Within the hour, former president and indicted felon Donald Trump will stand before a magistrate judge to enter a plea, but his case will be heard by US District Judge for the District of Columbia Tanya Chutkan on four felonies related to his involvement in the attempt to undermine the integrity of US elections.
Like the two other judges overseeing Trump’s criminal cases–New York Superior Court Judge Juan Marchan and US District Judge for the Southern District of Florida Aileen Cannon–the 61-year-old Chutkan was born outside the United States. She was nominated to the federal bench by Barack Obama in 2013 after spending more than a decade as a public defender before joining the law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner in 2002.
An alum of the University of Pennsylvania law school–Trump graduated from Penn’s Wharton School of Business undergraduate program–Chutkan had a number of notable cases, including the prosecution of NRA advocate and Russian agent Maria Butina.