Judge Tanya Chutkan is the toughest Jan. 6 sentencer. Next on her docket: Trump.

WASHINGTON - With U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan as the trial judge overseeing his case in Washington, Donald Trump’s legal troubles in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack come nearly full circle.

Trump’s federal criminal indictment on charges of attempting to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election was randomly assigned Tuesday to Chutkan, 61, who over a year and a half ago became one of the first federal judges in D.C. to reject the former president’s efforts to use executive privilege to withhold White House communications from Jan. 6 investigators, in that instance from the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot.

In her Trump documents opinion on Nov. 9, 2021, Chutkan ruled that Congress had a strong public interest in obtaining White House communications and other records that could shed light on the violent attack by a mob of Trump supporters who injured dozens of police officers, ransacked offices and forced the evacuation of lawmakers meeting to confirm the results of the 2020 election. Chutkan noted that President Biden had waived executive privilege, overcoming his predecessor’s attempt to invoke the confidentiality of presidential communications, a ruling affirmed by a federal appeals court and left standing by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“At bottom, this is a dispute between a former and incumbent President,” Chutkan wrote. “And the Supreme Court has already made clear that in such circumstances, the incumbent’s view is accorded greater weight.”

Chutkan agreed with the House that the matter was of “unsurpassed public importance because such information relates to our core democratic institutions and the public’s confidence in them” and could help lead to legislation “to prevent such events from ever occurring again.”

About 13 months later, the House committee referred Trump to the Justice Department for criminal charges. And 2½ years after the Jan. 6 attack, a grand jury indicted Trump on Tuesday, charging him with trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Trump is scheduled to make his first appearance Thursday before a magistrate judge in U.S. District Court in Washington, and after that, Chutkan will take over the case, facing enormous scrutiny over the high-profile case.

Chutkan’s biography is a study in contrasts with that of Aileen M. Cannon - the federal judge in Florida overseeing Trump’s criminal case over alleged obstruction and mishandling of classified documents. Cannon is a former federal prosecutor and one of the last young conservative lawyers Trump appointed to the bench before leaving the White House. Chutkan is a former public defender appointed in 2014 by Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, after she served as a volunteer with Lawyers for Obama during his 2012 campaign.

Politicians on both sides have found rulings by each objectionable, and Trump’s defenders were quick to criticize Chutkan. “We can anticipate a judge who is going to be relentlessly hostile to Donald Trump, who is going to bend over backwards for the Biden DOJ, and who is going to make ruling, after ruling, after ruling against Trump,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said on his podcast, claiming that Chutkan “has a reputation for being far left, even by D.C. District Court standards.”

A trained dancer raised in Kingston, Jamaica, Chutkan graduated from George Washington University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School before working in private practice with two Washington firms and serving 11 years with the D.C. Public Defender Service. She then joined the Boies Schiller Flexner law firm, where as partner she was a white-collar defense specialist focusing on complex antitrust class-action cases.

“For a lot of people, I seem to check a lot of boxes: immigrant, woman, Black, Asian. Your qualifications are always going to be subject to criticism and you have to develop a thick skin,” Chutkan was quoted as saying in a February 2022 profile posted by the federal judiciary.

The featured speaker at an African American History Month event hosted by the judiciary’s Defender Services Office, Chutkan cited “the dignity and the brilliance” of former federal judge and NAACP Legal Defense Fund litigator Constance Baker Motley and her predecessors as a model. “They put their lives on the line every time they did their jobs and had to put up with far more than I have,” she said.

Chutkan also said that she drew inspiration from young people.

“Young people inspire me in their openness, in their tolerance, and in their desire to fight injustice,” she was quoted as saying. “I can’t let them down. I have to be an example to them.”

Chutkan has been the toughest sentencing judge on the D.C. federal court for Jan. 6 defendants, according to a Washington Post database. Through mid-June, Chutkan sentenced every one of the 31 defendants to have come before her to at least some jail or prison time. She has exceeded prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations nine times and granted them 14 times, while court-wide, judges have sentenced below government recommendation about 80 percent of the time.

“It has to be made clear that trying to violently overthrow the government, trying to stop the peaceful transition of power and assaulting law enforcement officers in that effort, is going to be met with absolutely certain punishment,” Chutkan has explained from the bench.

Alluding to Trump’s role in the events, Chutkan said at another defendant’s sentencing: He “did not go to the United States Capitol out of any love for our country… . He went for one man.”

At another sentencing, she said, “The country is watching to see what the consequences are for something that has not ever happened in the country before.”

A Trump spokesman declined to comment about Chutkan on Wednesday, but defense attorney John Lauro told CBS News that the former president’s legal team would “absolutely” seek to move his trial out of overwhelmingly Democratic Washington and suggested Republican-leaning West Virginia as an alternative.

Venue change requests are very rarely granted because of the constitutional principle that defendants be tried where crimes allegedly occurred, and none of more than a dozen similar motions by riot defendants have succeeded. Judges have noted that Americans all over the country have been exposed to the same potential pretrial publicity surrounding Trump.

“I understand why Trump would like another judge, and I understand why Trump would like another venue,” said Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics professor at New York University School of Law, “but nothing I’ve heard - including the fact that Judge Chutkan has sentenced harshly other January 6 defendants - would warrant a recusal… . Things such as what is said or done within the four corners of a case before her as a judge cannot be a basis for recusal because she’s doing her job. That’s what judges do.”

Chutkan declined to comment through a court spokesperson. Chief U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg said of Chutkan, “I have a lot of confidence in all of the judges on this court, and I have no doubt she will do a terrific job in overseeing this case.”