This is giving kangaroo courts a bad name.
The trial of former President Donald Trump in the District of Columbia isn’t even close to starting yet, but Americans who support the 45th president can already be sure of one thing: The judge has already reached her own verdict.
It’s been clear from the get-go that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is biased in the case being brought by Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith that accuses Trump of four counts related to the Capitol incursion of Jan. 6, 2021: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.
But a review of Chutkan’s handling of Capitol incursion defendants by the website RealClearInvestigations yielded an explosive result: Chutkan is not only biased, she’s tacitly pronounced Trump guilty, in open court, of what are essentially the charges against him.
And she’s done it more than once.
In one case, Chutkan sentenced Christine Priola, a Cleveland woman, to 15 months in prison after Priola pleaded guilty to obstructing an official proceeding and aiding and abetting, according to WJW in Cleveland.
But judging by Chutkan’s words from the bench at the Oct. 28 hearing, the real culprit was Donald Trump, and he deserved to be in prison, too.
The participants in the incursion “were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man — not to the Constitution, of which most of the people who come before me seem woefully ignorant, not to the ideals of this country, and not to the principles of democracy,” Chutkan said, according to RealClearInvestigations.
“It’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.”
“Free to this day”? Sounds an awful lot like Chutkan was wishing she was putting Donald Trump behind bars, not a former occupational therapist from Ohio.
In another case, she sentenced Texas resident Matthew Mazzocco to 45 days behind bars when, according to The Washington Post. Prosecutors had only asked for probation.
And, in Chutkan’s words, she made it clear that Trump was the man who should have been standing before her instead.
Mazzocco, Chutkan said, “went there to support one man who he viewed had the election taken from him. In total disregard of a lawfully conducted election, he went to the Capitol in support of one man, not in support of our country or in support of democracy.”
And that “one man” is going to be relying on Chutkan to dispense impartial justice in her courtroom?
With that kind of record, it’s more than understandable that Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican firebrand, has introduced a measure to censure Chutkan for her comments — not only regarding Trump himself but also comparing the Capitol incursion, unfavorably, to the Black Lives Matter rioters who burned American cities during the summer of 2020.
“But to compare the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights, to those of a violent mob seeking to overthrow the lawfully elected government is a false equivalency and ignores a very real danger that the Jan. 6 riots posed to the foundation of our democracy,” she said at Mazzocco’s sentencing hearing, The Washington Post reported.
Gaetz clearly knows, just like any honest observer knows, that Chutkan has reached her own decision on the Trump case — and the decision is clearly going to color every decision she makes as it proceeds.
A kangaroo court is a parody of justice, where predetermined verdicts get the color of due process, the fiction that a legal proceeding has ensured the rights of the accused, as well as the rights and duties of the society whose rules he is supposed to have violated.
If Judge Tanya Chutkan is allowed to continue to preside over the case — a woman who has already pronounced the defendant guilty, on more than one occasion, and in open court — Trump’s trial in D.C. won’t have even that.