“Presidents are not kings. And the plaintiff is not president. The tone is set: Tanya Chutkan, the judge randomly assigned on Tuesday to preside over the trial which earned Donald Trump his third and most important criminal charge, is a well-known figure of the former Republican president. And for good reason: it has already been opposed to him. In 2021, the judge was one of the most determined to allow the committee investigating the Capitol storming access to 700 documents that Donald Trump wanted to keep secret.
It will therefore be her who will preside over the case which targets Donald Trump, prosecuted for conspiracy against the State in connection with his attempts to reverse the result of the 2020 election. The face-to-face is likely to prove intense . Born in Jamaica and raised in Kingston, a graduate of the University of Washington and Pennsylvania, Tanya Chutkan has a strong background in criminal trials. According to her biography available on the Federal Court website, she has “litigated numerous appellate cases and tried over thirty cases, including many serious criminal cases.”
After working for more than ten years for the famous New York law firm Boies, Schiller
Unknown to the general public, she then distinguished herself by her severity and intransigence, nine times pronouncing sentences higher than those required by the prosecutor, while 80% of the defendants on average received lighter sentences. According to the Washington Post, she sentenced the 31 people who appeared before her to prison terms.
The supporters of the former president will therefore not fail, as usual, to cry conspiracy. Ultra-conservative Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz has once called her a “far-left judge,” claiming to be able to “anticipate a judge who is going to be relentlessly hostile to Donald Trump, who is going to bend over backwards to serve the administration. Biden, and who’s going to make decision after decision after decision against Trump.”
Public defender for ten years – the equivalent of a court-appointed lawyer intended for indigent defendants – and committed to the Democrats of which she participated in financing certain campaigns, Tanya Chutkan indeed has a liberal profile, an inverted mirror of that of conservative judge Aileen M. Cannon, appointed in Florida to oversee the classified documents case.
Tanya Chutkan points this out in a statement available on the US Federal Justice website. “To a lot of people, I feel like I tick a lot of boxes: immigrant, female, black, Asian. Your qualifications are always going to be criticized and you have to develop a tough skin,” she says.
Defenders of Donald Trump, the Republican favorite for the 2024 presidential election, are seeking to move the trial to a politically more favorable state, such as Virginia. A rarity in the United States, where it is most often considered that the crime must be judged at the place where it was committed.
Aware of the magnitude of her task, Tanya Chutkan would have declared on Wednesday, according to the BBC, that she had not slept since the file of Donald Trump had been entrusted to her. Faced with a fellow lawyer urging her to be careful, the judge reportedly replied “I’ll try”, before explaining that she wanted to keep her agenda open “or in case I have to leave town, which looks more and more like a good idea “.
Donald Trump must be presented to another judge this Thursday, before the investigation returns to Tanya Chutkan. He denounced, before appearing, “the unprecedented instrumentalization of justice”.
