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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, as Chutkan explained in her opinion.
In fact, it would have been surprising had she recused, given the clear precedent for her staying put, including, as I’ve explained, and as Chutkan cited in her opinion, cases dealing with Watergate and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn. In light of those precedents and others, appellate courts should have little difficulty rejecting any potential Trump appeal on the matter.
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" means the statements stemmed from doing her job as a judge, rather than from some outside source. That means Trump faced an even higher recusal bar.
"The statements at issue here were based on intrajudicial sources," Chutkan wrote. "They arose not, as the defense speculates, from watching the news," she added, but from the sentencing proceedings in those cases.
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.
Chutkan rejected Trump’s claim that her statements meant she wanted him prosecuted and imprisoned. "That inferential leap is not reasonable in light of the relevant facts, record, and law," she wrote, noting that both defendants sought lower sentences "on the grounds that their culpability for the January 6 attack was lesser than that of others whom they considered to be the attack’s instigators, and so it would be unfair for them to receive a full sentence while those other people were not prosecuted."
The judge was therefore "legally bound to not only privately consider those arguments, but also to publicly assess them," she wrote.
Read Chutkan's full opinion below:
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.