Huge Numbers Tune in to Listen to Court on Trump Travel Ban

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Huge and possibly unprecedented numbers of people tuned in to hear appeals court arguments over President Donald Trump's travel ban.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals livestreamed the audio to Wednesday's arguments between lawyers for the state of Washington and from Trump's Department of Justice.

On YouTube alone over 136,000 people listened to the livestream at its peak. But the audio was also streamed on the Facebook and web pages of news outlets, and carried at least in part on CNN and MSNBC. Immediate figures for all those sources are not available, but they likely took the number of listeners well past a million.

Those figures are staggering for the type of procedural arguments that would normally attract only a tiny handful of assigned reporters and other professional observers.