Tanya Chutkan is tough

Judge Tanya Chutkan is one of the toughest Jan. 6 sentencers. A week ago, she was randomly assigned to preside over the pending trial of Donald Trump who was indicted last week on charges of attempting to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election.

JUDGE TANYA CHUTKAN: Trump’s trial judge in D.C. is a former public defender and was one of the first U.S. judges to reject his executive privilege claims to withhold Jan. 6 White House records.

Chutkan is a former public defender appointed in 2014 by Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, after she served as a volunteer with Lawyers for Obama during his 2012 campaign.

Chutkan, 61, who over a year and a half ago became one of the first federal judges in D.C. to reject the former president’s efforts to use executive privilege to withhold White House communications from Jan. 6 investigators, in that instance from the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot.

A trained dancer raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Chutkan graduated from George Washington University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School before working in private practice with two Washington firms and serving 11 years with the D.C. Public Defender Service. She then joined the Boies Schiller Flexner law firm, where as partner she was a white-collar defense specialist focusing on complex antitrust class-action cases.

See Chutkan on page 4