In light of Donald Trump’s ridiculous political offensive against U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, it was only a matter of time before the former president’s lawyers asked the jurist to recuse herself from Trump’s latest criminal case. As NBC News reported, that request came late yesterday.
Attorneys for former President Donald Trump moved Monday to “recuse and disqualify” the judge presiding over the federal case charging him with trying to illegally overturn the 2020 presidential election. In a court filing, attorneys for Trump cited U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s references to him in other criminal cases tied to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
To briefly review how we arrived at this point, the first sign of trouble came in early August, when the former president used his social media platform to argue, “THERE IS NO WAY I CAN GET A FAIR TRIAL WITH THE JUDGE ‘ASSIGNED.’” He never got around to saying why, exactly, he had a problem with Chutkan, but by all appearances, he was trying to score political points, not make an argument based on merit.
About a week later, Trump also promoted a related message from someone who insisted that Chutkan “openly admitted she’s running election interference against Trump.” In reality, the judge said no such thing.
It was the next day when the Republican’s offensive intensified, pointing to Chutkan’s comments during the sentencing of a Jan. 6 rioter. The judge’s comments were hardly outlandish — they were, in fact, accurate and fair — but the Republican nevertheless told the public that Chutkan is “VERY BIASED & UNFAIR!”
It’s this last point that’s of particular interest now. In an earlier case, Chutkan referred broadly to “the people” responsible for Jan. 6 violence, and the former president’s lawyers are interpreting the reference as evidence of the judge targeting their client. As my MSNBC colleague Lisa Rubin explained overnight, that Trump’s lawyers are certain that the reference was about him “is suggestive of his vanity, if not his culpability, and says more about Trump than it does about Chutkan.”
What’s more, everything the judge said in the other case was true. With this in mind, Andrew Weissmann, a longtime Justice Department veteran and an MSNBC legal analyst, argued that the request for Chutkan’s recusal was “made for Trump’s base,” not because the attorneys who made the filing expect it to succeed.
As for the Republican’s pending charges in Georgia, his legal defense team have made a long-shot filing in that case, too. NBC News also reported:
Former President Donald Trump’s attorneys filed court papers Monday that marked his first attempt to get charges against him dismissed in the Georgia election interference case. Lawyers for Trump filed several motions that adopted arguments previously put forth by some of his 18 co-defendants, who have been accused of violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and other crimes amid alleged efforts to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss in the state.
If the former president’s followers expect this filing to succeed, they should probably start lowering their expectations. For his part, Trump added in an online missive yesterday that he and his fellow criminal defendants will use the upcoming legal proceedings to “show how the Presidential Election of 2020 was Rigged and Stollen.” (I’m going to assume he meant “stolen,” since a “stollen” is a German sweet bread with nuts and fruit.) He added that the evidence to support his election conspiracy theories “is both massive and conclusive.” Trump did not elaborate as to why no one has ever seen the “massive and conclusive” evidence that appears to be imaginary. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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