Jeanine Pirro Crashes Out
Never go full crazy eyes!
On Friday, Jeanine Pirro, the improbable US Attorney for DC, lost her shit on live television.
“Historic? I will tell you what is historic. I prosecute everything,” screeched the former Fox News host. “Other than 10 percent of the cases, where the United States Attorney before me did not prosecute 67 percent of the cases. That is what is historic. I am willing to take a not guilty. I am willing to take a no true bill. Because I will take all the crimes and put them in.”
Jeanine Pirro is, indeed, willing to take a no true bill. Or three. In the same case.
Bragging about failing to exercise prosecutorial discretion is a weird flex, though. Particularly since the Justice Manual explicitly says that “the attorney for the government should commence or recommend federal prosecution if he/she believes that the person's conduct constitutes a federal offense, and that the admissible evidence will probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction.”
Trying to prosecute “all the crimes,” irrespective of whether there’s a realistic chance of securing a conviction would appear to be a dereliction of duty, as well as a waste of prosecutorial resources. And yet Pirro affected outrage at the waste of taxpayer resources by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whose agency has run into massive cost overruns as it renovates the Federal Reserve buildings.
“I can have a suspicion, I can read the newspaper, I can just want to make sure he did not commit a crime,” she raged on Friday, insisting that she was acting “in a legal lane” — albeit one that just happens to run parallel to the president’s political demands.
Independence? Schmindependence!
Trump has brayed for Chairman Powell’s head for over to a year now. He wants interest rates at zero and seems to think it’s his rightful due for “saving” the economy. This is economically illiterate — zero interest rates are a tool to stimulate an economy that is contracting — although his Iran misadventures may wind up changing the math.
At any rate, Trump seems to have grasped that trying to fire Powell would be more trouble than it’s worth, both politically and legally. But that hasn’t stopped Trump’s minions from targeting Powell in an effort to gin up justification to terminate the chair “for cause.”
Trump’s chief instigator is Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the chairman of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who spends his days spelunking through confidential financial documents looking for dirt on Trump’s enemies. He’s the one who came up with the allegation that Federal Reserve Board Member Lisa Cook had lied on a mortgage application, justifying her termination “for cause” and freeing up Trump to install someone more pliant. With Powell, Pulte seems to have settled on cost overruns in the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings as a convenient excuse.
Pulte’s tweet soon became the official Trumpland line, and White House officials, including Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair, posted memes of Powell as Marie Antoinette — which does double-duty as homophobia, too.
In DC, Pirro answered Pulte’s call. She served grand jury subpoenas on the Fed in January demanding information about the renovation and Powell’s testimony to Congress. Powell immediately took to the airwaves to denounce this blatant attack on the independence of the Federal Reserve.
He also moved to quash the subpoenas in the US District Court for the District of Columbia.
The case landed on the docket of Chief Justice James Boasberg, himself the target of a judicial ethics complaint, an impeachment push, and an unending stream of vitriol from the Trump administration. Last Wednesday, Judge Boasberg granted Powell’s motions to quash, unsealing much of it on the public docket Friday.
“Too late?” Or right on time?
Judge Boasberg began his order by quoting a few of Trump’s dozens of attacks on Powell.
“Being perceived as the President’s adversary has become risky in recent years,” he observed wryly. “In his second term, Trump has urged the Department of Justice to prosecute such people, and the Department’s prosecutors have listened.”
The judge noted that, after Trump called to prosecute members of Congress for reminding active duty service members of their duty to refuse unlawful orders, Pirro’s office tried to indict them. He omitted to mention that zero grand jurors voted to charge the legislators.
Judge Boasberg says that he invited the US Attorney’s Office to submit evidence ex parte that there is any reason at all to suspect that Powell committed a crime. The government declined, other than to gesture vaguely toward cost overruns in the Fed renovation and the fact that Powell’s testified before the Senate Banking Committee.
“The Government might as well investigate him for mail fraud because someone once saw him send a letter,” he judge scoffed.
And so, the subpoenas were quashed.
Take the L, Ma’am
This would be an ideal opportunity for the Trump administration to declare victory and go home.
Powell’s term as Fed Chair is up in May, although his tenure on the Board of Governors extends through 2027. It’s traditional for the Fed Chair to resign at the end of his term, leaving space for the president to leave his stamp on the Board with his own nominee. But Powell has refused to say whether he’ll depart, and the DOJ claims in its opposition that Powell refused to resign while this investigation was pending.
“By making this peculiar suggestion, the Board morphed the Subpoenas into the exact thing about which they complain — a mechanism by which Chair Powell could be removed,” the prosecutors whined. I believe this is meant to suggest that, by offering to leave if the case goes away, Powell himself is politicizing the prosecution. But if Pirro’s office could simply STFU up for ten minutes, she could solve a bunch of the president’s political issues.
Specifically, Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, was so incensed by Pirro’s attack on Powell that he vowed to block any confirmation to the Fed until it resolves. That includes Kevin Warsh, Trump’s pick to replace Powell as chair. On Friday, Senator Tillis encouraged the Trump administration to just take the off-ramp.
“This ruling confirms just how weak and frivolous the criminal investigation of Chairman Powell is and it is nothing more than a failed attack on Fed independence,” Sen. Tillis said. “We all know how this is going to end and the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office should save itself further embarrassment and move on. Appealing the ruling will only delay the confirmation of Kevin Warsh as the next Fed Chair.”
But Jeanine Pirro didn’t get where she is in this life by making rational choices. After foamily fulminating about her own track record prosecuting child sex crimes, she promised to appeal.
“By inserting himself and preventing the grand jury from even obtaining, let alone hearing evidence, he has neutered the ability of the grand jury to investigate crime,” she ranted. “As a result, Jerome Powell today is now bathed in immunity, preventing my office from investigating the Federal Reserve. This is wrong, and it is without legal authority.”
These two things are the same
Pirro’s hissy fit comes on the heels of the revelation that her predecessor is under investigation by the DC bar. Ed Martin publicly harassed the Georgetown University Law Center for its First Amendment protected speech, and then, when called out for it, privately spammed the District of Columbia Court of Appeals with ex parte communications demanding that the judges rein in the DC Bar.
Martin enjoys the dubious distinction of being one of the only Trump nominees rejected by the Senate. This, too, was thanks to Tillis, who said he wasn’t going to put a January 6 protester in charge of the US Attorneys Office in DC. Martin was then folded into the Justice Department and given several titles to soothe his wounded ego. Eventually, he appears to have worn out his welcome and gotten turfed out after sharing confidential grand jury materials with some rando on Twitter. But it’s worth asking what would be different at the US Attorneys Office in DC if Tillis had knuckled under and voted for Martin.
Because, for all Pirro’s histrionics about having “cleaned up this city,” violent crime in DC has declined at roughly the same rate as every other major city, including neighboring Baltimore. Despite having an actual resume as a prosecutor, Pirro’s tenure has been marked by an embarrassing string of defeats. She routinely gets no-billed by grand juries and laughed out of court by petit jurors. Her political prosecutions have come to naught. And on Friday, even as she was inveighing against Judge Boasberg, her office was abandoning the prosecution of veteran Jay Carey for burning a flag in Lafayette Park to protest Trump’s executive order purporting to ban it. That case was also presided over by Judge Boasberg, who refused to dismiss Carey’s case on statutory grounds, but did grant him discovery on the question of vindictive prosecution. Rather than explain herself, Pirro dropped the case.
Ed Martin couldn’t have done better! But then again, he probably couldn’t have done worse, either.
What she is really saying she is willing to charge innocent people just to fuck with them. She is why we have rights.
The fox pundits running this country are all drunken fools.