Jack Smith opposes Trump request for televised trial, warns of ‘carnival atmosphere’

Special counsel Jack Smith denounced Donald Trump’s request that the trial for his federal election subversion case be televised, accusing the former president on Monday of seeking a “carnival atmosphere” in the courtroom.

Smith’s team wrote in a court filing that Trump “hopes to profit” from such an atmosphere “by distracting, like many fraud defendants try to do, from the charges against him,” which involve allegations that Trump illegally attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

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NBC Universal and other media companies asked the court in October to permit cameras for Trump’s case, and Smith initially stated that he opposed their request, citing a decades-old ban on broadcasting federal court proceedings. Smith doubled down on his stance in the new filing after Trump’s defense team said in a heated and politically charged response last week that Trump sided with the media in wanting his trial televised.

Trump’s defense attorneys argued that “these proceedings should be fully televised so that the American public can see firsthand that this case, just like others, is nothing more than a dreamt-up unconstitutional charade that should never be allowed to happen again.”

Evoking Trump’s long-held stance that the 2020 election was rife with fraud, the attorneys also said Trump wanted the public to “hear all the evidence regarding an election that President Trump believes was rigged and stolen.”

Breaking with traditional court responses, Trump’s attorneys did not reference any court rulings related to televised trials, and Smith’s prosecutors zeroed in on that omission on Monday.

“The defendant’s response does not cite a single rule or case in support of his position, because there are none,” the prosecutors wrote.

They said other high-profile federal cases, including those involving 9/11 terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, received ample public exposure despite adhering to the broadcasting prohibition.

Trump’s heated response about wanting his trial televised came as a surprise after his defense team initially indicated to Smith that Trump took “no position” on the matter. Trump’s stance appeared to change days after the former president appeared in court in New York to testify in a civil fraud case.

Trump’s appearance in that case marked the first time in roughly a decade that he had appeared for substantial questioning on a witness stand, and his testimony stunned observers as he leveled accusations of bias at the judge and the New York attorney general, warned about threats from China and Russia, and lamented violent crime in New York.

“This is a very unfair trial. Very, very, and I hope the public is watching,” Trump said at one point while on the stand.

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Trump, who is the leading Republican presidential candidate, received widespread media coverage that day. That kind of coverage is likely to increase exponentially if cameras are present in the courtroom to capture Trump’s testimonies on video.

“The Court should decline the defendant’s ‘demand’ … that he be placed beyond the rules and above the law,” prosecutors wrote. “And it should avoid the spectacle—and attendant risks of witness intimidation—that the longstanding rules against courtroom broadcasting are designed to avoid.”