“Trump is up against an ostentatiously hostile judge called Tanya Chutkan,” Roger Kimball observes. Judge Chutkan is indeed hostile to the former president, but there’s more about her that people should know.
The Jamaican-born Chutkan, a University of Pennsylvania law alum, is an appointee of the composite character David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama. Consider Chutkan’s role in the case of Imran Awan.
Of all the IT people in all the IT firms in all the world, House Democrats thought Imran Awan was the best man for the job. Sometimes working from his native Pakistan, Awan and his family team accessed the computers of some 40 Democrats, including those on the intelligence and foreign affairs committees.
Without their consent, Awan and his team stashed the Democrats’ data on a server controlled by Xavier Becerra, chair of the House Democratic Caucus and once on Hillary Clinton’s short list as a running mate. Capitol Police wanted a copy of the server but the one Awan produced turned out to be a fake.
In February 2017, Awan and his team got booted off the House computer network, but Becerra had already fled to California where Gov. Jerry Brown appointed him state attorney general. In July of 2017, Awan attempted to flee the country but the authorities busted him for bank fraud.
For Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman, “this appears to be a real conspiracy, aimed at undermining American national security.” Some in Congress agreed, but the IT man had his defenders.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz charged that Awan was “put under scrutiny because of his religious faith and that “the right-wing media circus fringe” was jumping to conclusions. Awan’s attorney Chris Gowen, a former aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton, said Awan’s arrest for bank fraud was “clearly a right-wing media-driven prosecution by a United States Attorney’s Office that wants to prosecute people for working while Muslim.”
The case landed with Judge Tanya Chutkan, once a partner in the law firm of Boies, Schiller, & Flexner, which represented Huma Abedin in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server.
Judge Chutkan was a vocal opponent of President Trump’s travel ban and the judge shielded the national security aspect of the Awan case. Her frequent delays helped to protect Xavier Becerra in his run to remain attorney general in California.
In August of 2018, Chutkan sentenced Awan to time served, his one day in detention, and 11 months of GPS monitoring and three months’ supervision. Awan was never formally charged with unauthorized possession of government material or anything of the sort. In due time, the IT man would get his reward.
“Congress Pays $850,000 to Muslim Aides Targeted in Inquiry Stoked by Trump,” reads the November 25, 2020 New York Times headline. According to the story, the previously unreported settlement is one of the largest to resolve discrimination or harassment claims, in this case by people who “lost their jobs and endured harassment in part because of their Muslim faith and South Asian origins.”
Congress reportedly made the payment but the only House member quoted is Florida Democrat Ted Deutch, a leading figure in Democrats’ charge that candidate Donald Trump was guilty of collusion with Russia and a vocal proponent of impeaching President Trump. The former president is now up against the hostile Tanya Chutkan, already on a roll.
“Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President,” Chutkan wrote in one ruling. Like Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine) in Being There, the Obama judge reveals herself to herself and she’s drenched and purged.
The ostentatious Tanya recalls judge Emmet Sullivan, who maintained the case against Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s pick for national security advisor, after the DOJ dropped it. Like Chutkan, Sullivan moved on to January 6, delaying the trial of defendant Robert Geiswein on several occasions.
Chutkan basically pardoned Awan and Sullivan persecuted Flynn. In effect, both judges are zampolits, political commissars working for the Biden Junta. If anybody thought that neither one should be on the bench it would be hard to blame them. The proceedings are shaping up as a Stalinist show trial, and the one to watch is former Attorney General William Barr.
As he explained in One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, Barr started his career with the CIA. The author praises Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who appointed Robert Mueller to investigate Trump. After all the irregularities in the 2020 election, Barr conducted no investigation or audit of the proceedings yet proclaimed he had seen nothing that would have changed the outcome.
After Trump’s classified documents indictment, Barr told reporters, “If even half of this is true, he’s toast.” Here we have a former Attorney General who suspends the presumption of innocence and judges a case before the trial.
Barr also backed the unprecedented FBI raid on Trump’s residence, proclaiming “it’s also unprecedented for a president to take all this classified information and put them in a country club, okay?” And in Barr’s view it was the government that was being “jerked around.”
Barr was recently asked if he would be willing to testify against Trump. “Of course,” Barr responded. Forget the banana-republic comparison. It’s full-on Stalinist now.