Dozens of Democratic lawmakers have called on the Judicial Conference—the policy-setting body of the federal judiciary—to allow cameras into the courtroom for Donald Trump’s criminal trials. “Given the historic nature of the charges brought forth in these cases, it is hard to imagine a more powerful circumstance for televised proceedings,” the lawmakers, led by Rep. Adam Schiff, wrote in a letter to Judge Roslynn Mauskopf, who oversees the administration of federal courts. “If the public is to fully accept the outcome, it will be vitally important for it to witness, as directly as possible, how the trials are conducted, the strength of the evidence adduced and the credibility of witnesses.”
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Cameras are currently banned in federal criminal trial courts, where Trump faces charges both for his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. As I reported Thursday, some legal experts—and Trump’s own lawyer—have called for a change to the camera policy, given the immense national interest in cases against the former president. Without cameras, some have noted, the public would also be at greater risk of consuming deceptive or misleading information about the proceedings. “The idea that there is no visual primary source available to the larger public is unjustifiable in general, but especially when you know there will be so many competing narratives and so much misinformation about what’s happening in the courtroom,” Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, a judicial reform advocacy group, told me.
The lawmakers’ letter—whose signers include members of the January 6 committee Reps. Bennie Thompson, Zoe Lofgren, and Jamie Raskin—similarly emphasized the need for transparency. They urged the Judicial Conference “to take additional steps, including live broadcasting, to ensure the facts of this case are brought forward, unfiltered, to the public.”
There are “at least two pathways” to changing the policy, former acting US solicitor general Neal Katyal told me: the Judicial Conference, which is chaired by Chief Justice John Roberts, could vote to amend the rules—something they’ve been reluctant to do so in the past—or Congress could pass a law.
Lawmakers have pushed for cameras in the courtrooms in the past, as a bipartisan group of senators did in a bill earlier this year that would give federal judges the ability to permit TV coverage of their trials. But Trump’s cases bring heightened urgency to the matter. “That legislation could be a model for a specific bill in the Trump case,” Katyal wrote in the Washington Post.