WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is strongly considering naming Fox News host Jeanine Pirro as interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., a source familiar with his thinking told NBC News on Thursday.
Trump announced earlier in the day that he was withdrawing the nomination of conservative activist Ed Martin to stay on as the top federal prosecutor in Washington on a permanent basis.
ABC News first reported Trump was considering Pirro to take over the job on an interim basis. Martin’s role as acting U.S. attorney is set to end May 20.
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Trump considers Pirro “highly qualified” for the job, the source told NBC News, and an announcement could come as soon as Thursday, though the source added that nothing is final until Trump makes a public announcement.
The White House and Fox News did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Pirro pushed conspiracy theories about voting in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 election loss, and she came up in litigation filed by Dominion Voting Systems. Fox News tried to redact what one of Pirro’s executive producers thought about one of her post-2020 election monologues, with the producer writing, “This is completely crazy.”
Fox News and Dominion reached a $787.5 million settlement in the defamation lawsuit in 2023.
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., a member of the Judiciary Committee, said this week that he could not support Martin, a “stop the steal” organizer, for the position, citing concerns over his associations with Jan. 6 rioters.
Pirro has not been as closely aligned with Capitol attack defendants as Martin, but she fed some of the conspiracy theories that precipitated the 2021 riot.
Three days before the attack, Pirro on the air compared disruption of Congress’ planned certification of the 2020 election results to soldiers who fought in the American Revolutionary War.
“These hungry, tired, cold, defeated soldiers knew that it was their moment to stand up and fight for freedom. To many, Jan. 6 is such a moment,” she said. “As we are all being told to shut up and move on, Jan. 6 will tell us whether there are any in Congress willing to battle for the America that those soldiers fought for, the one that you and I believe in.”
Three days after the attack, Pirro condemned the events, saying they were “deplorable, reprehensible, outright criminal,” and she said members of the movement should stop looking for others to blame.
“Take the veil of politics off. Be totally objective. Anyone watching this must condemn it,” she said.