Judge Overseeing Trump Case Has Already Issued the Ruling That Matters - And It's Not for Trump
Special counsel Jack Smith couldn’t have asked for a better courtroom.
The Department of Justice prosecutor who brought charges against former President Donald Trump related to his handling of classified documents and his role in the 2021 Capitol incursion doesn’t know yet who’s going to be on the jury in his sham of a Jan. 6 case.
But he knows good and well that the judge who’s currently on the case is already in the bag.
U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, appointed to the bench in 2013 by then-President Barack Obama, has an established reputation for being the toughest in D.C. when it comes to sentencing Jan. 6 defendants.
She’s known to have worked at the same law firm as President Joe Biden’s notorious son Hunter Biden — at the same time Hunter Biden worked there.
But more to the point, she has already clearly made up her mind that Trump is the man responsible for the events of that day — and she put that opinion in writing almost two years ago.
It came in the court battle between Trump and the puppet theater known as the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Trump had exercised a claim of executive privilege over documents related to his activities that day.
Chutkan’s ruling was not in Trump’s favor.
While that Nov. 9, 2021, ruling might have been justified as a matter of law (it was upheld by an appeals court and allowed to stand by the Supreme Court, according to The Washington Post), it was what accompanied the decision that mattered:
A background summary that effectively convicted Trump of orchestrating the Capitol incursion, from his statements prior to the election that it could be “rigged,” to his court challenges after the election, to the speech he made on the Ellipse on Jan. 6 itself.
Her ruling quoted Trump saying in that speech, “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” and “you’ll never take back our country with weakness.”
“Shortly thereafter, the crowds surged from the rally,” Chutkan wrote, “marched along Constitution Avenue, and commenced their siege of the Capitol.”
It was a blending of facts worthy of a novelist — not a jurist — implicitly blaming the then-president’s words for the violence that followed.
And it had the propagandist’s touch, leaving out a crucial sentence earlier in the Trump speech that made it clear he wasn’t calling for violence: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” (Emphasis added.)
Independent journalist Julie Kelly published a portion of the statement to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, with an observation that any fair-minded person should be able to agree with:
“This statement by Judge Chutkan in her landmark ruling denying Trump exec privilege protections from House Democrats J6 committee alone should be disqualifying,” she wrote.
This statement by Judge Chutkan in her landmark ruling denying Trump exec privilege protections from House Democrats J6 committee alone should be disqualifying.
There is no way she can objectively oversee Jack Smith’s J6 case against Trump. pic.twitter.com/VDIbIQnyJ5
— Julie Kelly (@julie_kelly2) August 6, 2023
The tone of the ruling was clear. Even as Chutkan acknowledged that the “question of how that day’s events came about and who was responsible for them is not before the court” and the background was “not material to the outcome,” she felt the need to include it in her opinion in order to offer “context for the legal dispute here.”
Actually, what she offered was context for the legal case currently being brought by Jack Smith — charging Trump with 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.
The “official proceeding” Trump allegedly conspired to obstruct was the certification of the 2020 election — which resulted in the disaster of the Joe Biden presidency being visited on the nation.
Clearly, Chutkan has made up her mind that Trump is guilty of that — and therefore the other charges that flow from that. And she went out of her way to put that conviction in writing for the whole world to see. That’s the decision that matters.
If Trump’s attorneys are unable to get a new judge to oversee the case, and a new venue for it to be heard, the former president is going to be facing an openly hostile judge in a case where the jury is pulled from possibly the most partisan population in the country.
In 2020, 92.1 percent of voters in the District of Columbia went for Biden compared with just 5.4 percent for Trump. Saddam Hussein used to beat that average back in the day — he supposedly won 11 million to 0 in a 2002 “contest.” But considering this is the United States of America, not Baathist Iraq, that’s pretty monolithic for a city that’s supposed to be the capital of an entire country.
The partisanship of a jury in an environment like that is, regrettably, a foregone conclusion. The decision of the jury is, even more regrettably, practically foregone as well.
But a judge is supposed to be the honest figure in the courtroom. The one who’s there to make sure the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed, and that partisanship — even in a blatantly partisan prosecution like the one Jack Smith is running — is kept within the confines of the law.
That’s not who Judge Tanya Chutkan is. It’s not even who she pretends to be.
She’s made her decision already. She publicized her decision. And everyone in the Trump case knows it.
And, as Kelly wrote, it should well be “disqualifying” for the jurist to hear the case.
Smith’s prosecution might be a sham, but if Chutkan is the judge, he can’t ask for a better courtroom for it to play out.
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