The Judicial Tenure Commission used courtroom videos to make its case against Judge Kirsten Nielsen Hartig. Those same videos were never accessible to voters during her re-election. The master appointed in the Hartig JTC proceeding filed a report mischaracterizing Reeds’ video-based testimony as grounded in transcripts. Separately, in the Hallman First Amendment appeal where Reeds is arguing the public has no right to court recordings, his legal team filed their appellee brief the day after the master’s report dropped. Reeds testified from video in one proceeding and argues against video access in another. None of this is a coincidence.
Now Read the Proof.
The man arguing in federal court that the public has no right to court recordings handed the JTC a stack of videos and testified from them for hours. The March 3, 2026 hearing transcript is right here. Judge for yourself.
READ THE TRANSCRIPTWhat the Transcript Actually Shows
On the morning of March 3, 2026, Judge Travis Reeds returned to the witness stand before the Neutral in the formal JTC complaint proceeding against Hon. Kirsten Nielsen Hartig of the 52-4 District Court in Troy. His testimony that day was built around video, not paper.
Disciplinary Counsel Molly Kettler walked Reeds through exhibit after exhibit, each one a courtroom video of a Hartig proceeding. She played DC208. She played DC212. DC214. DC216. DC217. DC219. DC221. DC223. DC205. The transcript reflects the same sequence, over and over: “Video played.” Then Kettler would ask Reeds what he observed. Then Reeds would walk through the procedural failures he saw on screen.
| Proceeding | JTC Formal Complaint No. 109, In re Hon. Kirsten Nielsen Hartig, 52-4 District Court |
| Hearing volume | Volume 21 (pages 4873-4972) |
| Witness | Hon. Travis Reeds, direct examination (cont.) and cross-examination |
| Video exhibits admitted | DC205, DC208, DC212, DC214, DC216, DC217, DC219, DC221, DC223 (.mp4 files) |
| MHC transcripts admitted | DC305-DC322 (under seal) |
| Neutral | Hon. Jennifer A. Mazzuchi (P51418) |
| Disciplinary counsel | Molly Kettler (P59877), Robert M. Kalec (P38677) |
| Respondent’s counsel | Donald D. Campbell (P43088), Katharine B. Smith (P86301), Collins Einhorn Farrell PC |
The exhibit list tells the story before the testimony even begins. Exhibit DC208 is listed as “Edward Alviso, 24-001941.mp4.” DC212 is “Israel Garcia-Garcia, 23-001609.mp4.” DC214, DC216, DC217, DC219, DC221, DC223, DC205 are all .mp4 files. These are not transcripts. These are video recordings of Hartig’s courtroom, obtained and submitted by Reeds at the JTC’s request.
Reeds confirmed as much in his own words. When asked whether he had provided video examples to the JTC, he testified: “Yes.” He described his selection method with notable candor: “When you asked for these videos, I literally just threw a dart. I just opened up any random day because I know there’s going to be problems, and so I just pulled these from random days. It’s not like I searched around. Pulled up any day’s video in a criminal call in order to find issues.”
Reeds testified that he selected videos for the JTC by pulling randomly from Hartig’s court calendar, stating that he expected to find problems on any given day. The implication is that the issues were not isolated incidents but a pattern visible in routine court proceedings.
The mental health court transcripts, DC305 through DC322, were a separate evidentiary batch, admitted under seal immediately before Reeds took the stand that morning. They are not the foundation of the video testimony. They are a different category of evidence entirely.
What the Master’s Report Says Instead
The master appointed in the related First Amendment litigation filed her report on June 9, 2026. On page 30, she begins a paragraph with language that attributes Reeds’ documented concerns to the sealed transcripts: the report characterizes exhibits DC305 through DC322 as validating his testimony.
That framing collapses a critical distinction. Reeds’ direct examination testimony on March 3 was organized around videos. He watched them. He commented on what he saw in real time. His concerns were rooted in the visual record of Hartig’s courtroom conduct as captured on video. The sealed mental health court transcripts were introduced as a separate evidentiary item and were not the basis for the testimony covered in the excerpt now on the record.
