A federal judge who has emerged as one of the toughest authorities against rioters who participated in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol will soon meet her most high-profile defendant: Donald Trump.
Tanya Chutkan, a 2014 appointee of former president Barack Obama, was randomly assigned to oversee the case on Tuesday after a federal grand jury indicted the former president on four counts related to his attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential election, including conspiracy and obstruction of official proceedings.
Chutkan was born in Jamaica, where she trained as a classical dancer, and moved to the US where she attended George Washington University before earning her JD at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, according to the DC district court website. She worked as a public defender in DC for a decade before joining the private law firm where she specialized in “litigation and white-collar criminal defense”.
Chutkan has ruled on a Trump case before. She once blocked an attempt by Trump to refuse the House January 6 select committee’s request for White House files in the months after the election. That decision released mounds of evidence that shaped the committee’s investigation, according to Politico.
In her November 2021 ruling, Chutkan described the attack as an “unprecedented attempt to prevent the lawful transfer of power from one administration to the next [that] caused property damage, injuries, and death”.
But that case involved only legal questions about court proceedings and did not require her to rule on Trump’s role in the riot.
Chutkan is also the only judge who has delivered stricter sentences against January 6 defendants than requested by federal prosecutors. In December 2021, she imposed the longest sentence at the time for a January 6 rioter – 63 months in jail for Robert Palmer, a Florida man who sprayed Capitol police with a fire extinguisher.
“It has to be made clear that trying to violently overthrow the government, trying to stop the peaceful transition of power and assaulting law enforcement officers in that effort is going to be met with absolutely certain punishment,” she said at his sentencing, justifying lengthy jail time.
Eleanor Norton, the US congresswoman who has represented DC since 1991, recommended Chutkan, then a partner at a private law firm, to the post in 2013, according to a press release at the time. Chutkan became the third Black woman ever to serve on the sole DC district court, joining Ketanji B Jackson, now a supreme court justice, on the bench in 2014.
A different federal judge, Moxila A Upadhyaya, presided over Trump’s arraignment at a federal courthouse in DC on Thursday afternoon.
