Judge Tanya S. Chutkan to preside over former President Donald Trump Jan. 6 case

Our former president, Donald Trump, may soon be on his way to an open jail cell because the judge assigned to his four new charges stemming from the January 6 incident does not play games. 

The judge overseeing Trump’s cases involving his alleged attempts to rig the 2020 presidential election is Federal Judge Tanya S. Chutkan. Trump and Judge Chutkan have previously encountered each other. Judge Chutkan rejected a request from Trump’s legal team in 2021 to halt the release of records to the January 6 committee. 

Presidents are not kings, and the plaintiff is not the president, Judge Chutkan stated in her ruling.

She was born in Jamaica and earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from George Washington University before attending law school at the University of Pennsylvania. Judge Chutkan spent three years in private practice before joining the D.C. Public Defender Service, where she worked as a trial attorney and supervisor for over a decade. 

Judge Chutkan later worked for the law firm Boies, Schiller, & Flexner LLP for 12 years, specializing in litigation and white-collar crime defense. She was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in 2014 by former president Barack Obama.

She does not play games in her courtroom, as she has demonstrated in a number of cases involving January 6 criminals, always citing the necessity of consequences for their involvement in the insurrection. In one of those hearings, Judge Chutkan stated that “there must be consequences for participating in an attempted violent overthrow of the government, beyond sitting at home.”

Trump faces four federal charges in the new indictment:

• Conspiracy to defraud the United States.
• Conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.
• Obstruction of an attempt to obstruct an official proceeding.
• Conspiracy against rights.

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