The master’s report summarizes Reeds’ testimony as grounded in the mental health court transcripts (DC305-322). The March 3 JTC hearing transcript shows that his direct examination testimony was grounded in video exhibits. These are not the same evidence, and the distinction is not minor: it goes to what Reeds actually reviewed, when, and in what format.
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Explore The Lab ?The Timing Problem
Running parallel to the JTC misconduct proceeding is a separate federal First Amendment appeal, Hallman v. Reeds et al., Case No. 25-2166 in the Sixth Circuit. Dr. Samantha Hallman is challenging Michigan court policies that restrict public access to courtroom audio and video recordings. Clutch Justice has covered that litigation here. Travis Reeds is a named appellee.
Hallman filed her appellant brief on April 8, 2026 (Document 13), arguing in detail that transcripts are an inadequate substitute for audio and video recordings. The master filed her report in the Hartig JTC proceeding on June 9, 2026, mischaracterizing Reeds’ video-based testimony as grounded in transcripts. Reeds’ side filed their corrected appellee brief in the Hallman appeal the following day, June 10 (Document 26), arguing there is no First Amendment right to access or copy court recordings.
The sequence matters. On June 9, the master in the Hartig JTC proceeding filed a report recasting Reeds’ video-based testimony as grounded in transcripts. On June 10, Reeds’ legal team filed their appellee brief in the Hallman appeal arguing that transcripts are a constitutionally adequate substitute for video. The master’s report, in a separate case, had just spent the day before making exactly that argument for them, on the evidentiary record, without apparently meaning to. Whether that was coordinated is a question the record cannot answer. What the record does show is that both documents work in the same direction, serve the same argument, and arrived one day apart across two proceedings in which Travis Reeds is a central figure.
Reeds testified before the JTC using videos he personally provided. His legal team argued the next day in federal court that the public has no First Amendment right to those same videos. The master’s report, filed between those two events, describes the video testimony as transcript-based. Each document, taken alone, is explicable. Taken together, in sequence, they tell a coherent story about how the same evidence gets characterized differently depending on who is asking and why.
What Reeds’ Brief Actually Argues
The corrected appellee brief filed June 10 by Reeds’ legal team, Giarmarco, Mullins and Horton, makes four principal arguments against Hallman’s First Amendment claim. Each one deserves examination on its own terms.
The first argument is that there is no historical tradition of public access to court recordings, and that Hallman failed to establish one. The brief cites the Sixth Circuit’s prior decision in Stevens v. Michigan State Court Administrative Office, which declined to resolve the “experience and logic” test because the plaintiff there had not built an adequate historical record. Reeds’ team argues Hallman made the same mistake.
The problem with that argument is what it requires the court to ignore. The right of public access to proceedings does not derive from a history of access to the specific technology used to document them. It derives from the long-established principle that courts are public institutions and their conduct is subject to public scrutiny. Reeds’ brief acknowledges that courtrooms have historically been open. It then argues, in effect, that openness only means you were allowed to be in the room, and that nothing produced inside that room becomes a public record unless a legislature says so. That is a narrow reading of First Amendment access doctrine that the brief’s own cited cases do not fully support.
Reeds’ brief argues there is no historical tradition of access to recordings because recordings are a modern technology. Applied consistently, that principle would have foreclosed First Amendment access to transcripts when transcription was new, to photographs when courtroom photography was new, and to broadcast coverage when radio was new. The brief does not explain why the constitutional analysis should freeze at the moment a new documentation technology appears rather than following the underlying principle.
