The federal judge overseeing former President Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 trial has, in the past, suggested several times that he is guilty of crimes and has even suggested he should be behind bars, according to an investigative report.

Julie Kelly, in an analysis for RealClearInvestigations, wrote that U.S. District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who already has a reputation for being tougher on Jan. 6 defendants than even prosecutors wanted, warned during her first hearing in Trump’s case she won’t tolerate politics in her courtroom.

“The fact that [Trump is] running a political campaign has to yield to the orderly administration of justice,” Chutkan said Aug. 11.  “If that means he can’t say exactly what he wants to say about witnesses in this case, that’s how it has to be.” 

But, as Kelly reported, “even as she warns Trump about his ‘inflammatory’ language, Chutkan has routinely issued politically charged rulings and made incendiary statements of her own while presiding over some 30 cases involving Trump supporters charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, melee at the U.S. Capitol.”

After reviewing “thousands of pages” of transcripts from hearings she has presided over, Kelly said they reveal that Chutkan “has repeatedly expressed strong and settled opinions about issues” that are at the center of Trump’s case.

These include her statements reaffirming the integrity of the 2020 election, her claim that the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol Building was Trump’s fault, and her strong suggestions that the former president is guilty of criminal activity. She has characterized the events of January 6 as a “mob attack” targeting “the very foundation of our democracy” and categorized the central matter of the case before her – Trump’s contention that the 2020 election was stolen – as a conspiracy theory.

Kelly added:

Although judges often make comments from the bench, Chutkan’s strident language raises questions about her impartiality in handling the case against the presumptive GOP nominee for president in 2024. 

The report also included the exact language of U.S. statutory law regulating when judges should recuse themselves from cases.

”Any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” the statute says, adding that a primary reason to recuse is if the judge has demonstrated “a personal bias or prejudice concerning a party.”  

Legal experts say that judges are almost never forced to recuse from cases and that they often voice personal opinions in their courtrooms. But that said, Kelly noted that, on at least one occasion, Chutkan hinted that Trump should be in jail even though on that fateful day he implored his supporters to march “peacefully” to the U.S. Capitol Building in protest of the election’s outcome.

For example, in sentencing Christine Priola, an Ohio Trump supporter who pleaded guilty to obstructing an official proceeding, to 15 months behind bars, the judge seemed to complain that Trump had yet to be charged.

“[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,” Chutkan said during the Oct. 28, 2022 hearing. “It’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.”