Former President Donald Trump said Monday the federal judge appointed to preside over his latest criminal case should recuse herself.
In a social media post, Mr. Trump said special counsel Jack Smith sought “the Judge of his ‘dreams’ (WHO MUST BE RECUSED!), in an attempt to take away my FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS.”
U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2014, will oversee the case in Washington in which Mr. Trump is charged with conspiring to defraud the U.S. and its citizens by trying to overturn the 2020 election results in key states.
Judge Chutkan is known for stiff sentences against rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol as part of a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021, and she ruled against Mr. Trump when he tried to invoke executive privilege to shield White House records from the House select committee investigating the riot.
“Presidents are not kings, and plaintiff is not president,” she wrote at the time.
Mr. Trump appeared before a magistrate judge at his arraignment, so he hasn’t yet been face-to-face with Judge Chutkan.
The former president has a tendency to attack judges as being biased against him.
Mr. Trump has said Judge Juan Manuel Merchan — the New York jurist overseeing his state case that alleges Mr. Trump falsified business records — should recuse himself because of family ties to Democrats and his work in overseeing a separate case against the Trump Organization that ended in a tax fraud conviction.
During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump an attacked Indiana-born federal judge who presided over a case against Trump University. Mr. Trump said Judge Gonzalo Curiel couldn’t be impartial because he was “Mexican.”
The comments raised eyebrows at the time, with then-House Speaker Paul Ryan calling it “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
Mr. Ryan endorsed Mr. Trump in the 2016 election.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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