Donald Trump’s lawyers have said the federal trial planned for next March in which the former president will face charges of trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election should be “fully televised”.
Lawyers representing media outlets had asked Judge Tanya Chutkan to permit cameras in court for Trump’s forthcoming trial in Washington DC. Yesterday, his lawyers filed a response supporting that application. The response has more to say about politics than law.
On her Substack blog, the legal analyst Joyce Vance wrote that “Trump does not really want cameras in the courtroom… It’s meant as a strategic measure to paint himself as martyr and the government as a Soviet-style prosecution.” His lawyers expect the application to be dismissed because cameras are normally banned in federal hearings.
It will be a heavy lift to convince the courts to reverse course, not undoable, but uphill…
And Trump’s lawyers may have inadvertently provided Judge Chutkan with some cover by asking for cameras and claiming Trump’s due process rights would otherwise be violated. Federal courts have traditionally disallowed cameras out of concern for a defendant’s due process rights.
Here, Trump has effectively mooted that argument. He has waived the argument on appeal. There is no reason, other than the existence of an outmoded rule, to prevent the public from observing this most important of trials.
Like Vance, I hope the broadcasting application will be granted.
Thank you, Joshua. I agree that Joyce Vance is a source of much helpful legal comment and sanity.
I have to say that I am myself much more comfortable with our cautious and gradualist approach to televising cases. Mind you, it is so helpful to be reminded that in the States it is more a question of a case by case philosophy than we are sometimes tempted to assume.
For a little while now I have been tempted to think of the civil case presided over by Judge Engoron as rather like an “Al Capone” gambit by stopping his malign gallop over tax evasion. It would appear that, should THAT case continue to go they way it is, his enterprises would go belly up together- as we can hope- with his altogether unfounded reputation for business acumen duly exposed for the fiction it is.
On balance and in all humility I also favour the televising of the “Judge Chutkan “ case as long as this less impressive judge can maintain some sort of control over Trump. The “martyr” myth might thereby be watered down for any observers other than those inexorably wedded to Trumpish loyalty and of course the unprincipled chancers after personal and- as we can now finally begin to hope- short term - advantage as “followers.”
As the poet and lawyer activist Pauli Murray put it, “Hope is a song from a weary throat.”