Left-wing election disrupter Marc Elias admitted Sunday that former President Donald Trump cannot get an impartial jury trial in Washington D.C.
The Biden Department of Justice is trying to throw Trump in jail on multiple charges, including charges related to his speech about the 2020 presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021.
[Entire Premise of J6 Trial is an Affront to Free Elections and Rule of Law]
Elias, whose legal campaigns are often funded by left-wing billionaire George Soros, posted a screenshot on X of a headline announcing that former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley won her first primary of the 2024 election in the D.C. swamp.
“In a city of 700,000, Donald Trump got 676 votes in the GOP primary. A tough jury pool,” he commented.
While Elias appeared to be trying to make a political point about the Republican presidential primary, his post pointed out the constitutional concerns about trying Trump in such a deep-blue district.
Can Trump Get a Fair Trial?
The Sixth Amendment requires that defendants receive an “impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”
But could Trump really receive a fair trial?
Trump’s team has argued the former president will be unable to receive an impartial jury in the city where President Joe Biden received 92.1 percent of the vote compared to Trump’s 5.4 percent.
In fact, the Supreme Court acknowledged in the 1971 case Groppi v. Wisconsin that there are some cases where “only a change of venue [is] constitutionally sufficient to assure the kind of impartial jury” required by both the Sixth and 14th Amendments.
The court previously ruled in Rideau v. Louisiana that “it was a denial of due process of law to refuse the request for a change of venue” in that case. The precedent was later applied to federal trials in Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart and United States v. Faul, according to The University of Chicago Law Review.
But it’s not just the jury pool that might create an unfair trial for the former president.
Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, has appeared to bemoan the fact that Trump has so far escaped imprisonment. She told Jan. 6 defendants during a 2021 sentencing hearing that “the people who exhorted you and encouraged you and rallied you to go and take action and to fight have not been charged.”
Chutkan also said during sentencing for Jan. 6 defendant Christine Priola that “the people who mobbed that Capitol were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man — not to the Constitution, of which most of the people who come before me seem woefully ignorant; not to the ideals of this country; and not to the principles of democracy. It’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.”
Trump asked Chutkan to recuse herself from the case, a motion she herself then denied.