By Gabe Roth, FTC executive director

Earlier this month, FTC law clerk Cortez Collins and I wrote to the clerks of the Middle District of Pennsylvania and the District of New Jersey to request that an Aug. 15 hearing in USA v. Giraud be livestreamed.

The hearing was not about the merits of the U.S. attorney’s criminal case against the Girauds but about whether President Trump is permitted under federal law to keep his former defense attorney, Alina Habba, in the position of top federal prosecutor in the Garden State.

Habba’s 120-day interim appointment had expired without Senate confirmation, and under federal law, the judges of the District of New Jersey appointed a replacement.

Trump countered that on day 119, he actually withdrew Habba’s nomination, made her the acting U.S. attorney and fired the replacement chosen by the D. N.J. judges, which started the clock anew.

Since this case is of national interest, and since the underlying issue has to do with civil, not criminal, statutory matters, we thought that a court that cares about transparency might have found Rule 53’s prohibition against livestreaming criminal proceedings to be inapplicable.

So we had the following exchange:

Subject: Request for live audio access in USA v. Giraud, 24-768 (Aug. 5)

Dear Ms. Rhoads and Mr. Welsh,

This is Gabe Roth and Cortez Collins from Fix the Court, a nonprofit that promotes transparency in the federal judiciary. We write to request that M.D. Pa., in coordination with D. N.J., provide a live audio stream — or at minimum, a public call-in line — for the Aug. 15 oral argument in USA v. Giraud, case no. 1:24-cr-00768-MWB-1.

While we understand that criminal trials are not eligible for live audio under Judicial Conference policy, we respectfully submit that this non-evidentiary hearing could qualify for such access at the discretion of the Court, consistent with past practices in other jurisdictions and particularly when public interest is high and far outpaces the physical capacity of the Williamsport courtroom.

We believe that allowing live remote access would enhance transparency and promote confidence in the judicial process at this critical juncture.

We appreciate your consideration and look forward to your response.

Sincerely,
Gabe Roth
Executive Director
Fix the Court

Cortez Collins
Law Clerk
Fix the Court

Hours later, we received this response:

Dear Mr. Roth,

We will be governed by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 53 and the Judicial Conference Policy that you referenced. Transparency, and confidence in the judicial process,  is uncompromised, and supported, by the proceeding being held in open Court.

Sincerely,
Peter J. Welsh
Clerk of Court
United States District Court
Middle District of Pennsylvania

I couldn’t leave it there, so I wrote back:

Thank you for responding to my request. But you and I both know that that’s not how things work in the 21st century.

If I or any other concerned member of the public has to drive or fly several hours to make it to the courthouse, and then hope the courtroom isn’t full that day, which it will be, and then rely on a journalist or so-called journalist, who more likely than not, works at a media outlet with a clear partisan bias, to “tell” me what happened during the hearing, that isn’t transparency; that’s ceding the care and the seriousness with which you and your colleagues in the third branch conduct your work to some hack whose account of the proceedings will reach my news feed 1,000 times faster than that of a disinterested journalist.

It beggars belief that the branch would choose to sit idly by when the technology that would solve the issue I mentioned above is, in 2025, so easy to come by.