White House officials are reportedly experiencing “significant frustration” and “heaping blame” on U.S. attorney and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro over the firestorm surrounding her office’s criminal probe of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, which drew severe backlash this week from Republican members of Congress and a broad spectrum of right-wing media. But it would be a mistake to treat Pirro’s nakedly pretextual bid to punish Powell and curtail the Fed’s independence as the actions of a rogue actor — she is a committed Trumpist operative carrying out President Donald Trump’s instructions to use state power to punish his enemies. 

Trump has made clear that he wants federal prosecutors and investigators (and indeed, all administration officials) to forcefully wield their authority against people and entities who defy him. Pirro’s actions against Powell — whether she acted on orders from above or her own initiative — are fully in keeping with that assignment. Indeed, she has the job in the first place in no small part because she was in the vanguard of Trumpist media figures calling for criminal charges against Trump’s foes during her Fox tenure. 

Trump reportedly “criticized a group of U.S. attorneys at a White House event last week, calling them weak and complaining they weren’t moving fast enough to prosecute his favored targets.” Pirro, who was present at the event, is surely doing whatever she can to remain on his good list. 

Pirro’s Powell probe followed years of Trump invective targeting the Fed chair and came amid his threats of legal action, and the president has repeatedly defended the probe this week. Pirro’s office is also reportedly investigating Democratic legislators who released a video urging service members and intelligence officers not to follow illegal orders, which Trump characterized as “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” 

And she does not shrink from critics who say she is overseeing politicized investigations. On Tuesday night, Pirro went on Fox host and chief Trump propagandist Sean Hannity’s show (one of the president’s favorite watches) to not only defend her pursuit of Powell but to blast Republican legislators who have taken issue with it.

These actions are exactly what the president wants to see from his underlings.

Trump ran on “retribution” and assembled a team eager to protect his interests and target his political foes, including loyalists like Pirro, Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, and FBI Director Kash Patel. Less than a year into his tenure, the Justice Department has pursued cases at the president’s behest against a litany of Trump foils, including former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA). 

Trump wants these cases brought, so more are coming. There’s a Trumpist U.S. attorney in Miami reportedly pursuing an absurd but sprawling investigation into the right-wing fantasy that former President Barack Obama led a “deep state” conspiracy against Trump; a newly-announced assistant attorney general post slated to purportedly target fraud under the president’s direct oversight, which could be a vehicle to go after Democratic governors like Minnesota’s Tim Walz and California’s Gavin Newsom; and a broad, all-of-government effort to criminalize progressive groups and their funders by smearing them as domestic terrorists. 

But Trump needs prosecutors willing to do his dirty work; several have preferred to resign or be fired rather than pursue such weak and pretextual efforts. He surely knows from watching her on television over the years that in Pirro, he has a loyalist who won’t say no.

Pirro, a former judge and prosecutor who joined Fox after a failed 2006 U.S. Senate bid, emerged during the 2016 campaign as one of the most abjectly sycophantic Trump fanatics on TV — which made the president a regular viewer of her Saturday evening show. She spent much of his first presidency as a key cog in the right-wing media machine that encouraged the president to target his political foes through authoritarian tactics.

Pirro made headlines by demanding a “cleansing” of the FBI and DOJ, with the purportedly disloyal to be “taken out in handcuffs,” and spuriously accused Democrats like Hillary Clinton of various crimes. She lobbied for the ouster of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, calling for his dismissal on Fox and lashing out at his tenure to Trump in the White House, over Sessions’ unwillingness to turn Foxy fantasies into criminal indictments. Her support of Trumpian voter fraud conspiracy theories following the 2020 election led to her brief removal from Fox’s airwaves — and to her executive producer describing her as a “reckless maniac.”

The Fox host did show some concern about the prospect of prosecutorial overreach — when she perceived it as harming Trump’s interests. Pirro described Trump’s conviction by a New York jury as the result of “warfare” (because “lawfare is far too soft” a term) and suggested it could spark “a revolution” because it “was not a case that should've been brought.” She also suggested that the FBI agents searching Mar-A-Lago may have “wanted” to “engage in deadly physical force,” and said that the lack of media coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop meant that “we are living in a fascist state.”

Pirro’s “blind obedience to President Trump,” as Schiff put it, was readily observable when her nomination came up for a Senate vote in August — but Republicans voted in lockstep for her confirmation. Now Republican senators like Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) are saying that the Powell probe goes too far — but as with Sen. Bill Cassidy’s (R-LA) criticism of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s antivax moves, they’ve already yielded their strongest card by supporting the nomination in the first place.

The probes of Powell and Democratic legislators won’t be Pirro’s last investigations into the president’s foes. She seems more likely to end up a special counsel focused solely on such cases than drummed out of government for excessive partisanship. Her Fox catalog may hint at future targets, from Democratic governors who won’t comply with ICE to FBI and DOJ officials purportedly engaged in “election interference” against the president to the undocumented immigrants she says should be “presum[ed]” as violent criminals.

None of this is to say that Pirro’s authoritarian pursuit of the president’s critics will succeed — her relevant legal experience is decades old, and cases brought by her office have sputtered before D.C. juries at an historic rate. But she has the job because Trump knows that unlike more honorable federal prosecutors, she will keep trying.