Which itself is only going to lead to more impossible choices.
When Judge Tanya Chutkan of the federal district court for D.C. was assigned the trial of Donald Trump for his attempt to steal the election, according to the journalist Robert Draper, she asked a friend to pray for her. Chutkan’s decision today to impose a gag order on the former president, her most consequential pronouncement in the case so far, shows why she’ll need prayer, if not outright divine wisdom, to navigate the challenge before her. Chutkan faces a series of impossible choices.
Her first impossible choice: whether to impose any gag order at all. As she described it in court, the order she granted appears narrower than what prosecutors sought. It prohibits disparaging remarks only of witnesses, prosecutors, and court staff, but allows Trump to continue attacking the Justice Department, President Joe Biden, and others—including Chutkan herself—as long as his comments do not directly bear on the case.
Chutkan’s order followed a two-hour hearing in Washington, in which prosecutors argued that Trump’s comments would poison the chance for a fair trial, while the defense attorney John Lauro repeatedly—and to Chutkan’s dismay—called any restriction “censorship.” The judge probed both prosecutors and defense with piercing questions. She peppered Assistant U.S. Attorney Molly Gaston, representing Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team, with questions about their proposal, siding with Lauro’s contention that the government was asking for something too broad. But she reminded the defense, “Mr. Trump is facing criminal charges. He does not get to respond to every criticism of him if his response would affect potential witnesses. That’s the bottom line here.”
The dilemma for Chutkan is that almost any course she chooses threatens rule of law. She can hardly allow Trump to do things that she believes could corrupt the proceedings or intimidate witnesses, as the government alleges he has done. That would either erode the court’s ability to police every defendant, or else it would suggest that Trump doesn’t have to follow the same rules as everyone else.
