America might finally be able to watch the spectacle of a former president being criminally indicted live on their television and phone screens. A judge in Fulton County, Georgia -- where a grand jury is contemplating that exact indictment -- ruled Monday morning to allow cameras in the courtroom if...
I really hate the idea of giving him any platform to try to turn the trial into a reality shit show. The worst thing that you can do with an attention seeking child is to give them attention.
The flip side is transparency. The more transparency, the less opportunity for outright lies about the process. No amount of truth and reality will matter to the kool-aid chuggers, but there are still some with one foot still in reality.
If it makes you feel any better, as a fan of Knowledge Fight, I followed the Alex Jones Sandy Hook defamation trial in Texas pretty closely. Alex did his best to turn the trial into a circus, throwing out deep state conspiracies, complaining about the process and his first amendment rights on the stand, and otherwise showboating. The judge was on top of it and shut it all down, and a lot of that came back to bite him in the ass. It didn't help that Alex kept doing his show while the trial was ongoing and freshly defaimed the plaintiffs and alluded to the jury as being brainwashed liberals.
I'd imagine the same thing happens here. Whether trying to make a circus out of the proceedings helps Trump in the presidential race, I don't know. But it's not going to do him any favors with the judge and jury.
I saw some of the trial. That judge just radiated the look some parent of a toddler has at MacDonalds. The "I am not going to yell and I am not going to bend. I am the adult, this is the toddler. And that is the way it is going to be"
The judge and jury won't mean a thing if he wins the election and takes office before they convict him. He'll just pardon himself and try to destroy everyone involved in the cases against him. His defense team will focus heavily on delaying the trial.
And then it goes to the Supreme Court and they have a novel theory about pardons or some legal shenanigans where he can count time in the White House as time served.
It is nothing to do with transparency. Courtrooms are open to the public in most cases and open the press in all cases. Written transcripts are widely available. It is nothing to do with being able to tell what's happening inside it's the ability of the media to be able to dice and cut little clips for their segments little blurbs little gachas little reaction shots with no context that they can feed to their viewers without any sense of journalistic integrity. Cameras in a courtroom are only about sensationalist media. They have always and always will uproot the actual movement of Justice. We've seen it before we'll see it again here, but probably worse since it's him.
Way too early for a jury, but when cameras are in courtrooms they’re not allowed to do things like show the jury, or show witnesses or evidence that the judge rules must remain confidential. Any violation and the photographer could be held in contempt.
It's tough because the last few high profile cases to allow cameras in the courtroom have if anything shown that too much transparency can be a bad thing, especially when you make a spectacle out of a process that anyone who isn't a trial attorney isn't going to properly understand, but will certainly draw their own conclusions regardless