A Fox News executive has called a prominent Trump appointee a "reckless maniac."
Another Fox executive said, "I don't trust her to be responsible."
A third condemned her for the "tendency to find random conspiracy theories on weird internet sites."
And a Fox corporate board member called a public statement of hers "insane."
The person they were talking about is Jeanine Pirro, now the United States' top law enforcement official for Washington, D.C. At the time, she was a top-rated star on Fox News itself.
Her colleagues made those remarks in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, when Pirro used her platform to amplify baseless claims that victory had been stolen from President Trump.
The exchanges are quoted in legal documents made public last month in a defamation lawsuit brought by Smartmatic, a voting technology company, against Fox News. Pirro is named as a defendant.
As the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Pirro is the public face of Trump's crackdown on crime in the district, with armed troops and federal law enforcement officers patrolling neighborhoods.
"At some point in the near future, she's going to be really tested — like all U.S. attorneys with these kinds of big posts are," says Sarah Isgur, an attorney who served as a senior official in the U.S. Justice Department during President Trump's first term. "And we'll find out whether those comments were prescient or whether she really does understand the difference between the two hats."
Pirro, in a chance encounter aboard an Amtrak train, declined to comment for this story. Her Justice Department spokesperson, previously a Fox News producer who worked on her show for eight years, did not respond to written requests for comment.
A law enforcement career revived after nearly two decades
Before television, Pirro was a prosecutor, judge and political hopeful. In 2006, Pirro briefly sought to run against Hillary Clinton for a U.S. Senate seat representing New York. Pirro then withdrew to run, unsuccessfully, for New York attorney general.
Nearly two decades later, she has returned to law enforcement. In her new role, she has captured headlines and cable news coverage — not all of it flattering.
Since becoming the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Pirro has made public announcements about the indictment of a Haitian gang leader, the D.C. homicide level reaching triple digits for the year and the takedown of an alleged fentanyl and PCP drug-trafficking crew. Last month, Pirro told prosecutors to seek the most serious charges available for people who had been arrested.
Yet not all those charges are sticking.
Judges are pushing back on what they call illegally obtained or flimsy evidence presented by prosecutors in court filings.
A grand jury refused to indict a former Justice Department staffer for felony assault after he threw a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent patrolling the streets of D.C.
This despite the legal maxim that any good prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
Another grand jury declined three times to indict a D.C. woman accused of assaulting an FBI agent, according to The Washington Post. Most recently, a federal grand jury in D.C. declined to indict a woman accused by Pirro's office of making threats against Trump.
When Trump named Pirro to be his U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., he cited her past work in law enforcement.
But he also pointed to her two shows at Fox, Justice With Judge Jeanine and The Five, which he called "one of the Highest Rated Shows on Television."
Trump has repeatedly promoted Pirro's books and Fox shows on social media, noting her unwavering support of him.
A tenacious televised champion of Trump
Yet that very record — defined by her terrier-like tenacity as a champion for Trump — created migraines for her bosses at Fox at a pivotal point.
On Sept. 21, 2020, the court documents say, Pirro texted the head of the Republican National Committee. "I work so hard for the party across the country," she wrote Ronna McDaniel. "I'm the #1 watched show on all news cable all weekend. I work so hard for the President and party."
By November 2020, Fox's controlling owner, Rupert Murdoch, and network executives were walking a razor's edge.
On election night, Fox's voting-projection team concluded that Joe Biden had clinched Arizona. The network aired that call before any other major news outlet. That infuriated Trump's fans. Protesters chanted, "Fox sucks." Millions of viewers deserted Fox. The stock of parent company Fox Corp. dropped.
Both Fox and Smartmatic have each submitted lengthy court filings arguing why the judge should rule in its favor before trial. These filings include collections of what each asserts to be undisputed facts, including quotations from conversations, text messages and depositions from Fox News hosts and executives.
The legal documents Smartmatic filed indicate that network executives privately agreed that Trump had lost. But as the network rushed to stem the bleeding, Pirro became one of the most prominent Fox stars to embrace and amplify Trump's repeated claims that he had been cheated of victory, even as evidence publicly amassed that this was untrue.
