A federal judge said Wednesday she would not disqualify herself from presiding over Donald Trump’s federal election interference case in Washington, D.C., writing in a court filing that granting the former president’s request for recusal was “not warranted.”
The Trump team’s long-shot bid to have U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan remove herself from the case was based on a number of supposedly “disqualifying” remarks she’d made while sentencing Jan. 6 defendants. In a 20-page ruling, Chutkan called this line of argument an “inferential leap” and said her comments “certainly do not manifest a deep-seated prejudice that would make fair judgment impossible.”
She added that it “bears noting that the court has never taken the position the defense ascribes to it: that former ‘President Trump should be prosecuted and imprisoned.’ And the defense does not cite any instance of the court ever uttering those words or anything similar.”
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In their Sept. 11 request, Trump’s lawyers had pointed to a number of hearings they said served as examples of Chutkan’s potential prejudice. In one Oct. 2022 hearing, Chutkan described the Capitol riots as “nothing less than an attempt to violently overthrow the government” by a group who were there out of “a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.”
“The public meaning of this statement is inescapable—President Trump is free, but should not be,” the attorneys wrote.
Chutkan, an Obama appointee, has proven to be by far the harshest sentencer in Jan. 6 cases, having incarcerated all 31 rioters who went before her. At one sentencing, she remarked, “The country is watching to see what the consequences are for something that has not ever happened in the country before.”
On Wednesday, Chutkan wrote that her stern words “arose not, as the defense speculates, from watching the news, but from the sentencing proceedings” in those cases and “directly reflected facts proffered and arguments made by those defendants.”
She also clashed directly with the former president prior to being assigned to his criminal case. In Nov. 2021, the judge denied his bid to block the House committee investigating the Capitol attacks from accessing records. Overruling Trump’s claim of executive privilege, she wrote, “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.”
Earlier this month, special counsel Jack Smith’s office argued against Trump’s recusal request, saying that he had taken Chutkan’s words “out of context in order to manufacture allegations of bias.”
“There is no valid basis, under the relevant law and facts, for the Honorable Tanya S. Chutkan, United States District Judge for the District of Columbia, to disqualify herself in this proceeding,” Smith’s prosecutors wrote.
“Because the defendant’s motion fails to establish any bias by the Court, much less the deep-seated antagonism required for recusal, the Court has a duty to continue to oversee this proceeding.”
Chutkan previously set the trial to begin March 4, 2024. Trump has denied all wrongdoing in the matter, and pleaded not guilty to all four felony counts in a hearing last month.
He is accused of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.
Read it at The Associated Press
