Fox News and the Murdochs have made yet another move to put hate-for-profit and lies over anything that resembles responsible journalism by boosting Jeanine Pirro to a permanent cohosting chair on The Five.

Pirro, currently the host of Saturday evening’s “Justice with Judge Jeanine,” has been personally named as a defendant in Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox for her part in the network’s 2020 election lies about the voting technology company. She was also singled out in Dominion Voting System’s similar $1.6 billion lawsuit. You may recall a judge recently denied Fox’s motion to dismiss the Dominion case.

But that’s not all that’s wrong with Pirro. For one thing, there’s her bigotry: Her unapologetic smears about Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Muslim faith was so offensive, it got her suspended for two weeks from Fox. But she also mimicked the El Paso shooter’s manifesto with her own “white replacement” rhetoric years before Tucker Carlson notably did so. She also justified Trump’s Charlottesville remarks.

Then there’s her deliberate sabotage of COVID-19 mitigation: In April, 2020, she literally gave her blessing to Michigan protesters who snarled traffic and flouted social distancing, thus obstructing health care workers from getting to work. Media Matters caught her saying on a digital show called “London Real,” in 2020, that she wouldn’t get the coronavirus vaccine and that the point of wearing masks is to “dehumanize” and “frighten people.”

Clearly, she'll get along great with cohost Jesse Watters.

American democracy, not so much. Pirro also promoted Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election both on the air and off. From Media Matters:

Pirro was a full-throated supporter of targeting Congress on January 6 in the effort to overturn Biden’s victory. In her opening monologue on January 2, 2021, she compared the upcoming certification of the Electoral College in Congress to Washington crossing the Delaware, saying election “irregularities were beyond minimal” and “January 6 will tell us whether there are any in Congress willing to battle for the America that those soldiers fought for, the one that you and I believe in.” [That video is below]

During that same hour, in an interview with Trump administration official Peter Navarro, she embraced the theory that Pence could object to the certification of the elections on January 6 and create a “10-day window” to overturn the Electoral College’s vote for Biden.

Off Fox and behind the scenes, Pirro was making moves in support of Trump’s anti-democracy campaign. According to a report in The Washington Post, Pirro successfully urged the Trump campaign to financially assist the sinister efforts underway in the Willard Hotel “war room” and help pay for the hotel rooms populated by Bernie Kerik, John Eastman, Steve Bannon, and others plotting to subvert the election and focusing their efforts on January 6. 

Media Matters has plenty more examples of Pirro’s radical opposition to American democracy.

Oh, and that’s not counting her 32-year marriage to a tax-fraud felon (she co-signed many of the returns) with reported mob ties who had been on retainer to Donald Trump. Pirro successfully lobbied Trump to pardon her ex just before leaving office.

In its press release, Fox said that Pirro will give up her Saturday evening program and that The Five’s liberal chair vacated by Juan Williams will now be filled with the rotating cohosts Harold Ford Jr., Geraldo Rivera and Jessica Tarlov.

You can get a glimpse of whom and what Fox and the Murdochs just promoted below, where Pirro likens overturning the election to Washington crossing the Delaware, from the January 2, 2021 Justice with Judge Jeanine, via Media Matters.