Judge in Trump 'conspiracy' case gave harsher sentences to Jan 6 defendants than Biden's DOJ requested

It has been revealed that the presiding judge over former President Trump's recent indictment will be Tanya Chutkan, a US district judge who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2014. Trump will be arraigned in her Washington, DC court on Thursday.

In presiding over cases involving January 6 defendants, Chutkan has gone far and above the sentencing requests of Biden's DOJ. While most judges have granted sentences that were less extreme than what was asked for by prosecutors, Chutkan has either matched or gone beyond their requests in 19 of her 38 sentences. Furthermore, four of the cases contained zero requests for any time of confinement in jail or prison, the AP reports, yet she gave jail time.

Chutkan has tried at least 38 people who were ultimately convicted of crimes at occurred at or near the Capitol on January 6, 2021, giving prison time to every single one. Some of those people received over five years, the longest sentences delivered.

She also has ruled against Trump in the past, denying a request he made to stop the release of documents to the US House’s Jan. 6 committee via his claim of executive privilege. 

The judge is notably much more critical of the riots at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 than she is of the infamous Black Lives Matter summer riots. 

When speaking on words from Judge Trevor McFadden, who said that the Department of Justice was being too harsh on American citizens who had broken into the Capitol as compared to its conduct with those who took part in the Black Lives Matter riots, Chutkan said in Oct. 2021:

"People gathered all over the country last year to protest the violent murder by the police of an unarmed man. Some of those protesters became violent..."

She then opined that it is a "false equivalency" to "compare the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights, to those of a violent mob seeking to overthrow the lawfully elected government," and added that the Jan. 6 riots posed a danger to the "foundation of our democracy." More than 30 people died during the BLM riots of 2020. One woman, veteran Ashli Babbitt, was killed during the Capitol riot of January 6, and she was shot to death by police officers.

The Black Lives Matter Riots caused the most financial damage of any event in insurance history, and more than 30 people were killed during the summer riots, which spanned cities across the country.