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.
Julie Kelly
@julie_kelly2
This statement by Judge Chutkan in her landmark ruling denying Trump exec privilege protections from House Democrats J6 committee alone should be disqualifying.
No comments:
Post a Comment