Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
Former President Donald Trump’s trial in Fulton County, Georgia will be livestreamed and televised, but his federal trials in Florida and Washington, D.C. will not. That’s because of the federal judiciary’s ban on cameras in the courtroom.
That ban is championed by Chief Justice John Roberts, who chairs the Judicial Conference of the United States, the body that sets policies for the federal courts. In 2018, Roberts opined on the issue of how cameras could help educate people about what the court does, saying: “That’s not our job to educate people.”
His former colleague Justice David Souter put it even more strongly when he testified before a House Appropriations Committee in 1996, saying, “the day you see a camera come into our courtroom, it’s going to roll over my dead body.” Souter retired in 2009, so he never had to deal with that grim potential circumstance.