The federal judge in Washington, D.C., who has been assigned to oversee the latest charges filed by special counsel Jack Smith against former President Donald Trump on Tuesday, is probably the worst possible choice for him.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama appointee, has been called “the toughest punisher” of Jan. 6 rioters, but she has a nefarious past in addition to that distinction. According to the UK’s Daily Mail, she also once worked for a law firm that was associated with Hunter Biden.
The outlet noted that last year, a fawning profile of Chutkan by The Associated Press noted: “Chutkan has handed out tougher sentences than the [Justice Department] was seeking in seven cases, matched its requests in four others and sent all 11 riot defendants who have come before her behind bars.”
The story, which ran under the headline, “In Jan. 6 cases, 1 judge stands out as the toughest punisher,” added: “In the four cases in which prosecutors did not seek jail time, Chutkan gave terms ranging from 14 days to 45 days.”
Though prosecutors were not seeking it, Chutkan also jailed “an Ohio couple who climbed through a broken window of the U.S. Capitol.”
Others prosecuted for actions taken during the riot include a “Texas mortgage broker [who] posed for a selfie in front of rioters breaching the building [and an] Indiana hair salon owner celebrated on Facebook a day after she joined the pro-Donald Trump mob,” the AP noted further.
The Daily Mail noted further:
Chutkan had worked at the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner from 2002 until she was confirmed a federal judge in 2014.
Boies Schiller has strong connections to the Democratic Party and then-second son Hunter Biden — whose dad President Biden is likely to face Trump in the 2024 election — was of counsel at the firm from 2009 to 2014.
It is not known if the two ever had any interaction while working there.
Trump was charged late Tuesday with four counts — willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and false statements. According to the Daily Mail, those charges bring a maximum of 55 years in prison, which would effectively be a life sentence for the 76-year-old former president.
In addition, “Trump is already facing 40 federal charges in Florida relating to his handling of sensitive government documents after leaving office, and is due to stand trial in New York next year accused of falsifying business documents after making a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels,” the outlet reported.
The most recent indictment comes amidst a series of investigations into the events of January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters clashed with police and stormed the U.S. Capitol. It also focuses on the former president’s efforts to overturn the election’s outcome during that time.
Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, defended his actions following the 2020 election during an interview Tuesday evening, saying that he did “what you would want a president to do.”
Lara Trump was appearing on “Jesse Watters Primetime” with fellow contributor Clay Travis just hours after the former president was charged.
She said that while working as a senior adviser to her father-in-law’s 2020 campaign, she told Watters that “multiple times a day” she and others “would continue to receive reports from across the country of people, sometimes in the form of affidavits, detailing very questionable, nefarious things they saw at different polling locations.”
“So we had a lot of questions about what happened in the 2020 election. Quite frankly, I don’t think we’ve ever had an election in the United States history that we’ve come out of having more questions than we did post-2020,” she continued.
“Obviously, one of those people as well was a sitting president of the United States, my father-in-law Donald Trump, who did exactly what you would want a president to do,” she said. “He upheld and defended the Constitution of the United States by trying to ensure that we indeed had a free and fair election. That was his whole goal. That’s what he wanted to ensure was going on.”
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