Jeanine Pirro, the top federal prosecutor for Washington, D.C., is embroiled in an ongoing war of words with a magistrate judge who has recently leveled biting criticism against prosecutors for bringing cases he says lack evidence in their attempt to support President Donald Trump's aggressive crime crackdown in the district.
Pirro took aim during a Friday news conference at Judge Zia Faruqui for comments Faruqui made during a Thursday hearing lambasting prosecutors for a recent spate of cases the U.S. attorney's office has been forced to drop due to grand juries refusing to indict defendants charged with offenses ranging from weapons possession to purported threats against President Trump.
"Judge Faruqui has never really met someone with an illegal gun that he hasn't found some compassion for, OK?" Pirro said. "I'm not going into grand juries and telling him what to do and what not to do. That is their prerogative. We are advisers to grand juries. We tell them what the law is. We present cases that are clearly based on the evidence, OK?"
It's extremely rare for grand juries to refuse to hand up indictments in the federal system, but it has happened in at least seven separate instances across five cases since Trump ordered his surge of federal resources to Washington roughly a month ago, according to a tally by the Associated Press.
In a hearing Thursday, Faruqui, according to the AP, accused prosecutors of "playing cops and robbers" on the streets of D.C. while the "rule of law" was "bring flushed down the toilet" in order to puff up numbers for the Justice Department and FBI to claim their federal intervention in the district has proved effective.
The comments led Pirro to issue an usual statement taking aim at Faruqui, one of several magistrate judges in D.C. who directly oversee prosecutors' activities -- including signing off on search warrants and arrests of suspects.
Pirro issued a similar statement earlier in the week taking direct aim at a grand jury which had refused to bring an indictment against a suspect her office had charged with leveling threats against President Trump.
Pirro again echoed her criticisms Friday in response to a question from a reporter who asked whether her office plans to change its approach to avoid such setbacks in the future.
"As far as I'm concerned, our job, my job as a prosecutor, is to bring criminals into court and to try to prove my case beyond a reasonable doubt. I'm not into going back and forth with judges," Pirro said. "I was a judge, OK? That's not what I did as a judge. So we need to leave politics out of it."
"I'll do my job. He should do his job as a judge and leave his politics out of it," Pirro said.