The judges deciding Donald Trump’s future

Donald Trump has demanded the removal of the judge overseeing his election fraud case, claiming that “there is no way I can get a fair trial”.

The former US president last week denied four criminal counts related to efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 vote, including conspiracy to defraud the US. In a post on his Truth Social platform yesterday, he said that his legal team would ask District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who was randomly assigned to the case, to step aside on “very powerful grounds”.

Trump is facing a total of 78 felony charges across three criminal cases, many of which carry “the potential for hefty prison time”, said Politico. The case that “appears least likely to put Trump away is the prosecution by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office”, which has charged him with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, in relation to hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.

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Here are three of the judges in the other two cases facing the former US leader as he campaigns to be the Republican nominee in the 2024 election.

District Judge Tanya Chutkan

Trump is facing a “familiar foe” in “hard-line judge” Chutkan, said the BBC. In November 2021, she blocked his bid to stop a Congressional committee from accessing White House papers from his administration. “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not president,” Chutkan wrote in her ruling.

The decision, said the BBC, “gave new life” to the congressional investigation into the Capitol riots, “the results of which came full circle” when the case brought against Trump by Special Counsel Jack Smith was “randomly handed to her”.

Chutkan has overseen “numerous cases” involving 6 January rioters, said Forbes, and has handed down “some of the toughest punishments” doled out, including some that have “gone further than what prosecutors recommended”.

According to a tally by The Washington Post, through to mid-June, Chutkan sentenced every one of a total 31 defendants to have come before her “to at least some jail or prison time” .

And she has been “remarkably candid when sentencing defendants”, added the BBC. At a hearing last year, she said: “It is not patriotism, it is not standing up for America to stand up for one man – who knows full well that he lost – instead of the Constitution he was trying to subvert.”

Jamaica-born Chutkan, 61, has served on the District Court for Columbia since in 2014, after being nominated by then president Barack Obama.

According to her biography on the court’s website, she had previously worked at a law firm, following an 11-year stint as a public defender in Washington D.C.

She is expected to set a start date for the trial against Trump at a hearing on 28 August.

Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya

Although Chutkan is due to oversee the 2020 election case, Trump appeared before Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya in Washington D.C. last week for his arraignment. Magistrate judges such as Upadhyaya “are appointed by majority vote of the active district judges of the court”, said ABC News, and have “the authority to conduct preliminary proceedings in criminal cases, such as arraignments”.

Upadhyaya’s court biography states that she was born in India and raised near Kansas City in Missouri. She was appointed as a magistrate judge last September and has handled proceedings for several 6 January defendants.

Upadhyaya, 35, donated at least $2,550 to political candidates, all Democrats, in the decade before her judicial appointment, according to OpenSecrets.

District Judge Aileen Cannon

In June, Trump was indicted on 37 counts in connection to his handling of classified government documents. The indictment, also brought by Special Counsel Smith, came after the FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and recovered hundreds of pages of government records.

Last week, a further three charges related to the case were brought against Trump, who pleaded not guilty.

The Florida district judge assigned to oversee the case is Aileen Cannon, who according to The New York Times has “scant experience running criminal trials”. Colombia-born Cannon, 42, has “already attracted scrutiny amid widespread perceptions that she demonstrated bias in the former president’s favour” last year, when she oversaw a “long-shot” lawsuit filed by Trump challenging the FBI’s search, the paper added.

And she has faced further criticism after allegedly making significant errors in a trial in June, “including one that potentially violated the defendant’s constitutional rights and could have invalidated the proceedings”, according to Reuters.

Cannon, a registered Republican, was appointed to the federal bench by Trump, who gave her a lifetime appointment shortly after he lost re-election. Her appointment “came only 12 years after she was first admitted to practice law, which is the minimum experience that the American Bar Association requires of nominees”, said The Guardian.