The federal judge overseeing the case involving former President Donald Trump's alleged attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election previously worked at a law firm that once employed Hunter Biden.
U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan worked for 12 years at Boies Schiller Flexner LLP (BSF), specializing in white-collar litigation and antitrust defense.
Biden, whose foreign business dealings are being investigated by the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability for alleged influence peddling, worked for BSF in 2014. In April of that year he was appointed to Ukrainian energy company Burisma's board, the Daily Caller reported.
Whistleblower Devon Archer told the House panel Monday that Hunter Biden used father Joe Biden, then vice president, on more than 20 phone calls during business meetings to promote the Biden brand.
Chutkan is the only federal D.C. judge who has sentenced Jan. 6 defendants to longer sentences than were requested by the government.
Chutkan has defended Black Lives Matter protesters, whose actions in the summer of 2020 after the death of George Floyd have been compared to those by people who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Chutkan said the comparison was a "false equivalency."
"People gathered all over the country last year to protest the violent murder by the police of an unarmed man. Some of those protesters became violent," Chutkan said in a hearing in October 2021, Politico reported.
"But to compare the actions of people protesting, mostly peacefully, for civil rights, to those of a violent mob seeking to overthrow the lawfully elected government, is a false equivalency and ignores a very real danger that the Jan. 6 riot posed to the foundation of our democracy."
Riots after Floyd's death in May 2020 resulted in several deaths and injuries, curfews in most cities across the country, and an estimated $1 billion to $2 billion in property damage, the Washington Examiner reported.
The Jan. 6 Capitol attack caused an estimated $2.73 million in damage, the death of one demonstrator, and injuries to several others.
Chutkan, a native of Kingston, Jamaica, was appointed by then-President Barack Obama to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in June 2014. Before that, she worked at other private-sector law firms and served as a public defender in Washington D.C., before joining BSF.
Chutkan graduated from George Washington University and the University of Pennsylvania law school.
Records indicate Chutkan was a donor to Obama and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., the Examiner reported.