7 jurors seated in Trump hush money trial
Judge warns Trump of potential intimidation
Jury selection is set to resume Thursday in the first-ever criminal prosecution of an ex-president after a day off following the seating of seven jurors Tuesday in Donald Trump’s historic hush money trial. Opening arguments could begin within days.
Tuesday’s proceedings saw the presumptive Republican presidential nominee warned by Judge Juan Merchan over potential juror intimidation, while several possible jurors were confronted with social media posts that Trump’s lawyers said showed bias against the onetime reality TV star.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has hit Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a six-figure hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.
Trump says he’s not guilty and has denied Daniels’ claim they had sex in 2006, shortly after the birth of Trump’s youngest child.
Merchan is “rushing this trial,” the former president told reporters outside the courthouse Tuesday afternoon. “And he’s doing as much as he can for the Democrats.”
At the current pace, five more jurors and six alternates will be seated in the coming days, court-watchers say, and the Manhattan trial – featuring Trump, his felonious former fixer, and Daniels – will begin in earnest.
Here are five takeaways:
Donald Trump will have a jury in days, not weeks
Despite early predictions that it would take weeks to seat 12 unbiased Manhattanites willing to weigh the district attorney’s case against the most polarizing figure in America, seven jurors were already in place after two days of proceedings.
“There are a lot of people in this town,” said John Moscow, a former top prosecutor in the DA’s office. “You can get a jury.”
More than half of the first 96 prospective jurors were dismissed on Monday after most said they couldn’t be impartial in a trial of the former president. By Tuesday, prosecutors and defense attorneys were questioning possible jurors one by one over their feelings for Trump.
“It’s so monumental, this historic
prosecution of a man who held the highest office in the country,” veteran defense attorney Ron Kuby told USA TODAY. “But the actual conduct of what happens in the courtroom, it’s utterly mundane. Once they weeded those people out, it went pretty fast.”
The seven jurors seated Tuesday included a man originally from Ireland who enjoys doing “anything outdoorsy” and watches both MSNBC and Fox News, a woman who works as an oncology nurse and enjoys taking her dog to the park, and a corporate lawyer who said he does not closely follow the news.
Defense confronts possible jurors with anti-Trump posts
Some potential jurors found their social media history excavated by the defense team as it looked for signs of bias against the bombastic former president – with mixed results for Trump.
Judge Merchan allowed a woman who was linked to a video of anti-Trump celebrations to remain in the jury pool after she acknowledged seeing the street party outside her home. But she maintained she could be fair and impartial.
Trump lawyer Susan Necheles described the video as “clearly an antiTrump event that she’s out celebrating and partying at.” Merchan agreed it was an anti-Trump event of some kind (the video wasn’t shown to reporters), but said it wasn’t clear the potential juror
participated.
Others didn’t make the cut. Merchan dismissed a potential juror who posted a parody video generated by artificial intelligence that was titled “I’m dumb as f---” and featured Trump.
Another posted “Get him out and lock him up” during a court battle over Trump’s ban, while president, on Muslims from several countries entering the U.S.
Trump visibly smirked at the juror as he was confronted with his compromising words. “I don’t think that I can allow this juror to remain,” Merchan said.
A different potential juror was allowed to stay in the mix after the defense revealed an 8-year-old post by her husband.
“The question is, could one be fair and impartial in weighing whether he committed these crimes?” Moscow told USA TODAY.
“The question is not whether they like him.”
Judge Merchan calls out potential intimidation by Trump
With his courtroom outbursts and attacks on witnesses, Trump has tested the patience of judges in recent civil trials where he was accused of defamation and business fraud.
On Monday, Merchan warned the former president against any direct interactions with the jury pool. With the prospective jurors out of the courtroom, the judge told both sides that Trump had been audibly muttering and gesturing during the questioning of a prospective juror over a social media post.
“I won’t tolerate that,” Merchan said. “I will not have any jurors intimidated in the courtroom.”
“Speak to your client,” he told defense attorney Todd Blanche.
Merchan “is being proactive,” Kuby said, noting that the judge had also tried a 2022 tax fraud case that sent Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s former chief financial officer, to jail, and resulted in a $1.6 million fine against Trump’s company.
Where federal Judge Lewis Kaplan, who tried the defamation case, was “abusive and yelled at everybody,” and state Judge Arthur Engoron of the real estate fraud trial “wanted to be everybody’s friend,” Kuby said, Merchan “is different. He runs his courtroom with a quiet, firm sense of dignity.”
Trump: Payments to Cohen were legal expenses
Speaking to reporters before entering the courthouse Monday morning, Trump said his payments to his former lawyer Michael Cohen − which prosecutors and Cohen say were reimbursements for hush money to Stormy Daniels − were accurately described as “legal expenses” on his company records. Cohen was convicted of campaign finance violations in federal court for his role in the payments.
“I was paying a lawyer and marked it down as a legal expense – some accountant, I didn’t know – marked it down as a legal expense,” Trump said. “That’s exactly what it was. And you get an indictment over that?”
Trump makes a campaign stop at a bodega
After leaving court in lower Manhattan, Trump made his first campaign stop of the hush money trial, visiting a Harlem bodega where a clerk was initially charged with murder for fatally stabbing an armed robber two years ago.
“It’s a rigged trial,” Trump said, adding: “There’s no crime. You know where the crime is? In the bodegas.”
Trump also said, “We’re going to make a heavy play for New York,” although no Republican has carried the state since Ronald Reagan in 1984.
Trump is scheduled to have dinner Wednesday in New York with Polish President Andrzej Duda.
Contributing: David Jackson, USA TODAY; Reuters