Nick Akerman is a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and was a Watergate special prosecutor.

The court trials of former president Donald Trump are well underway, yet aside from the Georgia RICO prosecution, it is unlikely, based on current law, that there will be cameras in the courtrooms for any of these history-making proceedings.

This, however, need not be the death knell for transparency. There is a simple way to provide the public with a direct view into the upcoming trials of the only U.S. president ever to be prosecuted for alleged crimes committed while in office: the daily release of the official word-for-word trial transcripts.

Transcripts of trial proceedings are verbatim and contemporaneous records produced by court reporters for every court session, including pretrial conferences. These transcripts accurately record every word uttered by witnesses, lawyers and the judge. Trial lawyers use transcripts extensively as an accurate record that can be referred to while cross-examining witnesses, in final summation arguments to the jury and in arguing potential appeals. Most important, if, during their deliberations, jurors have questions about a witness’s testimony, the trial transcript can be read back to assist the jury in reaching a verdict.

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Currently, there is no universal system for releasing such transcripts to any member of the public at no cost. A daily release of the transcripts directed by the judges from all the Trump trials would permit everyone to read an unvarnished account of what happened in the courtroom.

In the three Trump civil trials that have taken place to date — the E. Jean Carroll defamation case, her subsequent lawsuit for additional damages, and the New York attorney general’s fraud case — the media’s reporting has not exactly been a paradigm of transparency. The public heard or read only what reporters, most of whom have never tried a civil or criminal case, deemed significant.

For example, during the first Carroll trial, the public did not get a full picture of her case against Trump, as the media presented only certain highlights of her three days of testimony. The key issue, in that case, was whether Carroll was telling the truth when she described Trump’s alleged sexual assault at the Bergdorf Goodman department store some 27 years earlier. The complete transcript of her direct testimony and cross-examination, and that of supporting witnesses, would have provided a much clearer picture of why the jury found her credible.

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The unavailability of transcripts for the two-month trial of the New York attorney general’s fraud case against Trump similarly created a black hole of information in a classic white-collar financial fraud litigation that demands extraordinary attention to detail. For instance, the credibility of Donald Trump Jr.’s testimony that he relied on accountants in certifying false financial statements requires a careful review of the trial transcripts to determine whether his testimony was supported by other witnesses or by business records.

Ironically, the one party in that fraud trial who appears to recognize the value of the public release of transcripts is Trump. On Jan. 4, weeks after testimony ended, Trump’s lawyers e-filed on the case’s public docket sheet the complete daily transcripts covering his defense, in support of his final motion to dismiss the case.

Some practical issues would need to be addressed before any Trump trial transcripts can be released on a daily basis. These include accelerating the release of the official court transcript to minimize lag time from the actual testimony. And the court reporters who produce the transcripts must be compensated accordingly.

These are hardly insurmountable problems, and if the goal of transparency is to provide the public with as much accurate information as possible, as quickly as possible, the daily release of official trial transcripts is the best available solution.

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