Trump wants to relocate his D.C. criminal case. His judge has previously rejected his arguments.

Donald Trump and his lawyer are touting several arguments for moving the former president’s newest — and most damaging — criminal case out of Washington, D.C. The judge in his case, Tanya Chutkan, has in recent years rejected all of them.

Trump’s arguments center on two claims: that Washington D.C.’s liberal politics would deprive him of an impartial jury, and that the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol stirs an emotional response in Washington, D.C. residents that is unique to the region. His lawyer, John Lauro, said Sunday he intends to survey D.C. residents to back up these claims and present findings to the judge.

Trump’s biggest obstacle: Chutkan — along with nearly every federal judge on the bench in Washington, D.C. — has already rejected versions of these arguments in the hundreds of criminal cases stemming from the Jan. 6 attack. A review of Chutkan’s rulings on these motions suggests Trump is unlikely to fare any better.

At the heart of Chutkan’s analysis — like most of her colleagues’ as well — is a rejection of Trump’s premise. Just because a juror is affiliated with one political party — and even opposes the political views of someone facing charges — does not mean they are incapable of setting aside those views to judge a case based on evidence and facts.

“People in this country have strong views … we expect people to have opinions. And one of the things — it's fine to have an opinion,” Chutkan said in September 2022, swatting aside defendant Russell Alford’s bid to relocate his Jan. 6 case. “But what I'm going to be instructing the jury is ‘can you put aside your opinion and adjudge the defendant based on the evidence?’ And it's amazing how, I have found, how seriously jurors take that charge. And what we're looking for is not people without opinions; what we're looking for is people who are able to put aside their opinion and focus their decision solely on the evidence presented in this courtroom.”

The protection for prosecutors and defendants concerned about juror bias is typically a thorough vetting process — known as “voir dire” — in which the judge and lawyers get to grill potential jurors under oath about their background, views and experiences, screening out those who might be incapable of deciding the case fairly. This process has helped seat jurors in other politically explosive recent cases, including the seditious conspiracy trials of leaders of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, who were charged with helping orchestrate and exacerbate the Jan. 6 attack.

Often, predictions about rampant bias in the jury pool are put to rest after interviews reveal jurors with diverse political viewpoints, little knowledge of the cases or issues present and no preconceived notions about the defendants or their potential guilt or innocence. And courts uniformly prefer to wait for this process to play out before considering a venue transfer.

Courts’ overwhelming reluctance to relocate trials is rooted in the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee for “a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.” Appellate courts have repeatedly found that venue transfers are justified only in the most extreme circumstances — and even then only after an extensive voir dire has proven it impossible to seat a fair jury. Those circumstances include a tiny jury pool — much smaller than Washington’s 600,000-plus population of potential jurors — and pretrial publicity that uniquely taints that particular district.

To be sure, Trump’s case is an unprecedented test for the courts — whether in Washington, D.C. or anywhere else. He has near-universal name recognition and has spent years stoking the passions of his supporters and the enmity of his rivals, making efforts to seat an impartial jury Herculean no matter the district.

Lauro, saying he wants to get the trial “out of the Washington, D.C. mindset,” has floated moving the case to West Virginia, a state that Trump won overwhelmingly.

But Lauro’s plan to bolster his arguments with surveys may not get him very far. Judges have looked skeptically at pretrial surveys and polls defendants often point to as proof of bias in the jury pool. For one thing, most of that bias can be screened out during the voir dire process, they note. And more to the point, the surveys can paint a misleading picture.

“The proper means for determining whether District residents are biased is not an 800-person phone survey commissioned by one party, but rather, voir dire, which makes practical sense,” Chutkan ruled in Alford’s case in April 2022.

In her ruling, Chutkan noted that Alford cited the same statistic Trump now cites: That 92 percent of Washington, D.C.’s presidential vote went for Joe Biden. But she called Alford’s claim “misleading and ultimately unavailing.” That’s because it didn’t account for a large share of D.C. residents who didn’t vote but would also be in the jury pool, excluding “many potential jurors who may not closely follow politics.” Some of the surveys cited by Alford and others have shown more than 40 percent of D.C. residents do not identify as Democrats.

“Defendant’s own evidence thus paints a more complex picture of the District’s political views than he asserts,” Chutkan noted.

Lauro was pressed on the “political bias” argument Sunday on a podcast hosted by Florida defense lawyer David Markus, and he conceded that it’s not actually the centerpiece of Trump’s forthcoming effort to relocate his trial. Rather, Lauro said, it’s the impact of Jan. 6 on Washingtonians.

“The political piece is in play to some extent. But I think you’re right, it’s more of whether or not you’re facing this roadblock of bias and whether the community you’re trying the case in front of is affected by the case in an emotional, passionate way, which certainly Washington, D.C. was,” he said.

But this argument, too, has gone nowhere in the courts — including Chutkan’s. She noted in Alford’s case that the immediate impacts of Jan. 6 on Washington, D.C. had largely abated, and the Supreme Court — in a case rooted in the Enron scandal — has itself concluded that passage of time is an important factor in considering a motion to transfer venue. In addition, the political passions stirred by Jan. 6 are evident across the country and unlikely to be more pronounced in any particular district, Chutkan noted.

She cited some of the touchstone cases for previous efforts to transfer venue — including the Enron case; the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, who unsuccessfully tried to move his trial out of Boston; and cases stemming from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in Washington and New York and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

“Courts routinely conclude that defendants can receive a fair trial in the location where they committed their crimes, even though some members of the community were victimized,” she ruled.