Donna Rotunno said Thursday that Judge Tony Graf could stop the Charlie Kirk assassination preliminary hearing and move the case to trial, warning that the court was starting to lose control as the proceeding entered its fourth day.
Rotunno made the remarks on Outnumbered while prosecutors were still pressing ahead with disputed evidence. She said Graf could end the back-and-forth by saying he had heard enough and was ready to move the case on, rather than letting the hearing drift through repeated objections and delays.
The criticism landed as Utah prosecutors played audio clips of police officers interviewing Luna Twiggs, and the defense tried to shut down the recordings from being heard. Rotunno said the judge was not controlling the timing, the scheduling or the deadlines, and argued that the hearing was starting to look less like a focused legal proceeding and more like a place where the same issues kept getting relitigated.
She also said the defense was filing objections at the 11th hour in the middle of the hearing, even though a higher court had already ruled that this was a preliminary hearing and that certain issues should be handled at that stage. In her view, that made the judge’s restraint more than a management problem. It turned the hearing into a test of whether the court would actually move the case forward.
Rotunno said the risk was that Graf could become “Judge [Lance] Ito,” a shorthand for a judge who lets a highly watched case become defined by process rather than direction. She said the continuing objections and delayed rulings were creating an appearance that was not judicial and not expedient, and that people were waiting for the case to move to the next phase.
The hearing involves Tyler Robinson, who turned himself in one day after Charlie Kirk was shot, and he has not entered a plea. That makes the preliminary hearing the stage where prosecutors are still testing the evidence before any trial date is set, which is why every ruling over what jurors may eventually hear matters now.
Rotunno is best known for her defense of Harvey Weinstein, and her comments on Thursday carried the weight of someone who has watched major criminal cases stall when courtroom control slips away. The unresolved question is not whether the hearing has become contentious; it already has. It is whether Graf will keep letting it run on objections, or decide that enough has been heard to send the case to trial.