The Supreme Court’s experience-and-logic test, established in Press-Enterprise Co. v. Superior Court, 478 U.S. 1 (1986), asks two questions: whether the proceeding has historically been open to the public, and whether openness plays a significant positive role in its functioning. Courtrooms have been open by tradition for centuries. The Sixth Circuit itself extended that principle beyond criminal trials to quasi-judicial proceedings in Detroit Free Press v. Ashcroft, 303 F.3d 681 (6th Cir. 2002), finding a First Amendment right of access to deportation hearings because they had “traditionally been open to the public, and openness undoubtedly plays a significant positive role in this process.” Reeds’ brief does not engage with the logic prong at all. It focuses entirely on whether there is a historical tradition of access to the specific technology of video recordings, rather than asking whether the proceedings those recordings document have historically been open. That is the wrong question. Press-Enterprise never required a plaintiff to establish a tradition of access to a particular documentation format. It required a tradition of openness in the proceeding itself. Michigan courtrooms are open. Reeds’ brief cannot wish that tradition away by pointing to the newness of the camera.
The second argument is that access to the room is constitutionally sufficient, and that requiring courts to provide copies of recordings goes beyond what the First Amendment demands. The brief leans heavily on Nixon v. Warner Communications for the proposition that even when recordings exist and are played in open court, no constitutional right to copies follows. That case involved the Watergate tapes. It was decided in 1978, before digital reproduction cost nothing, before the internet existed, and before the practical reality that a transcript and a recording are experienced entirely differently by the public became a matter of empirical record rather than speculation.
The brief does not engage with that gap. It treats a 1978 decision about reel-to-reel tape duplication as a clean analogue for 2026 digital video access. It is not.
The brief’s reliance on Nixon v. Warner Communications for the proposition that access to information contained in a recording satisfies the First Amendment assumes that a transcript and a recording contain the same information. Judge Reeds’ own March 3 testimony demolishes that assumption. He testified by watching videos and describing what he observed in demeanor, procedure, and conduct. He did not testify by reading transcripts. His own words establish that the recording and the transcript are not the same thing.
Reeds’ team leans on Nixon v. Warner Communications, 435 U.S. 589 (1978), as though it settles the question. It does not. Nixon held that no common law right required the physical release of the Watergate tape reels for commercial duplication. It was not a First Amendment access case. It addressed a common law right, not a constitutional one, and it addressed tape duplication in the pre-digital era, not access to documentation of open judicial proceedings. More critically, the Press-Enterprise cases directly addressed what Reeds is really arguing here, and went the other way. The Supreme Court in Press-Enterprise I, 464 U.S. 501 (1984), rejected the argument that the right to attend a proceeding is satisfied by a later transcript, stating that the value of openness is in its real-time, observable nature, not in a paper record produced afterward. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press notes explicitly that the Press-Enterprise cases established that transcripts released after the fact are not sufficient to ensure public confidence in court proceedings. That is the doctrinal foundation Hallman’s brief is building on. Reeds’ brief relies on a 1978 common law case to answer a 1986 First Amendment holding. That is not a response. It is an evasion.
The third argument is that failed legislation proves there is no constitutional right. The brief points to the Lockerbie Victims Access Act, the proposed Sunshine in the Courtroom Act, and a dead Michigan Senate bill as evidence that access to court recordings is a matter for legislatures, not courts. If Congress had to pass a law to allow Lockerbie families to watch proceedings remotely, the argument goes, that is proof the First Amendment does not require it.
That argument proves considerably less than the brief suggests. Legislatures routinely codify rights that already exist constitutionally, either to clarify their scope, to override conflicting rules, or to provide a statutory remedy alongside a constitutional one. The existence of legislation addressing an area does not establish that the area is constitutionally unoccupied. The brief treats legislative action as a ceiling on constitutional rights rather than a floor under them, and does not explain why that framing is correct.
The Sixth Circuit has repeatedly recognized First Amendment rights of access in the absence of specific legislation requiring it. In United States v. Dejournett, 817 F.3d 479 (6th Cir. 2016), the court held that plea agreements are “the quintessential judicial record, entitled to the protection of the First Amendment right to public access,” and that the public may be denied access “only by an overriding interest based on findings that closure is essential to preserve higher values and is narrowly tailored to serve that interest.” No legislation required that result. Constitutional doctrine did. The argument that failed legislation proves the absence of a constitutional right has it exactly backwards. Congress and state legislatures pass laws to clarify and operationalize constitutional rights all the time. The Civil Rights Act did not create the right to be free from racial discrimination. It enforced a right the Fourteenth Amendment already guaranteed. The same logic applies here. The Michigan Legislature’s failure to mandate video access does not mean the First Amendment does not require it. It means the Legislature has not yet been forced to confront that question by a court that takes the constitutional argument seriously.
