Republican presidential nominee and former US President Donald Trump.
Credit: Reuters Photo
Judge Tanya Chutkan wasted no time last month when the biggest case of her career -- the indictment of former President Donald Trump on election interference charges -- was handed back to her.
After watching from the sidelines for nearly eight months as Trump's lawyers fought their way up to the Supreme Court with what turned out to be a largely successful argument that he had broad immunity from prosecution on charges arising from his official acts as president, Chutkan moved quickly to get pretrial proceedings moving again.
Within 24 hours of getting the matter back, she laid out a schedule for discussing the impact of the court's immunity ruling on the case. Working on a Saturday in August, she also found time to tidy up her desk and deny two separate motions by Trump's lawyers that the appellate process had forbidden her to touch for nearly a year.
On Thursday, Chutkan is set to preside over a hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington where she is likely to explain how she intends to approach the task of figuring out which parts of Trump's indictment will have to be tossed out under the immunity ruling and which can survive and go to trial.
Her ultimate decision will not only shape the future of the case, but will also serve as a test of the no-nonsense style that she has brought to bear on it since the day it was assigned to her in August 2023.
Before Trump's immunity appeals put the case in limbo, Chutkan, who was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama, oversaw it with a stern hand and an expeditious manner. She often worked through the weekends and evinced little patience for the persistent strategy by Trump and his legal team of seeking to delay the case at every turn.
Not long after the indictment was returned, she set the tone for how she planned to handle the matter by telling Trump that when he was in her courtroom, she planned to look on him as a criminal defendant, not a former president. As for the fact that he was running for office again, that, she said somewhat dismissively, was his "day job."
In all of this, she distinguished herself from a colleague in Florida, Judge Aileen Cannon, who recently threw out Trump's other federal case -- in which he stood accused of mishandling classified documents -- on the grounds that Jack Smith, the special counsel who filed both prosecutions, had been improperly appointed to his job.
The ruling by Cannon, who was appointed by Trump, flew in the face of both a quarter-century of Justice Department practice and previous court decisions reaching back to the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s. It also capped a series of unusual rulings and procedural moves that were so outside the norm that many legal experts called for Smith to seek her removal.
The fate of the federal election case, in which Trump is charged with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election, rests in part on decisions that will be made outside of Chutkan's courtroom.
If voters return Trump to office, he is all but certain to direct his Justice Department to kill the case or at least delay it until the end of his term. And even if he loses in November, the case will face further legal hurdles, including likely further review by the Supreme Court of any decisions made by Chutkan about how much of the indictment can survive the immunity ruling.
The hearing Thursday will be largely procedural in nature. Trump is not expected to attend, and will leave it to his lawyers to formally enter a plea of not guilty to a revised version of the indictment that Smith filed last week to address the Supreme Court's immunity ruling, according to a court filing Tuesday.
Chutkan is expected to consider -- and may hand down a ruling on -- the dueling proposals filed last week by the defense and prosecution about how they would like to address the question of applying the immunity decision to the charges accusing Trump of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.
Smith's deputies, in their proposal, said they believed that the Supreme Court's ruling simply "does not apply" to the charges in the case, which they recently retooled to home in, as they put it, on Trump's "private electioneering activity," not on his official acts as president.
The prosecutors told Chutkan that they were ready to get to work whenever she was, saying they could send her court papers explaining their position "promptly at any time the court deems appropriate."
Trump's lawyers had a very different view on how to proceed, saying that even the newly fashioned charges could not survive the ruling on immunity. Moreover, they informed Chutkan that they planned to attack the case on legal fronts that go well beyond the issue of immunity, suggesting a schedule for additional briefings and hearings that reach into the fall of next year.
How Chutkan handles these competing plans will determine how long it could take to have a trial-ready indictment in place and how much new evidence about Trump's plots to stay in power could be revealed by the process of designing one.
Smith's team has suggested, for example, that it would like to include in its filing at least some evidence that was not in the indictment. But Chutkan may have something to say about whether that evidence should be made public or whether it is submitted under seal.
Trump's lawyers are likely to raise different concerns and can be expected to ask Chutkan for permission to file a new motion to dismiss the case even before the two sides open the debate about how the Supreme Court's immunity decision will affect it.
The lawyers have already said they would like to push back any detailed discussion of immunity until at least December, well after the election. They have also said they would like to file a motion attacking Smith's appointment, similar to the one that led to the dismissal of the classified documents case.
While it remains unclear how Chutkan will decide these issues, if her previous appearances on the bench in the election case are any measure, she is unlikely to look favorably on efforts to unnecessarily complicate or delay it.
The last time she oversaw a hearing in the matter was in October of last year, when she imposed a gag order on Trump, barring him from attacking some witnesses, court staff and prosecutors involved in the proceeding.
At that hearing, she kept things moving forward, brooked no nonsense from Trump's lawyers and treated the former president like any other criminal defendant.
At one point, John Lauro, a lawyer for Trump, objected to her that the trial date she had picked -- then set for early March -- was only a day before Trump was to compete in the Republican primary elections on Super Tuesday.
Chutkan was not interested in Lauro's complaints.
"This trial will not yield to the election cycle," she told him, "and we're not revisiting the trial date."