Pirro Taps Dance Photographer-Lawyer in Lawmaker Video Case (1)

Washington’s US Attorney Jeanine Pirro tapped a dance photographer who worked for her decades ago as one of the prosecutors who tried—and failed—to convince a grand jury to indict six Democratic lawmakers Tuesday, said two people familiar with the situation.

Steven Vandervelden maintained an active photography studio when presenting federal charges to the grand jury against the six members of Congress for creating a video reminding military service members of their rights to refuse unlawful orders.

He’s one of two Pirro hires with minimal federal prosecution experience who got rejected by the grand jury in a case that’s been widely criticized as a politically-motivated attack on free speech.

Assigning such a sensitive probe to lawyers she’d brought in from outside the office—rather than career line prosecutors—is unprecedented, former federal prosecutors in DC said.

Vandervelden—who had a long career as a local prosecutor in Westchester County, N.Y. where Pirro was district attorney —declined to comment on the investigation into the lawmakers, calling it a potentially open case. In a brief phone interview Wednesday, he confirmed he is the same Vandervelden who posted an update to his studio’s Instagram account several hours earlier.

Vandervelden’s presence in the federal courtroom Tuesday, along with another Pirro-appointed special counsel Carlton Davis, is one of multiple elements that former prosecutors considered highly unusual about the Trump Justice Department’s pursuit of criminal charges against the sitting lawmakers.

Vandervelden had no prior DOJ background before joining the office last year, while Davis had a brief stint as an assistant US attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia in 2018.

While being rebuffed by the grand jury is rare enough on its own, prosecutors’ willingness to seek charges before a grand jury in this matter shocked former attorneys in Pirro’s office, who spoke anonymously out of fear of retribution.

In a statement, Pirro said, “Steven Vandervelden is one of the best prosecutors and best investigators that I have worked with in well over three decades in the criminal justice system. Any attempt to undercut his expertise is nothing more than an effort to detract from his excellent prosecutorial record to which few can compare. And by the way, everybody has a hobby.”

Pirro added that “Davis has been an investigator at the highest levels of our government.”

Walled Off

Davis, a former staffer for House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), and Vandervelden were both brought into Pirro’s inner circle last year as she tried advancing a series of Trump administration initiatives. The DC office’s public corruption team has a long history of investigating members of Congress, but was walled off from the investigation into the six Democrats, which include Sens. Mark Kelly (Ariz.) and Elissa Slotkin (Mich.), said the two people with knowledge of the matter.

Charges against sitting lawmakers also would typically require a series of approvals and consultations with DOJ’s public integrity section. But that office has been gutted over the past year and it’s not clear if the few lawyers remaining had any window into this indictment effort.

Vandervelden worked for Pirro in the Westchester County District Attorney’s office in the 1990s. His pursuit of this case along with Davis also followed a mass exodus of criminal prosecutors from Pirro’s staff, including supervisors in the public corruption unit.

Vandervelden’s photography website features sections labeled, “Dance Puppetry,” “Dance the Plank Series,” and “Circus, Yoga, and Fitness.”

“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 about his shift from law to photography. “Now it’s a joy to peer into the darkness and look for the light and find beauty as opposed to the grime.”