I Guess 🤷🏻‍♂️

Transparency will be crucial in the trials of the U.S. v. Donald J. Trump.

It’s why dozens of my colleagues joined me today in urging that these proceedings be broadcast for the public.

If the American people are to accept the outcome, it will be vitally important for them to… pic.twitter.com/xYY2xuooYd

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) August 4, 2023

The J6 committee had public televised hearings organized to make presentations during prime time. 

And yet most people still don’t know what they established or what was even presented.

A trial is not a proceeding organized for broadcast. It would not be conducted in prime time, but in daylight hours. It would involve testimony that is hardly riveting or all that comprehensible. (I remember the Watergate hearings. It wasn’t all John Dean fingering Nixon.) It will involve a large cast of characters talking about things that won’t really make sense even to the jury, until they get the jury charge and have to answer questions the viewers at home won’t even see. (The Watergate hearings grew so arcane I think it spawned a cottage industry if Ph.D.’s trying to explain it.)

And the dialogue won’t be written by Andrew Sorkin.

Most people won’t watch it. The ones who do will have a hard time following it, much less understanding it (you think legal commentary is bad now!), and it won’t really achieve the goal of “transparency.” I may be able to look through the glass, but if I don’t know what I’m seeing, I probably won’t look for long.

And we’ll end up with sound bites on Fox and Acyn and Rupar, and worse commentary on the Big 3 (I watched NBC talk about Trump’s arraignment today. I won’t sit through that mindless drivel again soon.), and no better understanding than we’d have otherwise.

Dese are de conditions dat prevail. Sitting through weeks of broadcast federal trials will not make seasoned legal analysts of us all, not cure what ails our partisan politics.

The Special Committee hearings aired Nixon’s crimes in summer-long detail, and yet no small part of the country decided he was railroaded anyway. 

Besides, Roberts is not going to change the gravitational constant of the Federal court universe for this.  Period. EOD.

So it goes.