The fourth argument is the most candid, and the most revealing. Reeds’ brief states plainly that whether court recordings should be publicly available is a question of public policy to be resolved by public policy makers, not courts. It says Hallman’s position amounts to a good idea that should go to the legislature.
That argument is notable for what it concedes. It does not argue that video secrecy serves a legitimate government interest in any case-specific or proceeding-specific way. It does not argue that release of these particular recordings would harm these particular defendants or compromise these particular proceedings. It argues, categorically, that courts may withhold recordings because legislators have not yet required them to share. That is a position about institutional prerogative, not about any identifiable harm that disclosure would cause.
Reeds’ brief does not argue that releasing the recordings of the proceedings at issue would prejudice a defendant, compromise a pending matter, intimidate a witness, or cause any concrete harm to any identifiable person. It argues that courts have discretion to withhold recordings and that this discretion is valid policy. It offers no limiting principle for when that discretion becomes an accountability problem. The JTC proceeding against Hartig, built on the very videos Reeds himself provided, is that limiting principle made visible.
They Said There Were No Recordings. Then They Showed Her the Recordings.
On April 4, 2022, the District Court Administrator told Hallman in writing that the video recording of her brother’s probation violation hearing was not publicly accessible. Not that it did not exist. That it could not be accessed. That is the position the court took when she wanted documentation of how a judge had treated a defendant.
Later that same year, the Oakland County Circuit Court opened a room at the courthouse where anyone could come in and watch videos of judges running for re-election. The recordings existed. The infrastructure was there. The court knew how to make them accessible when it chose to. The policy just happened to require in-person viewing during normal business hours, which meant that Hallman, whose schedule could not accommodate unlimited courthouse visits, was only able to watch two of the judges on the ballot, not all of them. The recordings were available. Access to them was designed to be inconvenient enough that most people would not complete it.
Reeds’ brief recites both of these facts without comment. It does not attempt to reconcile them. It does not explain why the system that produced no video of a defendant’s hearing was simultaneously capable of producing a viewing room full of judicial recordings for a political researcher. It simply states both things and moves on, apparently confident that no one would notice the distance between them.
The court told Hallman the recording of her brother’s hearing was not publicly accessible. The court then opened a room for anyone to come watch recordings of judges running for re-election. The brief containing both of these facts was filed in defense of a policy the brief describes as a neutral, discretionary framework. Discretion that consistently produces recordings when courts want public attention on judicial candidates, and consistently produces nothing when a defendant wants documentation of how a judge treated him, is not a neutral policy. It is a selective one.
Access Was Available Right Up Until It Became Useful
The brief’s own statement of the case draws the boundary precisely. Hallman was permitted to view recordings of judges running for re-election. When she asked to copy those recordings to publish them, that request was denied. The Circuit Court’s Local Administrative Order allowed viewing but not copying. The District Court’s order allowed neither.
The brief frames this as the orderly operation of a tiered policy framework. What it actually describes is a system that tolerates public awareness of judicial conduct at the level of supervised, expiring, in-courthouse viewing, and cuts off access at exactly the point where that awareness could travel, be shared, be published, or reach a voter who could not make it to the courthouse in person.
Hallman was given a 72-hour expiring link to view the Circuit Court recording. Not to keep. Not to share. To watch, alone, before the link disappeared. That is not transparency. That is a controlled performance of transparency designed to leave no trace.
You may watch. You may not copy. The link expires in 72 hours. You cannot share what you saw. You cannot publish it. You cannot show it to anyone who was not in the room. If you want to inform voters about a judge’s conduct on the bench, you will need to summarize what you remember from a supervised viewing session at the courthouse before the recording was taken back. Reeds’ brief calls this a valid exercise of discretionary policy authority. The record calls it something else.
