'Insane!' Trump pick Jeanine Pirro ridiculed behind the scenes by Fox News executives

U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. Jeanine Pirro was privately ridiculed by several Fox News executives as “insane” and a “reckless maniac” according to legal documents from a defamation lawsuit against the network made public recently.

“I don’t trust her to be responsible,” said one unnamed Fox executive, according to National Public Radio reporter David Folkenflik, who scrubbed through the filings and published some of their content in a report Thursday.

A former Fox News personality, Pirro was tapped by Trump to be the capital’s top law enforcement officer in May after withdrawing his support for his initial nominee, Ed Martin Jr., who lacked sufficient support in the Senate to be confirmed. Martin would go on to be appointed by Trump as the Justice Department pardon attorney.

Pirro has become the face of Trump’s D.C. federal takeover, and has regularly defended the president’s escalations in the city, from deploying the military to the city, to arming them with M4 carbine rifles. And while critics have decried Pirro as being more loyal to Trump than to upholding the law, she reportedly was long the target of critics, particularly from her own colleagues at Fox News.

A second Fox executive said that Pirro had a “tendency to find random conspiracy theories on weird internet sites,” making the comments in the wake of the 2021 defamation lawsuit filed against Fox News from Smartmatic, a company that manufactures voting systems, over the network’s promotion of false claims that its voting systems had been rigged.

Fox News was the target of multiple lawsuits over its false claims suggesting the 2020 election had been rigged against Trump, including one from Dominion Voting Systems, which saw the network pay the company $787 million as a settlement. Smartmatic’s case against Fox News is still ongoing, according to court records.