Fox host Jeanine Pirro isn’t letting her decades-long marriage to a felon allegedly tied to the mob (and Trump) stop her from trying to replace Jeff Sessions as attorney general. Trump has also reportedly threatened to nominate her to the Supreme Court if Sessions doesn’t make her a deputy attorney general.
From Politico:
A former prosecutor and judge, Pirro has repeatedly told Trump’s aides and advisers over the past 18 months that she’s interested in taking over as the nation’s top law enforcement official, according to four people familiar with the conversations.
Trump has dangled the possibility of giving her a top appointment. During a November meeting in the Oval Office, the president raised the possibility of nominating Pirro to a federal judgeship, according to a former administration official, though this person added that Trump was more likely engaging in flattery than seriously considering putting Pirro on the bench.
[…]
Pirro first began talking with transition aides in late 2016 about joining the administration. Though she expressed interest in the attorney general job, when it became clear that job was going with Sessions, she began pushing for deputy attorney general, according to two Trump administration officials.
The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman commented on this article in a tweet:
Given Pirro’s Trump-friendly attacks on the Russia investigation and her recent accusation that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is the “most dangerous man in America,” it’s not a huge surprise that she would be gunning for an administration job nor that Trump should want to give her one. There’s no doubt that if she got her foot in the door, she’d do her best to destroy the Russia investigation and re-make the Department of Justice into an arm of Trump authoritarianism.
But could she be confirmed? Pirro’s past is not exactly the stuff of federal law enforcement nor judiciary. Here’s how I recently described her history:
[Pirro] was married for 32 years to a lawyer with alleged mob ties, who went to jail for tax fraud and who fathered an illegitimate daughter. She also came under federal investigation for allegedly planning to bug her husband’s boat to see if [he] was cheating on her. It just so happens that same (now former) husband was kept on retainer by Trump. It’s not clear if that ended after the jail sentence.
One other detail: Pirro’s then-husband, Al Pirro, was convicted of 34 counts of tax evasion and conspiracy and it’s hard to believe she did not know what he was up to. From a New York Magazine article written before Pirro’s conviction:
The Feds say [Al] Pirro hid $1 million in income between 1988 and 1997, claiming dozens of personal luxuries as business expenses, from his $123,000 Ferrari to his wife’s Mercedes-Benz.
Though federal tax law allows spouses to claim ignorance of their other half’s business dealings, Al’s list of exemptions raises real concerns—at least about Jeanine’s lack of curiosity.
[…]
Though she co-signed several of the couple’s joint tax returns (she earns $136,700 a year as D.A.), she has offered no explanations. Not about the Mercedes, which she drives each day past the $40,000 electronic gates of her $1.7 million Harrison home—gates Al claimed as a business deduction—or about the deductions of a $3,700 backyard awning; $10,000 in furnishings for a West Palm Beach vacation home; another Mercedes, for Jeanine’s mother; cruise tickets; stereos; fine wines; cigars; toys; and even salaries for workers who baby-sat the Pirro children, picked up the dry cleaning, and took the family’s pot-bellied pigs to the vet.
None of that will matter to Trump, of course. But what about Republican senators? Or will Trump find a spot for Pirro that doesn’t require confirmation?
Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, watch Pirro jump the shark and call Sessions “the most dangerous man in America”above, from the May 18, 2018 Justice with Judge Jeanine.
Cross-posted at Newshounds.us
