Politico reporter Kyle Cheney is clearly on pins and needles waiting for the January 6 trial of Donald Trump, which isn't until next March. But on Monday, he offered "pregame" excitement in a story titled Inside the courtroom of Trump’s D.C. judge."
Cheney began: "U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan is poised to preside over a historic trial that will feature a defendant unlike any who has set foot in her court or any other: former President Donald Trump."
Although Cheney noted she was an Obama appointee, the judge was presented as an impartial hero against Trump: "Chutkan probed potential jurors’ strong feelings about Trump and his lies about the 2020 election. She grappled with disputes over evidence-sharing. And she laid down the law, quite literally, with a recalcitrant defendant who violated the terms of his pretrial release — just as Trump has been accused of by prosecutors."
During jury selection, he wrote "she repeated her universal creed: It’s OK to have opinions and biases. What matters, she said, is “whether you can put those opinions aside and be fair and impartial.” No one in the story questioned Chutkan's impartiality, or the fact that almost every January 6 defendant has been found guilty by D.C. juries.
He did insist that "Chutkan, like all federal judges who have handled Jan. 6 cases, has had to wrestle with the impact of Trump’s words on the rioters’ mental states, their belief in his false claims that the election was stolen."
In his tribute disguised as an article to Judge Chutkan, Cheney absurdly backs her up for denying a delay in the trial because Special Counsel Jack Smith was supposedly an "overinclusive" guy who provided millions of pages of documents "he was not required to share."
Chutkan has signaled a similar approach in Trump’s case. She has rejected Trump’s request for years of pretrial preparation — despite millions of pages of evidence — in part because of Smith’s “overinclusive” approach that included millions of duplicative pages or records he was not required to share.
Cheney did not detail just how many millions of pages but the total is over twelve million. Alan Dershowitz estimated that for Trump's lawyers to review that many pages between now and the March 4 trial date, they would have to read over 70,000 documents per day.
Although Cheney seems to think that such a Herculean task is no big deal, it would be interesting to watch his reaction if his Politico assignment editor gave him 70,000 pages to review. And even if given a whole month instead of merely a day, it is doubtful if Cheney could complete the assignment. But for Trump and his legal team, normal rules seem not to apply in Kyle Cheney's world so, tough luck, the trial must go on as scheduled.