A complicated lawsuit
Fox declined comment for this story.
Its executives have testified in sworn depositions that they had no concerns about what Pirro said on the air and considered her a source of reliable information. They assert Pirro took steps to investigate the claims and was careful to feature the denials she was aware of. The network's legal team notes that Pirro had couched things as allegations.
Fox argues that its journalists didn't know that the allegations were false. And therefore, its lawyers say, the network shouldn't be held liable for defamation, giving no credence to Smartmatic's arguments about the concerns of producers and executives.
Fundamentally, Fox's legal team asserts the network was reporting on newsworthy claims by the president and his allies, a journalistic endeavor that it argues is protected by the First Amendment. The allegations were "an issue that was pretty much splattered across newspapers across the country," Pirro said in a December 2023 deposition.
In filings for its defense, Fox says Smartmatic cannot prove its libel claims or that it was financially harmed.
The network also points to Smartmatic's own legal troubles: The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently charged Smartmatic executives with involvement in a bribery scheme in the Philippines. Prosecutors also have raised questions about how Smartmatic spent money from its Los Angeles County contract.
Smartmatic told NPR that it operates ethically and in full compliance with the law wherever it does business, adding: "The allegations in the DOJ's filing are full of misrepresentations."
"I don't trust her to be responsible tomorrow"
On Nov. 6, 2020, ahead of Pirro's regularly scheduled Saturday show the next day, Fox News' senior vice president for weekend programming, David Clark, texted Meade Cooper, the executive vice president over prime time, with a grim assessment. "Bottom line, I don't trust her to be responsible tomorrow. Her guests are all going to say the election is being stolen and if she pushes back at all it will just be a token," he wrote.
Cooper replied: "Maybe she does not have a show tomorrow night.'
"Honestly," Clark wrote back, "that would be the wisest course of action."
The network canceled Pirro's show for that Saturday; at the time, it told NPR and other outlets that her program was simply preempted for standard election coverage.
Fox had done the same at least once before: In 2019, the network took Pirro off the air after she had attacked U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar for wearing a hijab, suggesting the Minnesota Democrat, who is Muslim, was committed to sharia law.
This time, however, Pirro privately complained to Fox star Sean Hannity of censorship. And conservative news outlets reported she had been silenced for supporting Trump, much to the dismay of executives, internal exchanges reproduced in court filings show.
Hannity, who had talked to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, is quoted in the court documents as texting Pirro that she'd be fine: "You can come on and let it rip."
A weakness for "random conspiracy theories on weird internet sites"
Even after Trump administration officials responsible for the integrity of the election process said they had found no appreciable voting fraud, Pirro kept at it, executives said.
On Nov. 13, Fox Corp. Executive Chairman Lachlan Murdoch texted Scott, concerned about the backlash over the question of her show being pulled the previous week. "Has anyone spoken to Judge Jeanine before her show this weekend?" he asked, according to Smartmatic's filing. "It would be good if she corrects the record and clears up the schedule change last week."
Scott told top executives to promote Pirro on the network's major shows and website, Smartmatic's legal filing says. "I expect this to be handled well," she wrote. The network's top communications executive confirmed that the promotions for Pirro were airing and posted online too.
Even so, according to Smartmatic's filing, prime-time executive Cooper warned Scott: "Pirro has a tendency to find random conspiracy theories on weird internet sites." The filing says she assigned a manager and a consultant to work with Pirro to keep her "from saying untrue things... etc."
Pirro hosted her weekly show the next day and again the next week. Executives flagged her scripts, which were frequently contradicted by research from Fox's "Brainroom," to one another, according to Smartmatic's filing.
"It's rife w[ith] conspiracy theories and bs and is yet another example of why this woman should never be on live television," Fox News executive Jerry Andrews wrote to two other executives on Nov. 20, Smartmatic's filing says.
