Jeanine Pirro says she did not conspire with Donald Trump to send a message that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan should resign.
Last weekend, Trump tweeted that people should “Watch @JudgeJeanine on @FoxNews tonight at 9:00 P.M. On her show, she called for Ryan to step down. That prompted speculation that Trump was trying to send a message to Ryan through Pirro.
“No! No! No! No!” Pirro told TheWrap, adding that there was no coordination between her and the president.
“In fact, I had just come from Maine — my daughter is getting married in Maine. I flew to D.C. and someone said, ‘The President tweeted your show. … I said, ‘He did not!,’” she laughed. “And then it was like, ‘Yeah, he did. And it was like, ‘Why?’”
We asked Pirro if she thinks Trump was just randomly plugging her show: “Yes,” she responded. “And that’s the God’s-honest truth.”
Here’s Trump’s tweet:
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/845646761704243200
Former prosecutor Pirro kicked off last Saturday’s episode of “Justice with Judge Jeanine” by coming down hard on Ryan for his failure to deliver the votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with his health care bill.
“Paul Ryan needs to step down,” she said. “The reason? He failed to deliver the votes on his health care bill … The one that he had seven years to work on … The one that had to be pulled to prevent the embarrassment of not having enough votes to pass.”
Pierre placed the blame solely on Ryan’s shoulders: “I want to be clear. This is not on President Trump. No one expected a business man to completely understand the nuances, the complicated ins and outs of Washington and its legislative process.”
Pirro and Trump are known to be friendly and she has been spotted at Trump’s events. Media watchdogs assumed that Trump knew she was going to attack Ryan when he sent the tweet promoting her show, but everyone involved denies that the president had any knowledge of the episode’s content.
Ryan even said President Trump called him after learning that Pirro ripped the House Speaker during the same episode he had urged his followers to watch.
“[President Trump] actually was very apologetic about it, in that he said, ‘I had no idea that that’s what she was gonna talk about. I thought she was gonna talk about something else,’” Ryan told “CBS This Morning” co-host Norah O’Donnell. “So really, that was completely coincidental.”
Read more from TheWrap’s interview with Jeanine Pirro next week, when we cover her new Fox series “You the Jury.”
Brian Flood contributed to this report.