U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has become an ultimate villain for Donald Trump and his allies, accused of being unfair to the MAGA cause and especially those who showed up to storm the Capitol building on his behalf.
Trump’s lawyers have tried to have her removed from overseeing his Washington, D.C., criminal case, with the former president calling her “a TRUE TRUMP HATER” who is “incapable” of giving him a fair trial. In court, she warned Trump directly to “take special care in your public statements about this case.” Months after that, she was targeted by “swatting” at her home.
But in court, Chutkan has shown an atypical amount of patience and grace when dealing with Jan. 6 defendants during run-of-the-mill hearings that go largely unnoticed.
On a recent Thursday in Washington federal court, Chutkan faced off with a man whose profile isn’t too different from Trump’s: a defendant accused of trying to stop Congress from certifying the 2020 election who claims prosecutors don’t have the authority to charge him, rails against politicized courts and demands that she recuse herself from the case.
Andrew Miller is one of the hundreds of rioters still making their way through the legal system after getting sucked in by Trump’s election denial more than three years ago.
When the young man in Ohio called into the court Zoom conference from inside his home and complained about “the legalese language that’s being discussed,” the judge whipped out a classic Spanish-style accordion fan and began cooling herself off.
“That’s why you need a lawyer,” she said, maintaining a friendly tone that dialed down the temperature in the courtroom.
Aug. 15 was supposed to be the day Chutkan would oversee the first court hearing in Trump’s election interference case since the Supreme Court granted the former president an unprecedented level of immunity from criminal charges. When that was postponed until next month, the judge instead spent the afternoon dealing with the continuing flood of cases stemming from the Capitol insurrection.
The relatively new case of U.S. v. Miller serves as an example of how federal agents keep making insurrection-related arrests more than three years after the attack on the Capitol building. Miller, who describes himself online as a “devoted” Christian family man with “Amish Blood,” was criminally charged in April for hopping into a passenger van with about a dozen others and traveling to D.C. to take part in the riot. In court, the FBI presented images from security camera footage that it says shows Miller wearing goggles as he entered the Capitol through a broken window carrying a blue Trump flag.
But in the months since Chutkan freed him to continue living at home while his case inches along, Miller has refused to play ball. He adopted Trump’s legal strategy of claiming total immunity from criminal charges, albeit with a different approach: bizarrely asserting that court papers featuring his name in all caps must surely be referring to another Andrew M. Miller, one who’s no longer alive.
“This Court MUST take Mandatory Judicial Notice that the plaintiff is dead/deceased,” he wrote in May.
His court hearing on Aug. 15 immediately kicked off with Chutkan demanding to know why Miller keeps mailing back copies of her orders with the words “refusal for cause” emblazoned on the front. The judge wondered aloud whether the man before her was rejecting her authority outright.
“I have bent over backwards to make sure you understand what is happening,” she began, then shifting into an ominous warning. “Let me explain the concept of contempt of court.”
Chutkan patiently convinced Miller to stop fighting the case alone and accept the government-sponsored, free representation from a federal defense lawyer who’s an hour’s drive north in Akron.
“I’m just warning you … the course of conduct you’re engaging in is not in your best interest,” she said.
“I don’t know how the legal system works,” Miller responded.
“That is why I have repeatedly advised you to get a lawyer,” Chutkan said.
Within half an hour, Miller relented and agreed to go with the free attorney. The judge wished everyone a good day and exited the courtroom.
Across the country, judges don’t tend to tolerate criminal defendants who brazenly violate courtroom decorum when they go at it alone. And when counseling those who choose this route, known as going “pro se,” judges often point to a phrase attributed to Abraham Lincoln: “A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client.”
But Chutkan’s handling of many Jan. 6 defendants flips the persona Republicans have tried to foist on her since she began to oversee Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Trump.
On his podcast last year, Sen. Ted Cruz claimed Chutkan “has a reputation for being far left, even by D.C. District Court standards” and would “bend over backwards for the Biden DOJ.”
“She is the only federal judge in Washington, D.C., who has sentenced Jan. 6 defendants to sentences longer than the government requested,” he noted.
That particular gripe is why Rep. Matt Gaetz, who continues to lionize Trump-loyal insurrectionists, introduced a bill last year that went nowhere to have Chutkan “censured and condemned.” The bill claims the judge “exhibited open bias and partisanship in the conduct of her official duties” when she decried the “false equivalency” of Black Lives Matter protests with the Jan. 6 attack.
What Chutkan actually said during an October 2021 court hearing was, “People gathered all over the country last year to protest the violent murder by the police of an unarmed man. Some of those protesters became violent. But to compare the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights to those of a violent mob seeking to overthrow the lawfully elected government is a false equivalency and ignores a very real danger that the Jan. 6 riot posed to the foundation of our democracy.”
In court this month, Chutkan showed another side: how she treats insurrectionists when they’re done serving time in prison.
Chutkan sentenced Matthew Capsel to 18 months behind bars when he pleaded guilty to “civil disorder” after a TikTok video showed him charging into riot shields held by a line of National Guard soldiers in camouflage uniforms. Prosecutors had asked for 31 months, nearly a year more. He’s now out of prison and back with his family, but a chaotic incident at home meant that he apparently violated his probation.
His probation officer had alerted the court that Capsel had endangered the life of his child, drove without insurance and lost control of his dogs.
Chutkan diverted any calls to punish him and instead took on the role of life coach, stressing the need for him to stay out of jail and be there for his kids. Capsel appeared on the courtroom screen, wearing a backward baseball cap and blowing smoke from a vape pen.
“I’m not going to take medicine that makes me more moody … and does more harm than good,” Capsel explained.
“We don’t want you back in prison. You can’t help your kids there,” Chutkan stressed. “But you can’t be there for them if your life is unstable, and you need your medication more than ever. You need to get the right medication and take it.”
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.