WASHINGTON (CN) — With less than five months until the scheduled start date of Donald Trump’s trial in Washington on charges of attempting to overturn the 2020 election and maintain his grip on power, media organizations asked a federal judge to make the historic proceedings more publicly accessible.
A motion filed by NBCUniversal Media, the owner of outlets like NBC News and MSNBC, made public Wednesday requests that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan allow the trial to be televised, either by allowing a pool camera shared between media organizations or the use of the court’s cameras.
"The American public has an extraordinary interest in seeing and hearing this trial of former President Trump. The indictment claims that, as the sitting United States president, Mr. Trump sought to subvert the peaceful transfer of presidential power and the foundational principles of our nation’s democracy,” attorney Theodore Boutrous Jr. wrote for NBC in the filing dated Oct. 11.
“Yet, unless this court permits it, only the very small number of people who can access the physical courtroom will ever be able to see and hear the trial for themselves … if ever a trial were to be televised, this one should be, for the benefit of American democracy,” Boutrous said.
The motion cites two examples of presidents testifying in criminal proceedings in the Washington federal courthouse that were televised.
First was a deposition of Ronald Reagan, after he left office, during the prosecution of his National Security adviser John Poindexter, a video of which was played during a later trial. A judge later ruled that the video would be made available to the media.
The second was President Bill Clinton testimony before a D.C. grand jury while still in office during his impeachment proceedings. Congress released that testimony a month later, making public a proceeding that is normally held under lock and key.
Boutrous said that by making those examples public, the American people were able to “assess the fairness of those proceedings,” a particularly salient point as Trump has publicly decried the Washington case — and his many other criminal and civil cases across the country — as a “witch hunt.”
“NBCU News Group brings this application to ensure that present and future American generations see and hear this even more momentous occasion — the first time any U.S. president, former or current, will go on trial as a criminal defendant,”
The motion joins a similar request by a coalition of media organizations, including ABC News, The Associated Press, C-SPAN, the New York Times, Politico, The Washington Post and more, which requested the court allow news outlets to record and telecast the proceedings, or that the court either livestream the trial on YouTube or publish recordings at the end of each day.
Each courtroom, including Chutkan’s, has several cameras that are primarily used to facilitate virtual hearings and allow parties attending via Zoom to see the judge, or to stream high-profile cases to the media and public overflow rooms in the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse.
Thus far, each hearing in Trump’s case, from his Aug. 3 arraignment before U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya to a Monday hearing over a now-issued gag order, have been streamed in this manner. But for members of the public to attend these hearings, either in Chutkan’s courtroom or the overflow rooms, they have had to line up for hours to get a seat — including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who lined up to attend Monday’s hearing.
To date, the only images that have left the courtroom have been those created by sketch artist William Hennessy, as photography is strictly prohibited within the courthouse and especially in the media and overflow rooms.
Unlike the federal trials in Washington and Florida, Trump's criminal trial in Fulton County, Georgia, is expected to be televised thanks to looser rules governing cameras in state courthouses there.
Boutrous acknowledged the federal rules that sets such strict limits on disseminating images from federal proceedings but argued the rule only applies to broadcasting from the courtroom and does not prohibit the use of a single pool camera that can relay the feed to each outlet’s studio and be broadcast from there, or a similar system using the court’s cameras. Any interpretation of the rule as a ban against such a proposal would “present serious First Amendment issues.”
According to the motion, special counsel Jack Smith’s office indicated that they oppose the motion. As of the filing on Oct. 11, Boutrous had not heard from Trump’s defense team.
Boutrous seeks a hearing before Chutkan so she can hear oral arguments in the matter.
This story has been updated to state correctly that the deposition video of former President Ronald Reagan was played during the trial of adviser John Poindexter, not Robert McFarlane.
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