[ad_1]
By
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan will be staying on Donald Trump’s election interference case in Washington, writing in an opinion Wednesday that her recusal isn’t warranted.
Trump argued she needed to recuse because of remarks she made while sentencing lower-level Jan. 6 defendants, which the former president claimed required her disqualification. Legal precedent pointed in the other direction.
Chutkan said her statements “certainly do not manifest a deep-seated prejudice that would make fair judgment impossible — the standard for recusal based on statements with intrajudicial origins.”
“Intrajudicial origins” means that the statements stemmed from her doing her job of judging, rather than some outside source.
Chutkan previously set Trump’s trial for March, in what’s poised to be the first of four criminal trials he faces as he runs for president again.
In raising the tenuous recusal claim, Trump pointed to Chutkan’s comments that one defendant had a “blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.” She told another that they had a “very good point” that “the people who exhorted you and encouraged you and rallied you to go and take action and to fight have not been charged,” and she added: “I have my opinions, but they are not relevant.”
Special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutors noted that Trump took those comments out of context and applied them to reach an incorrect legal conclusion under the high bar for recusal.
Read Chutkan’s full opinion below:
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
[ad_2]
Source link