When former President Donald J. Trump seems in courtroom earlier than Judge Tanya S. Chutkan on costs of conspiring to subvert American democracy, it won’t be the primary time she has handled high-profile questions associated to Mr. Trump’s makes an attempt to remain in energy after shedding the 2020 election.

Nearly two years in the past, Judge Chutkan rejected Mr. Trump’s efforts to forestall his White House data from being given to the House committee investigating his actions main as much as and through the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol by his supporters — delivering a swift and sharp rebuke concerning the limits of his capability as former president to invoke government privilege.

“Presidents are not kings,” she wrote, “and plaintiff is not president.”

It isn’t clear when Judge Chutkan, 61, and Mr. Trump will first meet. He is about to seem earlier than a Justice of the Peace decide for an preliminary courtroom look on Thursday, the place he’s more likely to be arraigned and enter a plea of not responsible — simply as he did in June in a separate case involving his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House.

But she is going to supervise the trial, the place his presence will be required within the Federal District Court in Washington. Its project to her raised a distinction to the project of the paperwork case to Judge Aileen M. Cannon in Florida.

Where Judge Cannon is a Trump appointee with a conservative background, Judge Chutkan was appointed by President Barack Obama and, earlier than becoming a member of the bench, donated cash to his campaigns. Where Judge Cannon had been a federal prosecutor, Judge Chutkan had been a public defender.

Where Judge Cannon has scant criminal trial experience, Judge Chutkan is extra deeply versed in operating trials. She has been a trial decide for practically a decade. As a judicial nominee in 2014, she wrote that in her prior profession, she had tried about 40 to 45 circumstances to verdict and was a lead protection lawyer in lots of involving “serious felonies, such as homicide, first-degree sexual assault and kidnapping.”

And the place Judge Cannon had beforehand intervened within the paperwork investigation in a approach favorable to Mr. Trump — solely to be overturned by an appeals courtroom — Judge Chutkan dominated in opposition to Mr. Trump within the dispute over White House papers with the Jan. 6 committee, an consequence upheld by an appeals courtroom.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Judge Chutkan got here to the United States to attend faculty at George Washington University and obtained her legislation diploma on the University of Pennsylvania. She spent greater than a decade serving as a court-appointed lawyer for indigent purchasers and labored for a time on the white-shoe legislation agency Boies Schiller & Flexner earlier than becoming a member of the federal bench in Washington in 2014.

She is married to Peter A. Krauthamer, a former affiliate decide of the Superior Court within the District of Columbia, which handles native prison trials. The two met as public defenders within the District of Columbia, she stated at her 2014 confirmation hearing, and have two sons.

At that listening to, she additionally testified that good judges should be “open-minded, fair and prepared.” Each case, she added, should be handled “individually and on its own merits.”

“Impartiality is bedrock,” she stated.

Mr. Trump has a historical past of attacking judges by searching for to painting them as an “Obama judge” or in any other case biased in opposition to him, and Judge Chutkan’s background alerts a extra liberal-leaning outlook.

In her Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire, she described her volunteer expertise for Democratic candidates, together with the 1984 Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Walter Mondale, and a legal professionals’ group that supported Mr. Obama’s 2012 re-election marketing campaign.

A Federal Election Commission database exhibits she donated to the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns, in addition to to the 2008 marketing campaign of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York.

She has additionally dominated in an arguably liberal-leaning approach in a number of notable circumstances.

In 2017, she ruled that an American citizen being held in army detention in Iraq as a suspected member of ISIS had a proper to a lawyer, over the Trump administration’s objections. She additionally blocked the administration from stopping undocumented, pregnant youngsters from gaining access to abortion-related providers.

And in 2019, she issued an injunction halting the Trump administration’s plan to renew the demise penalty, blocking executions of 4 federal convicts.

But her involvement in circumstances associated to Jan. 6 is more likely to entice essentially the most consideration as she takes up what appears destined to be one of the crucial vital prison trials in American historical past. She dealt with each a lawsuit introduced by Mr. Trump searching for to dam his White House data from being handed over to the House Jan. 6 committee and a number of other prison circumstances introduced in opposition to rioters within the Capitol assault.

Over the previous two years, Judge Chutkan has earned a status for handing down powerful penalties to individuals convicted of crimes within the Jan. 6 riot. And whereas she has prevented the kind of pointed barbs in opposition to Mr. Trump that a few of her colleagues on the bench have used to explain the previous president’s position within the assault, she has not been shy in expressing her disdain for the assault.

The occasions of Jan. 6 had been “an attempt of a violent mob to prevent the orderly and peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next” and their efforts “soiled and defaced the halls of the Capitol,” she stated in October 2021 in delivering a harsher sentence to a rioter than what prosecutors had requested.

“The country is watching to see what the consequences are,” she declared, including, “There have to be consequences.”

As a matter of political actuality, it could additionally show vital that Judge Chutkan is Black, an immigrant and a lady. Mr. Trump has a history of attacking judges and prosecutors — particularly those that are girls, members of minority teams or each — in private phrases.

In 2016, Mr. Trump denounced Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was overseeing a fraud case in opposition to Trump University, calling him a “Mexican.” He accused the decide of bias as a result of he wished to construct a wall on the southern border. (Judge Curiel was born in Indiana to folks who had emigrated from Mexico.)

More not too long ago, Mr. Trump went after two Black prosecutors in New York — Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district legal professional, and Letitia James, the New York State legal professional basic — who’ve pursued circumstances in opposition to him. He has additionally lobbed assaults at Fani T. Willis, a Black district legal professional in Georgia who could quickly search his indictment associated to his efforts to overturn the election. Among different issues, he called all three racists.

A calendar for the trial has not but been set, however there’s motive to doubt that Judge Chutkan might be receptive if Mr. Trump follows his well-established follow of attempting to delay courtroom proceedings and run out the clock.

On Wednesday, John Lauro, a lawyer for the previous president, suggested on NBC’s “Today” present that attempting to take the Jan. 6 case to trial in about three months could be “absurd” and stated the protection would want to do its personal investigation. Pointing to the time prosecutors have devoted to the investigation, Mr. Lauro added: “Why don’t we make it equal?”

But Judge Chutkan moved unusually swiftly when she dealt with the lawsuit Mr. Trump introduced searching for to dam the discharge of his White House data. Just 23 days elapsed from when he filed the case and her ruling, by which she emphasised that President Biden didn’t assist his predecessor’s try to invoke government privilege.

That ruling in the end gave the House committee time to work with the data earlier than it accomplished its inquiry and issued a ultimate report.

Mr. Trump’s sample of speaking about authorized issues exterior of courtroom can also take a look at Judge Chutkan’s persistence.

In a 2018 case involving Maria Butina, a Russian accused of illegally appearing as a covert overseas agent through the 2016 marketing campaign, the decide imposed a sweeping gag order after which chastised Ms. Butina’s protection legal professionals for “trying this case in the media.”

At a bond hearing, she scolded a protection lawyer for defying her warning to not publicly focus on proof within the case. “You have overstepped,” Judge Chutkan informed him. “Your comments have crossed the line.”