Jeanine Pirro’s tenure as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia has been a never-ending shitshow debacle. From the no bills for protesters, to the quashed subpoenas, to the doomed effort to indict sitting members of Congress for making factually correct statements of law, she’s failed at every turn. She couldn’t even convict that guy who threw a ham sandwich at a CBP thug on camera and then said “I did it. I threw the sandwich.”
Last week, when she was forced to tap out on the prosecution of Olympian David Hearn for touching Trump’s mangled Reflecting Pool, it looked like her days .
Smelling blood in the water, the tweakiest felon at the White House has been screaming for her ouster.
And so, in what is surely not a coincidence, the Washington Post reports that Pirro has convened a special grand jury to take on the juicy political prosecutions Trump demands. Unlike regular grand juries, which have thus far been cool to Pirro’s advances, special grand juries investigate a particular kind of case, usually one with a political valance. At the end of their service, they are empowered to issue a report, even absent an indictment. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis used a similar vehicle in the election interference case she brought against Trump and his confederates, and Jason Reding Quiñones, the US Attorney in the Southern District of Florida, is presiding over a similar panel in Fort Pierce as he tries to construct a grand conspiracy case against everyone who crossed Trump for the past decade.
Quiñones managed to park his effort to lock up James Comey, Jack Smith, and the ghost of Robert Mueller in Judge Aileen Cannon’s friendly courtroom. Pirro will have to do the dirty under the auspices of Chief Judge James Boasberg, who has proven himself a lot less friendly. There’s a very real danger that she winds up like Andrew Boutros, the US Attorney in Chicago, who is currently engulfed in scandal after his office was revealed to have engaged in massive prosecutorial misconduct in the “Broadview 6” case.
Luckily, Pirro has put an experienced federal prosecutor on the job.
I’m kidding.
Pirro put her crony Steven Vandervelden in charge. Vandervelden worked for Pirro in the 90s as a local prosecutor in Westchester County and then retired to run a dance photography studio. Pirro brought him back on last year, and he’s led some of the more ignominious prosecutions of her tenure, including the no bill of the sitting members of Congress and the subpoena for the Federal Reserve that got quashed by Judge Boasberg for being illegitimate and pretextual.
But that’s all in the past. Now that Vandervelden’s got his sea legs under him, it will all be smooth sailing. So look out Anthony Fauci! Watch your back Jack Smith! Pirro and the boys are on the case.
Pirro, in rare move, convenes special grand jury in Washington [WaPo]
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.
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