The protective order issued by Judge Tanya Chutkan in former President Donald Trump's 2020 election coup case, after a morning of hard questioning of both the defense and prosecution, is part of a move to make the trial rock-solid against any appeal Trump might file against a potential conviction, said former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance on MSNBC Friday.
"Ultimately, what this does is everything that a protective order is meant to do," Vance told anchor Ari Melber, an attorney himself. "It protects witnesses, and it protects the jury process. And she has made it clear that she will react swiftly if Trump crosses the line."
"People can think of this, if you want to be really simplistic, like being at the car dealership," said Melber. "You kind of know some of the prices aren't the final price. You go back and forth. And so the Justice Department, well within its rights and strategy, doesn't necessarily start where they think they're going to end. They definitely took — we talked about this — a larger swing on the evidence, basically like, well, maybe you can't talk about anything."
"Let's loop it all in," he continued. "The Trump lawyers, who have a hard case and a hard client, I think everybody understands why, they did say something legally reasonable, which is, surely we can't let the opponent — in their case, Jack Smith — decide what sensitive is and be so overly broad that it restricts that which otherwise doesn't have legal protection. So explain ... a little more of where the judge, who is supposed to be more the arbiter here, where the judge came down on that distinction."
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"Right, so she does a good job of narrowing things a little bit," said Vance. "She does tell them in the courtroom, you all are free to go back and alter this. You can, by agreement, change the scope of what's covered. Very importantly here, tapes are covered. Transcripts are covered. Materials that came from other federal agencies are covered. And there are a couple of risks here that she's trying to head off. And one of the big ones is this: not all of the evidence that the government produces in discovery will be admissible at trial. Ari, as you know, there are some fairly stringent rules about what evidence the government gets to put in front of a jury."
As a result of that, she said, "one of the risks here, if Trump decides to seize on something in one of these transcripts, he could have, if she had not imposed this order, perhaps taken a single line in a recording and played it over and over. And if it was something that ultimately is not admissible in court, there's a real risk of jury taint. So what she's doing here is what every good trial judge does. She's trying to make sure that no matter what happens in her courtroom, it can be affirmed on appeal by the court of appeals."
Watch the video below or at the link.
Joyce Vance says Judge Chutkan is making her trial appeal-proofwww.youtube.com
