Fox News host-turned U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro's attempt to criminally charge six members of Congress fell flat this week. That may be due to the personnel she put in charge of making the case to the grand jury.
Bloomberg Law reported Wednesday that one of the Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors Pirro tasked with convincing a grand jury to indict members of Congress — who recorded a video message encouraging active-duty military service members to honor their oath to disobey illegal orders — is a dance photographer with no prior DOJ experience.
According to Bloomberg, Steve Vandervelden currently maintains a photography studio, and his Instagram profile shows posts as recent as Wednesday morning. He previously worked for Pirro several decades ago when she was the district attorney in Westchester County, New York. The other prosecutor on the case, Carlton Davis, last worked for the DOJ in 2018 as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia.
"I spent a good portion of my life peering into the darkness looking for the bad guy,” Vandervelven told the Rockland/Westchester Journal News in 2023, when explaining why he gave up his law career for photography. “Now it’s a joy to peer into the darkness and look for the light and find beauty as opposed to the grime.”
The outlet reported that it is "unprecedented" for the DOJ to assign a high-level investigation to an outside attorney. Typically, the Justice Department relies on longtime career prosecutors with multiple years of experience working on complex cases to ensure a suspect is indicted by a grand jury.
According to Bloomberg's unnamed sources within the DOJ, career prosecutors were alarmed that Pirro prevented the Justice Department's Public Integrity (PIN) section — which typically handles investigations of sitting elected officials – from the case involving the six Democratic lawmakers. However, PIN was effectively hollowed out last year with a wave of firings and resignations, and Bloomberg reported that PIN's remaining staff may have not had any input on the case.
The six Democrats in the video are all veterans of either the U.S. military or intelligence agencies. Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) joined Reps. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), Maggie Goodlander (D-N.H.), Chris DeLuzio (D-Pa.) and Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.) to remind troops of the Uniform Code of Military Justice's instructions to obey all orders from superior officers, except for orders that are illegal.
