A rant from Fox News host Jeanine Pirro has resurfaced this week, in which she goes on an angry tirade about how the country “cannot” have a president who’s the subject of ongoing investigations. Of course, she’s not talking about Donald Trump — this particular speech is from 2016.
As Trump awaits four separate criminal trials on 91 charges for an array of alleged crimes, Pirro’s old words have been brought back on social media. The Fox News host has, of course, been a staunch supporter of Trump since 2016, even amid his two impeachments.
But, at that time, Pirro was adamant that then-presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton simply could not run the country if she was under a single investigation.
“Whether you like Hillary Rodham Clinton, or Donald J. Trump doesn’t matter, there is only one person you can vote for,” Pirro said at the time. “We cannot have a country led by a president subject to ongoing criminal investigations, potential indictment and never ending hearings.”
Trump, of course, has been indicted four times as of this writing, and will be in a courtroom on trial every day for at least six weeks, according to fellow candidate Chris Christie, beginning the day before Super Tuesday.
Pirro continued, “We cannot have a president under that level of scrutiny that inevitably leads to even more questions and more investigations.”
The host added in the speech that, whether Clinton was indicted and/or convicted – which she was not – “it doesn’t matter.”
“Her guilt is a moot point, she cannot take the Oval Office,” Pirro said. “Now in any other business when the head of a corporation is plagued by scandal, that person steps down and is replaced, because the board knows a business cannot succeed without respect and authority.”
She added, “How do you think the world is going to look at the United States when a woman under federal criminal investigation who’s lied repeatedly to the American people is elected? Do you think they’ll take her at her word?”
Trump is currently facing an array of charges in federal court and in the state of Georgia stemming from the investigation into his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Notably, to use Pirro’s terminology, the former president also “lied repeatedly to the American people” with his false claims that the election was stolen.
Pirro herself became a central figure in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation suit against Fox News last year, when court documents from Dominion noted that “Discovery has revealed that…Fox News host Jeanine Pirro help[ed] spread the verifiably false yet devastating lies against Dominion.”
In February, new documents indicated that Pirro was among the Fox hosts who were horrified by some of the lies being spread on-air. At the time, Fox News noted that Dominion cherrypicked quotes to support a broadened view of defamation law, calling it an “assault on the First Amendment.”
You can watch Pirro’s 2016 rant in the video above.
