U.S. Justice Department says there's no valid basis for the judge to step aside from Trump's DC case

Mr. Trump’s lawyers filed a long-shot motion earlier this week urging Ms. Chutkan to step aside

The Justice Department is challenging efforts by former President Donald Trump to disqualify the Washington judge presiding over the case charging him with plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Prosecutors with special counsel Jack Smith's team wrote in a court filing late Thursday that there was “no valid basis” for U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to recuse herself.

Mr. Trump's lawyers filed a long-shot motion earlier this week urging Ms. Chutkan to step aside, citing comments she made in separate sentencing hearings related to the Jan 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol that they say taint the Trump proceedings and call into question whether she has already prejudged the Republican former president's guilt.

In one such hearing, Ms. Chutkan told a defendant who was sentenced to more than five years in prison that he had “made a very good point” that the “people who exhorted” and encouraged him “to go and take action and to fight” had not been charged. Ms. Chutkan added that she did not “make charging decisions” and had no “influence on that”.

“I have my opinions,” she said, “but they are not relevant.” But the Justice Department said the Trump team had taken Ms. Chutkan's comments out of context and failed to show that she harboured any bias against the former president, who lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden and falsely claimed the election was stolen from him.

The Justice Department said the statements the Trump lawyers had cited show the judge simply doing her job — responding to, and rejecting, efforts to minimise their own culpability by pointing the finger at Mr. Trump, who had told his supporters to “fight like hell” at a rally shortly before the deadly Capitol insurrection.

Ms. Chutkan did not say, prosecutors wrote, that Mr. Trump was legally or morally to blame for the events of Jan 6 or that he deserved to be punished.