Judge in Trump’s federal election-fraud case won’t step aside

The judge overseeing the federal government’s criminal prosecution of former President Donald Trump over his actions to subvert the 2020 presidential election has turned down Trump’s attempt to get her off the case.

In a 20-page ruling issued Wednesday evening, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected Trump’s arguments that her comments in other Jan. 6-related cases raised doubts about her fairness. In 2021 and 2022, while sentencing rioters convicted of crimes connected to the breach of the Capitol, Chutkan alluded to the fact that Trump had not yet been charged with any crimes and had motivated his followers to go to the Capitol that day.

The setback for Trump came just hours before his Republican primary opponents were set to debate on a stage without him. The ruling offered a vivid reminder of his legal vulnerability even as he continues to dominate the GOP contest.

In denying Trump’s request that she step aside, Chutkan wrote that Trump’s “hypersensitive” defense had exaggerated her previous statements and had wrongly claimed that they were informed by news reports or other sources. She maintained that her comments had responded to specific legal arguments of individual defendants who had tried to mitigate their culpability by pointing at Trump.

“A reasonable person — aware of the statutory requirement that the court address the defendant’s arguments and state its reasons for its sentence — would understand that in making the statements contested here, the court was not issuing vague declarations about third parties’ potential guilt in a hypothetical future case,” Chutkan wrote. “Instead, it was fulfilling its duty to expressly evaluate the defendants’ arguments that their sentences should be reduced because other individuals whom they believed were associated with the events of January 6 had not been prosecuted.”

Chutkan’s decision clears away, for now, the most pressing issue facing Trump’s prosecution related to his bid to subvert the 2020 election. The judge is also weighing a demand by prosecutors for a gag order to prevent Trump from attacking witnesses, prosecutors and the judge herself. Trump is also expected to file a barrage of motions to delay his trial (which is currently set for March), to transfer it to another district and to have the case thrown out altogether by claiming he’s immune from prosecution.

In her ruling, Chutkan also noted that legal precedents generally discourage judges from making comments based on news reports or their own personal investigation, but in-court remarks based on evidence before the court are generally fair game, even if the evidence comes from a prior, related case.

Trump’s attorneys sought to overcome that hurdle by arguing that Chutkan must have been considering information she obtained outside court, but she insisted that wasn’t the case.

“The statements at issue here were based on intrajudicial sources,” Chukan wrote. “They arose not, as the defense speculates, from watching the news, but from the sentencing proceedings…. The statements directly reflected facts proffered and arguments made by those defendants.”

Chutkan, a Washington-based appointee of President Barack Obama, also noted that Trump’s attorneys at times sought to characterize her comments about unnamed instigators of the Jan. 6 attack as being specifically about Trump.

“The court expressly declined to state who, if anyone, it thought should still face charges,” she wrote. “It is the defense, not the court, who has assumed that the defendant belongs in that undefined group.”

The judge also noted that she was, in her view, legally required to confront the arguments that Jan. 6 defendants made about Trump. In considering the sentences of the two prior defendants cited by Trump’s lawyers — Robert Palmer and Christine Priola — Chutkan pointed out that they sought reductions in their sentences by arguing that they bore less culpability than Trump and his enablers.

At Palmer’s sentencing in December 2021, Chutkan stated: “Mr. Palmer — you have made a very good point, one that has been made before — that the people who exhorted you and encouraged you and rallied you to go and take action and to fight have not been charged. … The issue of who has or has not been charged is not before me. I don’t have any influence on that. I have my opinions, but they are not relevant.”

And at Priola’s sentencing last October, Chutkan did seem to unambiguously refer to Trump.

“The people who mobbed that Capitol were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man — not to the Constitution, of which most of the people who come before me seem woefully ignorant; not to the ideals of this country; and not to the principles of democracy,” Chutkan declared then. “It’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.”

Chutkan acknowledged the accuracy of those remarks, but said they were appropriate and necessary given the arguments the defendants were making.

“The court did state that the former president was free at the time of Priola’s sentence — an undisputed fact upon which Priola had relied for her mitigation argument — but it went no further,” she wrote in her ruling Wednesday. “To extrapolate an announcement of defendant’s guilt from the court’s silence is to adopt ‘hypersensitive, cynical, and suspicious’ perspective rather than a reasonable one.”

An attorney for Trump, Todd Blanche, declined to comment Wednesday on whether the former president plans to ask the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to step in and wrest the case away from Chutkan. The case is one of two criminal prosecutions brought against Trump by special counsel Jack Smith.

But Chutkan noted that the appeals court has declined to order a judge’s recusal in far more pointed circumstances than the ones alleged by Trump and his lawyers.