President Donald Trump’s hand-picked top attorney in Washington, D.C., lashed out at CNN for pointing out that her office’s conviction rate has been far below the Justice Department’s usual average for federal criminal trials.
Over the past three years, about 90 percent of juries nationwide voted to convict criminal defendants, with the remaining 10 percent voting to acquit, CNN reported.
But under Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia has won just half of its first eight criminal trials this year. The low conviction rate stems from several issues, including a jury pool that is skeptical of the DOJ under Trump, sources told CNN.
Asked by the outlet about her office’s federal criminal trial record, Pirro insisted she was “very proud” of the conviction rate and claimed that acquittals and hung juries were not “indicative of what’s going on in the system.”
She also responded to multiple questions by declaring, “Hogwash!”
One former prosecutor who now works in the private sector told CNN that the DOJ has “lost the jury pool” in D.C. by renouncing its previous independence from the White House.
It doesn’t help that large banners of Trump’s face now hang from the Justice Department’s headquarters building downtown and from the Labor Department, which is next to a federal courthouse, the former prosecutor told CNN.
Grand juries have pushed back as the DOJ moved to aggressively prosecute Trump’s political enemies, and gone after protesters who opposed the administration’s federal crackdown of the city.
Multiple grand juries refused to indict a lawyer who threw a footlong Subway sandwich at a federal immigration officer last summer, and Pirro has similarly failed to secure indictments against Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly and five other former military and intelligence officers serving in Congress.
Those rejections were rare in previous administrations but have become a trend in D.C. since Pirro took over and began pushing through problematic cases, sources told CNN.
In cases that did make it to trial, jurors have refused to convict on principle to send a message to the DOJ.
The jury refusals could begin hurting law enforcement’s ability to bring legitimate cases against defendants who are serious public safety threats, according to CNN.
Pirro, however, claims the administration’s political vendettas have not affected her office’s results.
“If a jury feels that we haven’t met our burden, then so be it,” she told CNN.
A DOJ spokesperson also told CNN that “far-left activists” might be trying to “undermine” Pirro’s office.
The Daily Beast has also reached out for comment.
