U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is assigned to the January 6 case against former President Donald Trump, is related to some of the “most influential” Jamaican Marxists.
Special counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump on four counts related to his alleged effort to steal the 2020 election at the beginning of the month. Interestingly, the Article III Project revealed that Chutkan has family ties with the top Marxist revolutionaries in Jamaica.
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1962, Chutkan’s grandfather, Frank Hill, and great uncle, Ken Hill, played a key role in founding Jamaica’s People’s National Party (PNP). Ken Hill was “by far the most influential” member of a Marxist group within the PNP, according to one member of the group.
As one online encyclopedia recounted:
In 1939 Hill joined a Marxist group in the PNP, which became known simply as the left. One member, Richard Hart, wrote, “Ken Hill, by far the most influential, was more pragmatic and less concerned with political theory than most members of the left. 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” (Hart, 1999, p. 56).
Three years later, former Jamaican Governor Sir Arthur Richards jailed Ken and Frank Hill for subversive activity. Richards singled Ken Hill out as “probably the most dangerous subversive agent in Jamaica.”
Chutkan’s mother, Noelle, is Frank Hill’s daughter and Ken Hill’s niece.
Appointed to the federal judiciary in 2014, Chutkan is one of the many far-left judges former President Barack Obama nominated to the federal bench.
In 2021, Chutkan ruled hundreds of pages of the former president’s White House records could be turned over to the January 6 investigating committee despite Trump’s objections, as Breitbart News reported. She also donated to Obama’s 2008 and 2012 political campaigns.
In an unprecedented move, Obama appointed Chutkan and her husband, Peter Krauthamer, to highly sought-after judgeships in Washington, DC. Chutkan’s appointment came two years after Krauthamer was sworn in as a D.C. Superior Court Judge.
Chutkan is also known to give harsher sentences to January 6 defendants than her peers on the federal bench. Four of the six cases where judges sentenced January 6 defendants to prison over federal prosecutors’ requests for lesser punitive measures happened in Chutkan’s courtroom.
As Politifact detailed:
In one instance, Chutkan sentenced Matthew Mazzocco, a Texas man who pleaded guilty to parading, demonstrating or picketing in the Capitol, to 45 days incarceration, 60 hours of community service and $500 restitution. Prosecutors had recommended he be sentenced to 3 months home detention, 36 months probation, 60 hours of community service and $500 restitution.
“If Mr. Mazzocco walks away with probation and a slap on the wrist, that’s not going to deter anyone from trying what he did again,” Chutkan said at Mazzocco’s sentencing hearing. “It does not, in this Court’s opinion, indicate the severity, the gravity, of the offenses that he committed on January 6.”
On Monday, Trump shared a quote from Chutkan during one January 6 defendant’s sentencing where she lamented the former president “remains free to this day.”
Chutkan said:
I see the videotapes. I see the footage of the flags and the signs that people were carrying and the hats that they were wearing, and the garb. And the people who mobbed that Capitol were there in fealty, in loyalty to one man, not to the Constitution, of which most of the people who come before me seem woefully ignorant; not to the ideals of this county and not to the principles of democracy. It’s blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.
“She obviously wants me behind bars. VERY BIASED & UNFAIR,” Trump wrote online.
Jordan Dixon-Hamilton is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at
