The identity of the man responsible for leaking videos of testimony from two former co-defendants in the racketeering case against former President Donald Trump was revealed in court Wednesday.
Jonathan Miller, who is representing Trump co-defendant and former Coffee County Elections Supervisor Misty Hampton, told the court he gave the videos to a media outlet.
“And so that I can go to sleep well tonight, judge, I did release those videos to one outlet,” Miller told the court. “And in all candor to the court, I need the court to know that.”
During a segment with Blayne Alexander, who has been following the trial for NBC, MSNBC played the audio of Miller making that admission.
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District Attorney Fani Willis had asked the judge for a protective order after the videos were leaked, hoping to prevent other evidence from becoming similarly public.
In an “emergency renewed motion” filed with the court Tuesday, Willis asked for an immediate prohibiting any further release of evidence, a hearing on a motion filed previously seeking such a prohibition, and, ultimately, a permanent order protecting the evidence from unauthorized release.
Miller said he felt that the protective order as proposed by the prosecution was unnecessary, as did many of the attorneys for the various co-defendants in the case, Alexander said.
Miller said he released the videos because he felt the public had a right to see them and that the testimony on two of the videos helped his client’s case.
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The judge took no action against Miller for the leak.
Alexander speculated that Miller might not have been the only leaker, given that he said that only two of the four videos and the fact that multiple outlets apparently received the videos.
She then apparently sided with Willis against her own profession, suggesting that the leak showed the need for the protective order to keep evidence out of the hands of reporters like her.
“I do think all of it, though, underscores the DA’s argument that there needs to be a protective order so that nothing like this is released in the future,” she said.
Judge Scott McAfee said that the court and the public had “already seen what may happen if a protective order isn’t put in place, which is onerous logistical burdens that we’re going to have to discuss,” according to WSB-TV.
However, he conceded that a protective order might lessen the risk of further leaks, but could not eliminate that risk.
An attorney for one of the other co-defendants suggested a more limited protective order that would require prosecutors to label individual pieces of evidence as “sensitive,” a designation that the co-defendants could then argue against if they saw fit, WSB-TV reported.
The leaked video testimony has been declared by a number of experts to be harmful to Trump’s defense, if not those of his co-defendants.
“The entire idea behind the indictment is that Donald Trump was driving the bus and doing so in a way that was only intended to secure power,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University, told The Hill. “To the extent that this kind of evidence supports that theory, I think it’s really damning to the good-faith justifications that have been put out by his allies and his attorneys.”
