Last week, White House press secretary Jen Psaki tastelessly scoffed over commentary from Fox News’ Judge Jeanine Pirro on the consequences of soft-on-crime policies, asking laughingly, “What does that even mean?”
As it happens, this might have been the wrong hypothetical question when it comes to the consequences of soft-on-crime policies — one highly doubts Psaki hoped she’d get an answer, but boy did she.
In addition to being scorched on Twitter for the tone-deaf comments, which came just days after a 22-year-old NYPD officer was shot and killed and days before his outraged widow blasted city leadership for dangerous and deadly city policies, Pirro weighed in herself to answer Paski’s question on Monday.
For some context, on Jan. 25, Psaki was talking to “Pod Save America” host and fellow Obama administration alum Jon Favreau about the differences between how top cable news channels confronted the news.
Psaki explained she was looking at a TV which, typical for sets in D.C. government buildings, was split between four networks and was broadcasting their coverage all at once.
“So CNN — ‘Pentagon: As many as 8,500 U.S. troops on heightened alert’ — OK, true,” she noted approvingly. “Same on MSNBC … CNBC is doing their own thing about the market.”
“And then on Fox is Jeanine Pirro talking about ‘soft-on-crime consequences,’” she said, laughing.
“I mean what does that even mean, right?” she continued, still scoffing.
“So there’s an alternate universe on some coverage,” she added authoritatively, as though she wasn’t the press secretary to a sitting U.S. president who happens to get her toughest questions from Fox News’ own White House correspondent.
“What’s scary about it is a lot of people watch that,” she added with unveiled contempt for the dirty, unwashed masses of Fox News viewers who dare to tune in to the one network that routinely criticizes the Biden administration.
Well, given the opportunity to respond to this absurd question on Fox News’ “The Five” on Monday, Pirro explained exactly what “soft-on-crime consequences” means and how Psaki is the one living in an alternate universe, or rather, as she put it, an ivory tower.
“She wants to know why I’m talking about the consequences of soft-on-crime,” the fiery host started in when passed the question by co-host Jesse Watters.
“Well, I’m talking about the consequences of the Democrat/liberal/progressive/leftist soft-on-crime, criminal-loving, victim-hating group that has made a decision that no bail, no jail, and that criminals should be privileged and that social justice and rogue prosecutors should not be a part of the criminal justice system,” Pirro explained.
“Jen, are you so locked up in your ivory tower that you have no idea what Americans really care about and what they’re concerned about?” she asked.
What Americans are concerned about, as Pirro continued, is the “killing of innocents who didn’t deserve it, they didn’t ask for it, they did nothing but get in the way of a murderer,” who is often only out on the streets thanks to progressive bail reform policies when a “murderer and not God decides that they should die.”
This scorching delivery was far from over, however.
Pirro went on to blast Psaki and her “ilk” for refusing to “recognize what you’ve done” as crime skyrockets.
She noted that as homicide spiked 44 percent in major American cities, a likely reference to NYC’s homicide data between 2019 and 2020, President Joe Biden “ignored the looting, the burning, the rioting, and he ignored the burning of a federal courthouse and police precincts” but that only now he’s expressed an interest in going to New York, where he plans to tour NYPD’s headquarters, as the New York Post reported.
“Why didn’t he do that when they were defunding, demoralizing, and denigrating cops,” Pirro asked. “Why now? Could it be because this is an election year, a midterm year?”
“And why not increase funding when cops really needed it?” she continued. “You people don’t stand up for law and order, we do.”
She admonished Psakin to “think about one thing:” that “FOX quadruples all the pals, all of those networks that you identified that were talking about important things that I wasn’t.”
“Here’s the bottom line,” Pirro concluded. “We quadruple them because we talk about things that Americans care about, and maybe you and your friends ought to take a temperature of what Americans care about and talk about it.”
I’m sure she would have dropped a mic if it wouldn’t have involved awkwardly detaching hers from her outfit, since she was, of course, still on the set of “The Five,” but the effect of her words was most certainly as though she had.
Poor Psaki is going to need a lot of margaritas and kickboxing classes to recover from a schooling of this magnitude.