She will oversee one of the most memorable trials in US history. Federal judge for the District of Columbia, where Washington is located, Tanya Chutkan, 61, has been appointed to preside over the trial of Donald Trump. The latter is charged with trying to reverse the results of the 2020 presidential election, and pleaded not guilty this Thursday, August 3. The judge will be responsible in particular for setting the date of the trial, guaranteeing the legality of the evidence, will be able to ask questions to the witnesses and, if the jury finds Donald Trump guilty, it is she who will determine the sentence pronounced against him.
Tanya Chutkan is a regular at criminal trials. Raised in Kingston, Jamaica, before moving to the United States, she was a public defender in Washington for many years, then joined the New York law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner. Above all, she has already been confronted with Donald Trump in cases related to the attack by his supporters on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. While the former president wanted to ban a parliamentary commission of inquiry from consulting documents on his actions on the day of the assault, Tanya Chutkan denied her requestexplaining that “presidents are not kings and the plaintiff is not president”.
A few months later, she presided over the trial of several rioters who participated in the attack and pronounced particularly heavy sentences against them, even more severe than those required by the prosecution. A man who assaulted police officers was sentenced to five years in prison, as it recalls washington post. Tanya Chutkan then declared that the attack was the “attempt of a violent mob to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from one government to the next” and had “defiled and degraded” the Capitol. “There must be consequences,” she hammered.
Accusation of bias
The decisions and verdicts rendered by Tanya Chutkan indicate a Democratic sensibility in a country where federal judges are appointed by the President of the United States. She opposed the Trump administration on several occasions, when he wanted to prevent undocumented and pregnant teenagers from having access to abortion or deprive an American detained in Iraq of a lawyer of a lawyer. Islamic State. She also donated $1,500 to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2012, revealed the site Newsweek.
The profile of Tanya Chutkan will not fail to be used by the Trump camp, which denounces a political trial and a biased judge. “Democrats don’t want to campaign against me or they wouldn’t resort to this unprecedented instrumentalization of justice,” the former president wrote. on his social network, Truth. The appointment of the federal judge was however approved unanimously by the Senate in 2014, including by Ted Cruz, Republican senator from Texas, who today accuses Tanya Chutkan of being “far left” and under the orders of Joe Biden’s government.
Not without irony, THE New York Times compares Judge Tanya Chutkan to her Florida counterpart, Aileen Cannon. Appointed by Donald Trump in 2020, the latter is close to the Republican Party, has conservative positions… and it was she who was chosen to preside over the trial of the former president in the case of unreturned confidential documents, without arousing the same criticism.