There is one more thing the brief does not address, and its silence here is the loudest part of the document. Reeds is a named appellee in a case arguing that the public has no First Amendment right to court recordings. He is simultaneously a witness in a JTC misconduct proceeding where he provided those same recordings to a disciplinary body and testified from them for hours. The brief does not acknowledge that tension. It does not explain why video is adequate for professional accountability but inadequate for public accountability. It proceeds as though those two things have nothing to do with each other.
They have everything to do with each other. That is the point.
The Voter Accountability Gap This Exposes
Here is the contradiction at the center of this story: the Judicial Tenure Commission found video of Hartig’s courtroom proceedings compelling enough to build a formal misconduct case. Reeds testified that he pulled random days from the court calendar and found problems. Disciplinary counsel played those videos for the neutral and used them to walk through a detailed accounting of procedural failures across at least nine cases.
None of those videos were accessible to the public when Hartig was on the ballot.
Courtroom video in Michigan is not routinely available to the public. Transcripts, when obtainable at all, cost money. FOIA requests for court records can be resisted, redirected, or denied. The result is that voters are asked to make judicial retention decisions with a fraction of the information that the state’s disciplinary apparatus uses to evaluate the same judge.
The JTC process is not public-facing by design. It is confidential until charges are formally filed. But the evidentiary asymmetry goes beyond confidentiality. It reflects a structural condition in which the institutional actors who review judicial conduct have access to a documentary record that voters simply do not.
If video is good enough to support a formal misconduct proceeding, it is good enough for voters to evaluate their judges. The current system treats the same evidence as simultaneously relevant to professional accountability and irrelevant to democratic accountability. That is not a neutral design choice.
It is worth noting that the briefs in this appeal are publicly accessible only because of the RECAP project run by the Free Law Project, which captures federal court filings and makes them available through CourtListener at no cost. Without RECAP, those documents would sit behind PACER’s per-page fee wall, the same federal paywall that charges the public to access public court records. The briefs that argue voters have no constitutional right to court recordings are themselves documents that most voters would have to pay to read. The transparency problem does not begin and end with video. It runs through every layer of the system.
This is precisely why the First Amendment litigation matters. The argument that the public should have access to video of court proceedings, particularly of a sitting judge, is not a peripheral request. It is a challenge to the information architecture that lets judicial misconduct persist through cycles of elections that voters cannot meaningfully evaluate.
The Transcript Is Now Public
The transcript excerpt from the March 3, 2026, JTC hearing, Volume 21, pages 4873 through 4972, was obtained by a party to the related First Amendment litigation and shared with Clutch Justice. It is published in full at the link below. The record is now part of the public file on this matter.
What it shows is straightforward. Reeds watched videos and described what he saw. The master’s report describes something different. Those two things cannot both be accurate characterizations of the same testimony.
Bluebook: Williams, Rita. The JTC Used Video to Judge Hartig. Voters Never Could., Clutch Justice (June 17, 2026), https://clutchjustice.com/hartig-reeds-video-transcript-discrepancy/.
APA 7: Williams, R. (2026, June 17). The JTC used video to judge Hartig. Voters never could. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/hartig-reeds-video-transcript-discrepancy/
MLA 9: Williams, Rita. “The JTC Used Video to Judge Hartig. Voters Never Could.” Clutch Justice, 17 June 2026, clutchjustice.com/hartig-reeds-video-transcript-discrepancy/.
Chicago: Williams, Rita. “The JTC Used Video to Judge Hartig. Voters Never Could.” Clutch Justice, June 17, 2026. https://clutchjustice.com/hartig-reeds-video-transcript-discrepancy/.
You Have Documents. I Find Where They Break.
If you are navigating a proceeding where the record does not match what is being argued, that gap is evidence. I work with litigants, legal teams, and watchdog organizations to map institutional conduct against the documentary record.
