Plucked straight from Fox News, the face of President Donald Trump’s new law-and-order regime in the nation’s capital has run headlong into a series of high-profile court losses, making it clear that the federal takeover of law enforcement in Washington, D.C., is little more than theater with essentially no legal foundation. Jeanine Pirro was parachuted into one of the nation’s most consequential prosecutorial roles because of her loyalty, media savvy and ratings, but as D.C.’s U.S. attorney, she is overcommitting and underdelivering......

“Prosecutor Jeanine Pirro’s office has now whiffed on three cases alleging defendants assaulted federal agents during Trump’s police takeover,” HuffPost reported on Aug. 29. The New York Times observed that “one of her biggest challenges is matching her confident public messaging with results, given the mass departures of career prosecutors and support staff.” ....

But the D.C. grand jury declined to indict — not once, not twice, but at least four times this month. In the world of federal prosecution, refusing to indict is almost unheard of. Now Dunn is facing only a misdemeanor charge, and the only charge prosecutors could refile without grand jury approval. The sandwich case was meant to be a show of strength; instead, it is serving as a symbol of the administration’s superficial posturing. The Washington Post described a series of unprecedented failures for Pirro’s office:

Before prosecutors failed to indict Dunn, a grand jury on three separate occasions this month refused to indict a D.C. woman who was accused of assaulting an FBI agent, another extraordinary rejection of the prosecution’s case. Days later, a federal magistrate judge said an arrest in Northeast Washington was preceded by the “most illegal search I’ve seen in my life” and described another arrest as lacking “basic human dignity.”

Pirro’s tough-girl shtick may elicit praise from the boss and favorable coverage from her former Fox News peers, but it doesn’t translate to credibility in court. “The burden is on us to prove these cases, and we welcome that burden — beyond a reasonable doubt,” Pirro said at a news conference on Aug. 26. “Sometimes a jury will buy it and sometimes they won’t. So be it. That’s the way the process works.”