(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) Judge Tanya S. Chutkan hails from a long line of foreign Marxist revolutionaries, the New York Post reported.
Like Chutkan—who is presiding over the federal lawfare attack targeting former President Donald Trump for challenging the 2020 election outcome—some of her recent ancestors even became controversial figures for attempting to overthrow the political system in their native Jamaica.
Chutkan is the granddaughter of Frank Hill, a Jamaican communist revolutionary. Frank and his brother, Ken, were both jailed by Jamaica’s British governor during World War II due to their subversive political activism.
The brothers were also expelled from the People’s National Party of Jamaica due to their communist views.
In Richard Hart’s Towards Decolonisation: Political, Labour and Economic Developments in Jamaica 1938–1945, Hart noted that the Hills were more interested in action than abstract theorizing.
According to Hart, Ken–Chutkan’s great-uncle–was deeply influential.
“Ken Hill, by far the most influential, was more pragmatic and less concerned with political theory than most members of the left,” Hart wrote in 1999. “He probably began to consider himself a communist both as a result of the influence of his brother Frank and also his observation of the course of world events.”
Her genealogy helps cast new light on Chutkan, whose own political biases both in and out of thoe courtroom have been well documented.
She donated substantially to former President Barack Obama—who wound up elevating her to the federal judgeship in June 2014, after then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid used the “nuclear option” to eliminate filibusters on judicial confirmations.
Among the controversial statements she has made from the bench has has been a robust defense of the violent and lawless race riots in the summer of 2020, following the death of George Floyd.
“People gathered all over the country last year to protest the violent murder by the police of an unarmed man,” Chutkan said in a 2021 hearing, downplaying the actions that led to at least 25 deaths and billions of dollars in property damage, according to the Washington Examiner.
“Some of those protesters became violent,” she continued. “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.”
Four people—all Trump-supporting rallygoers—died during the roughly four-hour protest at the U.S. Capitol. Only one of those, Ashli Babbitt, was confirmed to have been a victim of homicide.
While initial estimates on the damage to the Capitol were $1.5 million, lawmakers were able to balloon that to more than $2.7 million after two years.
Chutkan, meanwhile, has continued to dole out disproportionately excessive sentences for the political dissidents involved in the Jan. 6 uprising, perhaps as revenge for the British jailing of her politically subversive grandfather and uncle.
Most recently, in an overtly partisan move, she set the trial date for Trump the day before next year’s Super Tuesday election.
Headline USA’s Ben Sellers contributed to this report.
