CHICAGO – Charges that the leader of a white supremacist group asked someone to murder a Chicago-based federal judge were assigned Monday to a federal judge from Indiana who will travel here to hear the case.

The decision was made so judges on the federal bench in Chicago would not have to sit in a case involving a close colleague.

Matt Hale, 31, is charged with solicitation to commit murder. He’s accused of asking someone to kill U.S. District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow, who was presiding in a trademark infringement suit against him.

Hale is the head of the World Church of the Creator, a white supremacist group. A member, Benjamin Smith, went on a rampage over the July 4 weekend in 1999 that left three dead and nine wounded.

U.S. District Judge James T. Moody of the Northern District of Indiana agreed to travel to Chicago to preside over the murder solicitation case as a visiting judge.

Moody won’t have to travel far, since his courtroom is in Hammond, just across the state line from Calumet City in Chicago’s south suburbs.

Hale, clad in the bright orange jumpsuit of a federal prisoner, appeared briefly before U.S. District Elaine E. Bucklo on Monday and she announced that a judge from outside the Northern District of Illinois would be appointed to preside over the case.

Hale was unable to attend an anti-Somali gathering the World Church held on Saturday in Lewiston, Maine, following his arrest here last week.

He had been scheduled for a bond hearing before Bucklo, but she offered him the opportunity to wait and allow an outside judge to preside over the hearing. Defense attorney Matt Madden of the federal defender’s office said it would be better to wait.