Judge May Unseal Documents Showing How Trump Blocked Aides From Testifying

A federal judge this week is mulling whether or not to unseal court documents that show how Donald Trump attempted to block multiple aides from testifying in front of a grand jury. The grand jury in question is the one convened by the DOJ looking into attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, and unsealing the court documents would show the public just how desperate Trump is to shut his people up and hide the truth. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

A federal judge this week asked the United States Department of Justice to respond as to why they should continue to keep sealed evidence from a grand jury showing that Donald Trump repeatedly prevented his own aids, former aids from test testifying in front of the grand jury that is investigating the attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, which of course includes the fake elector scheme. You see several media outlets, um, Politico, New York Times, and a couple others have been trying to get their hands on these court documents that, of course right now are under Seal And Chief Judge Bell Howell of the US District Court for Washington DC has asked the Justice Department, like, Why do we have to keep this under wraps? I think maybe we ought to release it to the media. I think the public might wanna be interested or might be interested in, uh, knowing how Donald Trump was actually working to circumvent justice by preventing his own people from testifying in front of this grand jury.

It's not anything that if revealed is going to tarnish the grand jury. It's not anything that could, you know, impede their investigation. This is mostly something that is inconsequential to the investigations and the desired result of the grand jury. So that in a nutshell is kind of what Judge Bell is telling the doj. Like, tell us why we should keep this under seal, otherwise, I'm giving it to the media outlets. So that may happen, by the way, within the coming days, this information could be unsealed and it would reveal how Donald Trump has, uh, you know, done his best to prevent his former people from testifying in front of this grand jury. Now, here's the thing, Don't get excited. Don't think that, Oh wow, this seems like evidence of obstruction of justice or witness tampering, right? No, that's not what we're talking about here. There is so far, and maybe it's different if we get the documents, who knows, right?

But so far, there's no evidence to suggest that Donald Trump has committed obstruction of justice, that he is engaged in any kind of witness tampering. All he's done that we know of is exert executive privilege over the conversations that he's had with these individuals. Some of them, he has exerted attorney client privilege, which is even stronger than executive privilege because if he's claiming executive privilege, all that needs to happen is for Biden to come out and say, Nope, no executive privilege. I'm the only guy that can make that determination and I'm not gonna make it. But the attorney client privilege one of course, is a little bit different. You do have to go through those. There is, you know, very strict laws governing that, but it's not obstruction. However, I

Do think that it is important for the public to understand what Donald Trump has done behind the scenes to prevent his people from testifying. I do not think for a second that any of these conversations he has had with him any of the attempts to stop them from, uh, testifying. I don't think personally any of it is covered by privilege. That has become Donald Trump's big crutch, and it's a crutch that is, you know, getting weaker and weaker by the day. We've seen it with the document scandal, and we're most likely gonna see it with this particular grand jury investigation.