President Donald Trump has announced he would be appointing Fox News host Jeanine Pirro — a former county prosecutor and elected judge — as the chief federal prosecutor for Washington, D.C., following the withdrawal of his original nominee.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he was naming Pirro as the interim US attorney in Washington D.C., but didn’t indicate whether he would nominate her for the Senate-confirmed position on a more permanent basis.

“Jeanine is incredibly well qualified for this position, and is considered one of the Top District Attorneys in the History of the State of New York. She is in a class by herself,” Trump wrote.

Jeanine Pirro will lead the nation’s largest US Attorney’s office — at least on an interim basis — after Trump withdrew his nomination of conservative activist Ed Martin Jr. earlier on Thursday. The nomination was pulled probably after a key Republican senator said he could not support Martin for the job due to his defense of rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

“He’s a terrific person, and he wasn’t getting the support from people that I thought,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday. He later added: “But we have somebody else that will be great.”

Martin has served as acting US Attorney for the District of Columbia since Trump’s first week in office. But his hopes of keeping the job faded amid questions about his qualifications and background. Martin had never served as a prosecutor or tried a case before taking office in January.

All about Jeanine Pirro

Pirro, who joined Fox News in 2006, co-hosts the network’s show “The Five” on weekday evenings. She was elected as a judge in New York’s Westchester County Court in 1990 before serving three terms as the county’s elected district attorney.

Pirro, a 1975 graduate of Albany Law School, has significantly more courtroom experience than Martin. She led one of the nation’s first domestic violence units in a prosecutor’s office.

After her elected terms as a judge and district attorney, Pirro briefly campaigned in 2005 as a Republican to unseat then-Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton before announcing that she would run for New York attorney general instead. She lost that race to Andrew Cuomo, son of former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.

Pirro became an ubiquitous television pundit during O J Simpson’s murder trial, often appearing on CNN’s “Larry King Live”. During her time on Fox News, she has frequently interviewed Trump.