Trump trial opens in Manhattan courthouse
NEW YORK • The historic hush-money trial of Donald Trump got underway Monday as dozens of prospective jurors packed into a courtroom where the former president will answer to charges that he falsified business records in order to stifle stories about his sex life.
Trump craned his neck to look back at the pool, whispering to his lawyer as they entered the jury box.
“You are about to participate in a trial by jury. The system of trial by jury is one of the cornerstones of our judicial system,” Judge Juan Merchan told the jurors. “The name of this case is the People of the State of New York vs. Donald Trump.”
Trump’s notoriety would make the process of picking 12 jurors and six alternates a near-herculean task in any year, but it’s likely to be especially challenging now, unfolding in a closely contested presidential election in the heavily Democratic city where Trump grew up and catapulted to celebrity status decades before winning the White House.
It is the first criminal trial of any former U.S. president and it will unfold as Trump vies to reclaim the presidency, creating a remarkable split-screen spectacle of the presumptive Republican nominee spending his days as a criminal defendant while simultaneously campaigning for office.
The day began with hours of pretrial arguments before moving into the start of jury selection Monday afternoon. The first members of the jury pool — 96 in all — were summoned into the courtroom, where the parties will decide who among them might be picked to decide Trump’s legal fate.
No matter the outcome, Trump is determined to benefit from the proceedings, casting the case, and his indictments elsewhere, as a broad “weaponization of law enforcement” by Democratic prosecutors and officials.
Earlier Monday, the judge denied a defence request to recuse himself from the case after Trump’s lawyers claimed he had a conflict of interest. He also said prosecutors could not play for the jury the 2005 Access Hollywood recording in which Trump was captured discussing grabbing women sexually without their permission. However, prosecutors will be allowed to question witnesses about the recording, which became public in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. Prosecutors say the alleged fraud was part of an effort to keep salacious — and, Trump says, bogus — stories about his sex life from emerging during his 2016 campaign.
The charges centre on $130,000 in payments that Trump’s company made to his then lawyer Michael Cohen. He paid that sum on Trump’s behalf to keep adult film actress Stormy Daniels from going public, a month before the election, with her claims of a sexual encounter with the married mogul a decade earlier.