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A federal judge said Wednesday she would not disqualify herself from presiding over Donald Trump’s federal election interference case in Washington, D.C., writing in a court filing that granting the former president’s request for recusal was “not warranted.”
The Trump team’s long-shot bid to have U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan remove herself from the case was based on a number of supposedly “disqualifying” remarks she’d made while sentencing Jan. 6 defendants. In a 20-page ruling, Chutkan called this line of argument an “inferential leap” and said her comments “certainly do not manifest a deep-seated prejudice that would make fair judgment impossible.”
She added that it “bears noting that the court has never taken the position the defense ascribes to it: that former ‘President Trump should be prosecuted and imprisoned.’ And the defense does not cite any instance of the court ever uttering those words or anything similar.”