How to ensure a fair trial for Trump: Allow cameras in courtroom
Like most journalists, I firmly believe that the press should have broad access to government proceedings. But I’ve always been a little squeamish about allowing TV cameras inside courtrooms during high-profile cases. One need only recall O.J. Simpson’s 1995 murder trial — the preening defendant, the strutting lawyers, the celebrity-seeking jurors — to understand how a solemn duty can turn into a media circus. But in the existential matter of whether former president Donald Trump criminally conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election, the benefits of televising his trial far outweigh the risks.
Last week, the Georgia judge in Trump’s election racketeering case ruled that the trial would be live-streamed on the Fulton County court’s YouTube channel. “In line with the spirit of transparency here,” Superior Court judge Scott McAfee said, Trump’s trial would be treated like any other in Georgia, where trials are routinely aired on the court channel. McAfee also said he would allow a press pool camera to film the trial, as well as laptops and cellphones for note-taking, so long as they don’t “disrupt the administration of justice.”
As with many of Trump’s embroilments with the law — the mug shot, the twin impeachments, the four separate indictments — the Georgia case would be unprecedented: the first and possibly the only criminal trial of the former president to be televised live. Doing so raises a host of worries about witness intimidation and general grandstanding, but a very dark cloud hovers over American democracy, and cameras would let the light in.
The American people deserve to see testimony in Trump’s election interference case presented unfiltered, under oath, and upon pain of perjury — not distorted through partisan memes on social media. The public would be more likely to accept the outcome of the trial if they can see the strength of the evidence, and the credibility of the witnesses, with their own eyes.
Georgia’s relatively open system is one good reason why the case should not be moved to a federal court, where cameras are generally prohibited. Last week, Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, asked US District Court Steve Jones to grant just that, saying his alleged behavior in the Georgia racketeering case was conducted under “color” of his role as a federal official. (Those actions include arranging the infamous phone call where Trump asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” him 11,780 votes to flip the 2020 results in that state.) Jones will make a decision on that motion soon, and allowing Meadows to switch could open a path for Trump and his 17 other codefendants. True, in July a federal judge denied Trump’s effort to move the Stormy Daniels hush-money case from New York to a federal court, but the argument that reimbursing fixer Michael Cohen for payoffs to a porn star is within Trump’s official duties was, understandably, a harder sell.
It’s impossible to know how a live broadcast would affect the outcome of the trial, or Trump’s own political fortunes. One of his lawyers in the federal Jan. 6 case, John Lauro, said he would “love to see” that trial televised. But in a fund-raising letter explaining why he waived a personal appearance when he entered a not guilty plea in Georgia last week, Trump himself blasted the idea. “The Communist Democrats would love nothing more than for me to be stuck in court in a televised spectacle as a way to keep me off the campaign trail,” he fumed in the letter. Never mind that judge McAfee was appointed by Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp. Send in the clowns!
One serious argument against televising the Georgia proceedings — or any of the federal cases, for that matter — is that it could put witnesses, jurors, and even judges at risk of violent harassment, or worse, by Trump partisans. Judges and attorneys in all four cases against the former president have received death threats following Trump’s own reckless attacks on his social media channels. But cloistering court proceedings because of threats would be succumbing to the ultimate heckler’s veto. Georgia officials should take security precautions by, for example, obscuring the faces of the jurors. But letting the proceedings unfold in the public eye is more likely to ensure a fair trial — for Trump as well as for his accusers.