Trump wants them gone, but Judge Chutkan refuses to back down More than 42,000 people have fled Nagorno-Karabakh

Former US President Donald Trump has failed in his demand that Judge Tanya Chutkan withdraw from a trial related to attempted election fraud due to bias.

Trump’s lawyers had argued that the judge was not neutral, but entered the proceedings with a preliminary decision. They quoted Chutkan’s previous statements. The judge at a court in the American capital Washington rejected Trump’s request on Wednesday (local time), according to her twenty-page ruling. It states, among other things, that her statements have been misinterpreted.

According to legal ethics expert Stephen Gillers, Chutkan can decide for herself whether she declares herself biased, he told the Washington Post.

Trump is facing federal charges in Washington related to attempted election fraud. It is about his campaign against his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, which culminated in the violent attack on the US Capitol by his supporters on January 6, 2021. The 77-year-old is charged, among other things, with conspiracy against the United States. The Republican presidential candidate for the 2024 elections is facing a total of four different charges in the middle of the campaign for a possible second term.

In recent months, Chutkan had led several cases against rioters who participated in the storming of the Capitol. In one of the proceedings, she explained that the rioters had not acted in the interests of the Constitution, but of a man – “out of blind loyalty to a person who, by the way, is still at large.”

Trump’s lawyers cited this reference to Trump, among other things, in the bias request. The meaning of this statement is clear: according to Chutkan, Trump is free, but that should not be the case, they wrote in the application in mid-September. (sda/dpa)