Purdue professor recounts Trump trial testimony

On April 28, a professor at Purdue was called to the stand to testify against former President Donald Trump in the hush money trial that resulted in Trump being convicted of 34 felony counts.

“I had rehearsed with the questions the prosecution was likely to ask me,” Robert Browning, a professor at the College of Liberal Arts and director of C-SPAN Archives, said.

“They asked me if I was nervous, to which I replied, ‘A little bit,’” he said, smiling sheepishly. “I got covered on CNN, MSNBC and others. Everybody covering the trial was asking, ‘Who’s Robert Browning?’”

Browning is the executive director of C-SPAN’s archives at Purdue Research Park. The organization televises, records and archives proceedings of the United States federal government and other public affairs, including videos the prosecution used in the trial against Trump.

Browning testified in court on the videos for about 20 minutes.

“Trump had a monitor in front of him,” he said. “I had a monitor in front of me and so did the jury. They had videos of Trump speaking during his 2016 campaign. Mostly the videos were about women’s allegations against Trump. He would say, ‘They’re lying. I never met these women.’”

The prosecution had four videos and three clips used against Trump’s defense.

“They asked me to testify that those videos were the same as what we held in the archive. They hadn’t been tampered with or changed in any way,” Browning said.

In the past, the C-SPAN Archives had been asked to authenticate other videos used in trials regarding elected officials. An inquiry was sent to them for evidence to be used in the Georgia appeals court’s case against Trump, he said.

That trial, which concerns election subversion, has been postponed for the foreseeable future. Election subversion describes efforts to prevent a true election winner from taking office.

“It is not uncommon for a defense to insist that evidence be authenticated,” Browning said. “Mostly, we’ve been able to satisfy these requests by letter, but this is a complex case with high stakes. They wanted someone to testify on the stand in person.”

When asked if he was surprised at the results of the trial, Browning said, “The nature of the presidency today is that everything is recorded and Trump says a lot of,” he paused, “things.”