The next day, Pirro opened her show by discussing two voting technology companies. The first was Dominion, which would settle a defamation case against Fox in 2023 for $787.5 million. The second, Smartmatic, had only a single contract in 2020 where its technology was used: in heavily Democratic Los Angeles County, which no one doubted would go for Biden.
"The president's lawyers [are] alleging a company called Dominion, which they say started in Venezuela with Cuban money, and with the assistance of Smartmatic software, a back door is capable of flipping votes," Pirro told viewers. (Dominion did not start in Venezuela, and no one has shown that it has a means of flipping votes.)
Immediately following the 2020 race, Trump and his allies, led by attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, claimed that Dominion and Smartmatic had colluded with the Biden campaign to throw the election.
Dominion had already been blanketing the network with denials, and Fox News researchers had dismissed Giuliani as an unreliable source.
(Both lawyers have since faced serious consequences for their claims, including financial penalties and legal sanctions. Giuliani was subsequently disbarred in New York state and the District of Columbia.)
But Pirro said Giuliani "made clear the Democrat cities were targeted by crooked Democrats who stole votes." These were cities comfortable with corruption, like Pittsburgh and Detroit, she said. And she said there was legal documentation:
"The president's lawyers offered evidence by way of affidavits, which I told you last Saturday as a judge, from a legal perspective, are sworn statements of individuals signed under penalty of perjury," Pirro told viewers, "meaning they know they face the penalty of prosecution and five years if they lie."
Testifying under oath in a later deposition, Pirro indicated that she had been referring to a declaration submitted in a lawsuit brought by a pro-Trump lawyer against Georgia's secretary of state.
She acknowledged under questioning that it was not signed and that she did not know the identity of the person making the declaration, as his or her identity had been withheld from the public, according to Smartmatic's legal filing.
In the weeks after Election Day, Dominion sent a barrage of messages to Fox's executives and journalists flagging the false claims in the allegations being relayed — thousands of emails and warnings in all.
In dozens of court hearings and reviews by state and local election officials, none of the claims by the Trump teams was found to have merit.
Smartmatic's filing says that via text message, Fox executive Andrews told Pirro that if she brought up the issue again, she must include Dominion's denials. She replied by saying she would follow the lead of Fox stars Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs. (Dobbs lost his job after Smartmatic filed its lawsuit.)
"Reckless maniac," Andrews later wrote to a colleague, Smartmatic's filing says. He was referring to Pirro.
An "insane" invocation of Kristallnacht
Pirro would go on to be a leading voice on Fox urging a mass turnout on the National Mall on Jan. 6, 2021, the day that the U.S. Congress was to ceremonially certify Biden's election victory.
On Jan. 3, Pirro compared those gathering to protest in Washington with Trump to the American soldiers in the Revolutionary War, adding, "Jan. 6 will tell us whether there are any in Congress willing to battle for the America that those soldiers fought for."
After protesters participated in a bloody siege of the Capitol, Pirro called for the most violent to be prosecuted. But she called the deplatforming of Parler, a far-right site that had hosted content calling for violence that day, akin to Kristallnacht — a night of violent rampages by Nazis against Jews in 1938.
Smartmatic's filing says Fox Corp. corporate board member Anne Dias texted another board member — former U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan — calling Pirro's Kristallnacht remark "insane." The two directors urged the Murdochs to have the network and its stars make a public stand against Trump and his claims.
Days after the Dominion lawsuit settled in the spring of 2023, Fox forced out Tucker Carlson; the network also settled a case brought by a former producer who alleged an abusive workplace and that Fox was pressuring her to lie in the Dominion case.
Despite the internal misgivings about Pirro, Fox promoted her in 2022 from weekend host to full-time host of The Five, usually Fox's highest-rated show — where she stayed, and starred, until Trump picked her as the top federal prosecutor in the nation's capital.
Lachlan Murdoch, Fox Corp.'s executive chairman and CEO, has told investment analysts that the network will fare better against Smartmatic in court than it did against Dominion. The case is before a different judge in a different jurisdiction — in this case, New York state court in Manhattan.
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