The judge presiding over former President Trump’s multiple charges related to his attempts to legally challenge the 2020 presidential election comes from a family with a history of Marxist revolutionary activity in Jamaica. The judge’s family history was recently reported by the New York Post.
Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, appointed by President Obama, is the granddaughter of Frank Hill. Hill was a communist revolutionary in Jamaica who, along with his brother Ken, was briefly imprisoned by the island’s British governor during World War II on suspicion of “subversive activities,” the report noted.
Frank Hill is the father of Noelle Hill, who is Judge Chutkan’s mother, according to public records. Frank and his brother Ken were expelled from the Jamaican People’s National Party for their communist beliefs, Jamaican media reported.
Ken was described as “more pragmatic and less concerned with political theory” by Richard Hart in his 1999 book Towards Decolonisation: Political, Labor and Economic Developments in Jamaica 1938–1945.
“Ken Hill, by far the most influential, was more pragmatic and less concerned with political theory than most members of the left. He probably came to consider himself a communist both through the influence of his brother Frank and his observation of the course of world events,” Hart wrote of the brothers.
Judge Chutkan has faced accusations from conservatives, who say she demonstrates a political bias in her role. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, for example, recently introduced a resolution seeking to censure and investigate the judge for “overt partisanship and partisanship in the performance of his official duties,” referring to his earlier statements in support of the protesters in Black Lives Matter in 2020.
“Tanya Chutkan was appointed a district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia by President Barack Obama after donating thousands of dollars to get him elected,” Gaetz said in a statement.
According to official documents, Chutkan gave $1,500 to the Obama campaign between 2008 and 2009.
Gaetz’s statement added that Chutkan “has inappropriately expressed support for the violent protests that occurred in the summer of 2020, while handing down several harsh sentences to the non-violent defendants of January 6. In addition, during a sentencing hearing in October 2022, he inappropriately lamented that President Donald Trump “is free to this day.”
Chutkan has been an extraordinarily tough judge in the January 6 cases. The judge has consistently expressed the view that the incident was an attempt to overthrow the government, rather than a riot carried out by unarmed extremists without the means to capture and hold the government.
“People gathered across the country last year to protest the violent police killing of an unarmed man. Some of those protesters turned violent,” Chutkan wrote of the protests in BLM in October 2021.
“But to compare the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights, to those of a violent mob seeking to overthrow the legally elected government is a false equivalency and ignores a very real danger posed by the 6 January for the foundation of our democracy,” he said.
The BLM riots resulted in over twenty deaths, while the January 6 protesters killed no one. Despite her obvious partisan bias, the judge has nevertheless had freedom to decide the cases of January 6. Now he has the fate of a presidential election in his hands.
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OPINION: This article contains comments that reflect the opinion of the author.