Judge to impose limited protective order after prosecutor interview leaks in Trump's Georgia trial

On Wednesday we learned that prosecutor's interviews of attorney Jenna Ellis and three others indicted alongside Donald Trump for attempting to overturn Georgia's election results were leaked by Jonathan Miller, the lawyer for another codefendant, one who has not struck a plea deal like Ellis and Trump gadfly-sort-of-lawyer Sidney Powell have.

The main news to come from the tapes was Ellis' retelling of a December 2021 conversation with White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino in which Scavino told her Trump was "not going to leave" the White House in January—whether the law was on his side or not. It's not clear why Miller thought leaking the tapes would help his own client, former Coffee County Elections Director Misty Hampton. District Attorney Fani Willis was furious at the leak, which came about due to the pre-trial discovery process that requires prosecutors to share their evidence with defendants.

It now looks like it's a near-certainty that the leak will result in a tamping down of the evidence the public will be allowed to see before the trial starts. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee is signaling that he will be drafting up a protective order in which evidence prosecutors label "sensitive" is temporarily barred from public release. This was a compromise reached between prosecutors and the defense after the defense and news outlets both argued that all evidence should be publicly released due to the enormous public interest in Trump's prosecution.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that McAfee specifically cited the leaked tapes in agreeing that a new protective order was necessary. "It seems like having open files for everyone to start litigating the case before we actually get inside of a courtroom comes with a lot of side effects that I don’t know if we've thought through," noted McAfee.