Todd Blanche Tosses Jeanine Pirro Under the Bus When Asked About Trump Possibly Firing Her: ‘He’s Allowed to Do That’
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche made clear on Wednesday that if President Donald Trump wanted to fire U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro for dropping baseless charges against someone Trump wanted prosecuted, the president is well within his rights to do so.
Pirro, the former Fox News host, angered Trump this past week by dropping charges in the Reflecting Pool vandalism case, citing a lack of evidence to take the case to court. Trump told reporters earlier in the week that Pirro “choked” and “folded like an umbrella” in dropping the charges, which he still claims to have evidence to back up.
“You’ve declined to say whether you stand by Jeanine Pirro’s decision to drop that case. I’m just — what message does it send, though, if President Trump fires a U.S. Attorney because she determined there was not sufficient evidence to charge four people with a crime? Did he fire her? What message would it send?” a reporter asked Blanche during a DOJ presser.
“Hypothetically, if the president chose to fire a United States attorney, it turns out he’s allowed to do that because he’s the president of the United States. And, by the way, if President Trump wanted to fire anybody within his administration, he understands he has the power to do that. So when he makes a decision about whether to fire a U.S. attorney or anybody else, that’s his call,” replied Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal attorney. Blanche added:
As far as any message — what I said earlier, Alex, is true, which is that when you look at the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office’s body of work over the past year and a half, and where we are in this city compared to where we were, they are doing a phenomenal job. Now, does that mean that every case goes exactly the way that President Trump, or I, or U.S. Attorney Pirro wants?
I mean, of course not — it doesn’t. So I think that what you’ve seen play out in the press with respect to President Trump and U.S. Attorney Pirro is… it’s all out there already, but I don’t think that that changes the fact that her prosecutors, her office, what they’ve done over the past year to transform the city into a place that we can all now walk around in after sunset, is something that’s incredible. So I don’t think they’re inconsistent with each other.
Watch the clip above via C-SPAN.
New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!
Comments
↓ Scroll down for comments ↓