Judge Jeanine Pirro Landed In A Major Legal Scandal Over Her Ex Husband's Rumored Affair

When matters of the heart get heated, tempers can flare and some people start to make poor decisions. This certainly seemed to be the case for Judge Jeanine Pirro, who has had a truly sad love life through the years. Jeanine found herself in hot water in 2006 while running for the office of attorney general of New York. As it turns out, because of her attempts to catch her then-husband, Albert Pirro, of having an affair, Jeanine may have inadvertently torpedoed her own political aspirations.

Pirro admitted in September 2006 that she was the subject of a federal investigation for alleged illegal wiretapping, the New York Post reported at the time. Apparently, transcripts of Jeanine's conversations with former New York police commissioner Bernard Kerik were released, and detailed Jeanine's efforts to plant an illegal bug to record her husband's supposed affairs. The transcripts further revealed that Jeanine suggested that she herself could place the clandestine recording equipment on Albert's boat, which happened to be named Christie, in honor of Albert and Jeanine's daughter, adding an extra layer of gross awkwardness to the situation.

At the time the alleged wiretapping conversations went down, Pirro had been serving as the District Attorney of Westchester County and was seeking higher office. However, she expressed in the private conversations that she felt the office of attorney general was beneath her. Pirro blamed her husband, who had already been embroiled in some high-profile criminal scandals, for her not having already been elected governor of the Empire State. In the end, however, it was her own headline-grabbing actions that cost her an election.

While Jeanine Pirro now lives quite the lavish life as a Fox News superstar, with a seriously impressive level of personal wealth for her efforts, she used to be a politically ambitious legal star. But many of her biggest dreams were hampered by her ethically ambiguous ex-husband, Albert Pirro. After tying the knot in 1975, Jeanine and Albert were a power couple in the upper echelons of the East Coast legal and business worlds. That was until 1999, when Albert was indicted on numerous counts of tax fraud and tax evasion.

Albert was found guilty on 34 counts in June 2000, and went on to serve 17 months in prison. Jeanine stuck by him during his incarceration. However, she soon came to suspect that Albert was having an affair. Enraged by her husband's supposed behavior, Pirro took matters into her own hands when it came to catching him in the act. Pirro later pointed out that she never went through with her suggestions. "I said a lot of things, but what matters is what I did and didn't do," Pirro told reporters at the time (via New York Daily News), "and what I did was vent."

Still, the scandal over the wiretapping conversations likely sank her run for attorney general – a position that wound up going to Andrew Cuomo, who later went on to face his own sex scandal controversies years later. She and Albert separated in 2007, and their divorce was eventually concluded in 2013. However, despite her political ambitions being dashed at the time, Pirro was recently tapped by President Donald Trump to serve as the interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., thus bringing her complicated history and legal dramas back into the spotlight.