Former federal prosecutor Harry Litman said Friday on MSNBC that Tanya Chutkan, the federal judge overseeing the January 6 criminal trial of failed former president Donald Trump like a “truant child” and also making it clear with her remarks in court today that she doesn’t trust the disgraced ex-president as far as she can throw him.
After a hearing this morning, Chutkan issued a protective order that limits what Trump and federal prosecutors are allowed to disclose, including any personally identifying information, sealed orders, witness testimony, or recordings and transcripts from witness interviews.
MSNBC anchor Alicia Menendez asked, “I want to underline a part of this. If they would be reasonably interpreted to intimidate witnesses. Does Trump’s post about, ‘If you come after me, I’ll come after you’ — does that fly?”
Litman replied:
“I think it falls totally flat. One more point. She treated Trump like a truant child. The most sort of galling thing of all. Obviously, he started at a level of mistrust. So he started with a record, as it were. Now, there will be exactly this debate. The reason there is something for him is not just what he got, but there will be a next level where they argue about terms and then she imposes something more strict.”
If Trump does defy the judge’s orders, Litman continued, Chutkan still has other ways of dealing with him.
“The big hammer she has, of course, but she doesn’t want to deploy it early or at all if they could help it, it is putting him in jail.”
“But they know that at the end of the day, it is her courtroom and her witnesses to worry about and it is her process to take account of,” Litman concluded. And she will, I think, she showed today, be unafraid — if he pushed her to the wall of responding with the most severe sanction.”
