Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia and ex-Fox News star, was reportedly described in deeply unflattering terms by executives at her old network in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss.
Court filings submitted by the voting machine company Smartmatic as part of a lawsuit against Fox reveal that one person working at the network described Pirro as “insane,” another called her a “reckless maniac,” a third said she had a “tendency to find random conspiracy theories on weird internet sites” and a fourth said simply: “I don’t trust her to be responsible.”
Smartmatic is seeking $2.7 billion in damages from Fox in a complaint that alleges the network’s anchors spread falsehoods about its products in the aftermath of Trump’s defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
Fox settled a similar defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems in 2023 for $787.5 million but has insisted that Smartmatic’s suit is without merit, arguing that its journalists acted in good faith and were careful to flag their talking points as allegations-only, also claiming that Smartmatic cannot prove its case or that it suffered direct financial injury.
“The evidence shows that Smartmatic’s business and reputation were badly suffering long before any claims by President Trump’s lawyers on Fox News and that Smartmatic grossly inflated its damage claims to generate headlines and chill free speech,” the network said in a statement last month.
“Now, in the aftermath of Smartmatic’s executives getting indicted for bribery charges, we are eager and ready to continue defending our press freedoms.”
The Independent has reached out to Fox and to Pirro for further comment. Pirro declined to comment when approached about the report by NPR.
The filings reveal that senior network executives, including Fox Corp Chairman Lachlan Murdoch and CEO Suzanne Scott, expressed unease about what Pirro and other anchors might say on air in support of Trump’s still-unproven claims that he was cheated out of a consecutive second term in the White House by a nationwide Democratic plot.
A text message sent by Fox News’s Senior VP for Weekend Programming David Clark to its Executive VP for Prime Time, Meade Cooper, on November 6 2020 says of Pirro: “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.”
Cooper is quoted in the filings warning Scott a week later: “Pirro has a tendency to find random conspiracy theories on weird internet sites.”
The anchor’s former producer Jerry Andrews is elsewhere quoted describing her as a “reckless maniac” while she is branded “insane” in a cited text exchange between two board members for comparing the deplatforming of the Parler app in the aftermath of the Capitol riot to Nazi Germany’s Kristallnacht of 1938.
It was previously reported that other filings in the same case recorded Pirro bragging to then-Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel about how helpful she had been to Trump and calling fellow Fox anchor Sean Hannity an “egomaniac” for walking around the Oval Office “like he owns the place.”
She can also be found complaining to Hannity by text: “I’M TIRED OF THE CENSORSHIP AND I’M EMBARRASSED BY HOW THEY CALLED THIS ELECTION.”
Andrews appears in those documents too, sagely advising Pirro against spreading misinformation on air by saying: “You should be very careful with this stuff and protect yourself given the ongoing calls for evidence that has not materialized.”
