US Attorney Jeanine Pirro touted a drop in crime since President Trump’s federal police takeover in Washington, DC, but called out the “liberal leftist” city council for allowing leniency for too many criminals.
In the latest episode of “Pod Force One,” the Trump-appointed DC prosecutor told The Post’s Miranda Devine that she wants local laws to change so that young offenders will be held accountable for serious crimes.
“We are subject to these liberal leftists, subject to the DC Council,” Pirro told Devine, who quipped they are the same thing.
“They pass laws that make it almost impossible for me to get sentences that are appropriate.”
Pirro cited various DC soft-on-crime laws, including the Incarceration Reduction Act and the Youth Rehabilitation Amendment Act, which provides sentencing alternatives for young adult offenders under 22 years of age.
“For example, if there’s a 19-year-old who goes on a public bus with an illegal gun and shoots another person … he is an adult, but under that statute, the law gives the judges the right to give them probation,” Pirro said.
“He walked out of that courtroom.”
“I would have put him in prison for the gun alone, let alone shooting someone who, but for the grace of God should be dead.”
Congress has tried to intervene with the GOP-led House passing bills this summer to overturn DC’s lenient crime laws for juveniles, but the reforms still need Senate action.
“What we’ve got is we’ve got to lower the age. We’ve got to get rid of some of these laws, and we’ve got to deal with judges who are releasing young people because they think it’s the right thing to do,” Pirro said.
Full Episode
Despite setbacks in sentencing, Pirro said she sees a turnaround in DC since Trump’s federal takeover of police this summer and sending in the National Guard.
The Metropolitan Police Department reported 274 murders in 2023; 187 murders in 2024, and 2025 so far had 122 murders.
“So the homicide rate continues to go down, and since the surge [this summer] the homicide rate is down 67%,” Pirro said.
“For all those people who say, ‘Oh, this is federal troops,’ no, this is angels coming in.”
DC had the fourth-highest murder-per-capita rate of any US city last year, according to a report from the Center for Public Safety Initiatives at the Rochester Institute of Technology, which was released last February.
Every week, Post columnist Miranda Devine sits down for exclusive and candid conversations with the most influential disruptors in Washington. Subscribe here!
DC Mayor Muriel Bowser thanked Trump for the assistance in August — and a month later issued an order with no expiration date mandating that local law enforcement continue to cooperate with their federal counterparts “to the maximum extent allowable by law within the District.”
One former city council member, Trayon White, was charged under Pirro’s predecessor with taking bribes and will go on trial next year.
He was expelled from the council earlier this year but re-elected in July despite the corruption charges.
Recent filings from DC federal prosecutors in Pirro’s office have suggested that White accepted $156,000 in cash bribes to cover gambling debts, according to WUSA9.
The governance issues have also hindered the DC prosecutor’s ability to charge assault cases like the high-profile mugging of a former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employee Edward Coristine, known by his former social media moniker “Big Balls.”
“I spoke to the girl that he was trying to protect the next morning, and the next morning she told me that this whole throng of young kids were trying to pull her out of the car as ‘Big Balls,’ the DOGE kid, was getting beaten,” recalled Pirro, who previously served as a district attorney and later judge in Westchester County, New York.
“She said, ‘Judge,’ they were 12 and 13 years old. They were not 16 and 17,” Pirro went on.
“Fast forward, the case goes to family court. I cannot get it. It’s not a crime over which I have jurisdiction, and the two 15-year-olds that were ultimately charged and brought to family court are out. It’s over.”
A DC judge sentenced the teen boy and girl to 12 months and 9 months of probation, respectively, for the Aug. 3 attack.
Pirro also cited issues with maintaining an “objective” jury pool in the District, where only 6.6% of voters cast ballots for Trump in the 2024 election and 92.5% voted for Vice President Kamala Harris.
That complicated the recent case brought against a former Department of Justice employee who hurled a turkey submarine sandwich at a federal officer, but was allowed to walk.
“The grand jury threw it out,” Pirro said.
“We put in the evidence, the case was solid, it was all there, and we’ll get questions like from grand jurors, ‘Is this part of the surge?’ Wait a minute, that’s none of your business. That is not the issue here. The issue is, is this a crime where we have met the elements of the statute?”
Pirro also placed some blame on the Biden administration — and her predecessor, DC US Attorney Matthew Graves — for letting criminals run amok.
“But there’s no question that during the Biden Administration, this office was not supporting the police in terms of actually filing charges,” she said.
“So, at one point, 60% of the arrests made by the Metropolitan Police Department here in DC, they were not filing charges. The police would arrest, and the Biden people wouldn’t prosecute them.”
Graves declined to bring charges in 67% of cases following an arrest in fiscal year 2022, but he defended that decision by citing the fact that DC’s crime lab lost its certification.
Pirro, who left her Fox News gig after Trump tapped her for the public service job, said she’s enjoyed getting back to her roots as a prosecutor.
“To me, the victim is a victim. The abuser is not the victim,” Pirro said.
“To me, it’s time to settle the scores, to make things right, and that’s why I’m here.”
