Here's why Trump's motion to get rid of DC judge is 'likely to fail': legal analyst
Former President Donald Trump's new motion demanding that Judge Tanya Chutkan recuse herself from the federal election plot case is almost certainly doomed to fail, said former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen and national security lawyer Carrie Cordero on CNN Monday.
Trump's argument stems from a comment Chutkan made during the proceedings of a January 6 rioter, remarking that they were acting out of "blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day" — a seeming implication Trump should be locked up as well. But that's not enough to establish judicial bias, they argued.
"Norm, Trump attorneys are pointing to Judge Chutkan's comments made in various cases involving other January 6th rioters," said anchor Wolf Blitzer. "What do you make of that argument?"
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"Well, Wolf, there needs to be a reasonable appearance of bias or partiality, and I don't think that these statements that Judge Chutkan made in those other cases amount to that," said Eisen. "She's had to assess the larger context of who's responsible here as part of sentencing, including because those defendants have, at times, raised it. So if you look at the case law on what amounts to bias, this is not it. This motion is overwhelmingly likely to fail."
"What do you think?" asked Wolf, turning to Cordero.
"I think that's right," Cordero agreed. "It is a fairly high standard for a judge to make the recusal decision. Her statement was strong in terms of the fact that it was directed directly against the former president, who now is the defendant in the case before her, but the context is also important. The context of it is that she feels in consideration of the other January 6th related defendants. So it's not as if she was making these comments extraneously or without any prompting. It was in the context of prosecutions for the event of January 6th."
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