colliding with real-world constraints, exposing both her limitations and the fragility of politicized law enforcement.
“Prosecutor Jeanine Pirro’s office has now whiffed on three cases alleging defendants assaulted federal agents during Trump’s police takeover,” HuffPost reported on Aug. 29. The New York Times observed that “one of her biggest challenges is matching her confident public messaging with results, given the mass departures of career prosecutors and support staff.”
Pirro recently revealed that she is getting help from military lawyers, because her office is short 90 prosecutors, as well as 60 investigators and paralegals. D.C. federal courts, used to processing an average of six new cases per week, now face six or more cases per day, many stemming from low-level offenses that previously would’ve been diverted or even dismissed. At the height of this recent backlog, over 125 criminal defendants appeared in a single day, forcing judges to speed through hearings and delay fair trials until as far out as 2027, according to the Associated Press. Defense attorneys are crying foul and civil rights groups are suing. It’s clear that Pirro’s directives are unsustainable.
Her nomination as U.S. Attorney for the District initially raised serious legal red flags — like concerns under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act about how many successive interim U.S. attorneys the president can lawfully appoint without Senate confirmation. But it’s her reputation as a Trump loyalist and media figure who faithfully echoed the president’s election lies that undermines her operational credibility. Pirro was one of the key promoters of the false claim that the 2020 election was rigged due to, at least in part, manipulated returns by voting-technology company Dominion Voting Systems. The accusations resulted in Fox News reaching a settlement with Dominion for a whopping $787.5 million. A filing from Dominion’s lawsuit revealed that Pirro’s own Fox producer had called her a “reckless maniac.”
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A former federal prosecutor from the 1990s and early 2000s, Pirro’s strategic incompetence was further exposed by the case of the Subway sandwich slinger. Soon after Trump announced his D.C. crackdown, Sean Charles Dunn, a 37-year-old former Justice Department paralegal, tossed a sandwich at a federal agent during a protest. Federal prosecutors, under Pirro’s directive, sought a felony assault indictment as a dramatic gesture to show toughness. The White House even released a theatrical arrest video, and Pirro herself taunted in a press appearance, “Stick your Subway sandwich somewhere else!”
But the D.C. grand jury declined to indict — not once, not twice, but at least four times this month. In the world of federal prosecution, refusing to indict is almost unheard of. Now Dunn is facing only a misdemeanor charge, and the only charge prosecutors could refile without grand jury approval. The sandwich case was meant to be a show of strength; instead, it is serving as a symbol of the administration’s superficial posturing. The Washington Post described a series of unprecedented failures for Pirro’s office:
Before prosecutors failed to indict Dunn, a grand jury on three separate occasions this month refused to indict a D.C. woman who was accused of assaulting an FBI agent, another extraordinary rejection of the prosecution’s case. Days later, a federal magistrate judge said an arrest in Northeast Washington was preceded by the “most illegal search I’ve seen in my life” and described another arrest as lacking “basic human dignity.”
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Pirro’s tough-girl shtick may elicit praise from the boss and favorable coverage from her former Fox News peers, but it doesn’t translate to credibility in court. “The burden is on us to prove these cases, and we welcome that burden — beyond a reasonable doubt,” Pirro said at a news conference on Aug. 26. “Sometimes a jury will buy it and sometimes they won’t. So be it. That’s the way the process works.”
The collapse of her high-profile indictments has become a defining feature of Trump’s federal takeover of the nation’s capital. In an unprecedented move, his Justice Department effectively stripped local D.C. prosecutors of authority, placing federal officials — who are appointed directly by the president — in charge of everything from misdemeanors to high-profile protests. Never before has the White House asserted so much direct prosecutorial power over a U.S. city.
With Trump’s installation of shock troops like Pirro to carry out his ideological retribution under the banner of justice, judges and juries are now functioning as the final guardrails in the near-total absence of resistance from the Republican-led legislative branch. Thankfully, over 200 court orders have blocked Trump’s policies, including at least 120 rulings within the first 100 days alone.
