TRUMP HUSH MONEY TRIAL
texas attorney general opinion or2018-19705
Jurors have variety of backgrounds, news habits
18 chosen say former president’s history will not influence decisions
A full jury of 12 jurors and six alternates has been seated in the historic hush money trial of former president Donald Trump after four days of jury selection in the Manhattan-based court case.
Trump faces 34 counts of falsifying business records, part of what prosecutors have described as a scheme during the 2016 presidential campaign to cover up an alleged affair with adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.
Trump has pleaded not guilty.
Here is what is known about the jurors, according to The Washington Post ’s reporting and pool reports:
Juror 1
This juror gets his news from The New York Times , the Daily Mail , as well as “some” Fox News and MSNBC.
“I’ve heard some of them,” the juror, who works in sales, said about Trump’s other cases.
Juror 2
This juror said he follows former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen on social media platform X. Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and confidant, arranged the hush money payment to Daniels in 2016 and is expected to be a key witness in the case.
He said he also follows former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway on X, as well as other figures on the right and left.
The juror, an investment banker, said he did so because of his work in finance.
“Anything that might move the markets, I might need to know about,” he said.
During questioning by Trump’s defense team, he said Trump had done some good for the country. “It’s ambivalent. It goes both ways,” he said.
Juror 3
This juror said he doesn’t need to be a mind reader to determine intent.
“I am actually not super familiar with the other charges. I don’t really follow the news that closely — a little embarrassing to say,” he said.
He works as a corporate lawyer.
He reads The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
In middle school, he enjoyed watching The Apprentice .
Juror 4
Asked by the prosecution if he had any concerns about returning a guilty verdict, this juror said, “No.”
He is not on social media and gets his news from a range of news outlets, he said.
He is an engineer.
He served on a criminal jury in California a long time ago but said he couldn’t recall if there was a verdict.
Juror 5
This juror said that, as a “woman of color,” she has friends with strong opinions about Trump but that she tries to avoid politics and is not very interested in the news.
While most of the jurors in the box indicated they were aware Trump faced other criminal cases, this woman signaled she did not.
She said she likes Trump’s candid style.
“President Trump speaks his mind,” she said. “I’d rather have that than someone in office that we don’t know what he’s doing behind the scenes.”
This juror works in education.
She gets her information from Google and TikTok, and she listens to The Breakfast Club , a radio show in New York City.
Juror 6
During questioning, this juror said she could treat Trump like any other person on trial.
“I would say that I think that Trump and I probably have different beliefs,” she said, “but I don’t think that that invalidates anything about who he is as a person.”
This juror works as a software engineer, and she gets her news from The New York Times and TikTok.
Juror 7
This juror said he has “political views as to the Trump presidency” and thinks there were probably Trump administration policies he disagreed with.
“I don’t know the man, and I don’t have opinions about him personally,” he added.
The juror also said he does not have any opinions about Trump’s character.
“I certainly follow the news. I’m aware there are other lawsuits out there,” he said. “But I’m not sure that I know anyone’s character.”
This juror works as a civil litigator.
He gets his news from The New York Times , Wall Street Journal , New York Post and The Washington Post . He also listens to NPR’s Car Talk , WNYC public radio and the SmartLess podcast.
Juror 8
This juror paused before answering “yes” when asked if he had feelings about Trump that could prevent him from being impartial.
Justice Juan Merchan stopped him, asked him to be clear, then repeated the question. “No,” the juror responded.
He said he gets his news from The New York Times , Wall Street Journal , CNBC and the BBC.
He is retired from a wealth management firm. He said he once served on a jury but the case settled before trial began.
Juror 9
This juror said she had opinions about Trump but insisted she could be impartial.
“I fully believe that I can follow the judge’s instructions,” she said. She added that she appreciated an analogy offered by prosecutors during questioning because, she said, “I’m not very well-versed in the legal world.”
She said she gets morning newsletters from The New York Times and CNN and listens to podcasts about reality television. “I don’t watch any news or follow it too closely,” she said. She said she works as a speech therapist.
Juror 10
This juror said he prefers podcasts about behavioral psychology to following the news.
When it comes to his media consumption, he said, “If anything, it’s The New York Times .” He works in e-commerce.
Juror 11
During questions from the defense team, this juror was blunt about how she views Trump.
“I don’t have strong opinions, but I don’t like his persona, how he presents himself in public,” she said.
“I don’t like some of my co-workers, but I don’t try to sabotage their work,” she continued, drawing laughs in the courtroom.
Merchan asked her to repeat herself for the record, which she did.
“He seems very selfish and self-serving,” she continued. “I don’t really appreciate that from any public servant.” The way he portrays himself publicly, she said, “it’s not my cup of tea.”
Trump defense lawyer Susan Necheles said, “It sounds a bit like what you’re saying is you don’t like him.”
“Yes,” the juror responded.
The juror works in product development.
She follows fashion publications and watches late-night television but doesn’t follow the news closely, she said.
Juror 12
This juror said she reads The New York Times and USA Today, and watches CNN. She also listens to sports and faith-based podcasts. She works as a physical therapist.
Alternate 1
This juror, the first alternate to be seated, gets her news from the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times .
She works in finance.
Alternate 2
Necheles, Trump’s defense lawyer, asked this alternate juror about witnesses changing their stories. “I will base my verdict on the proofs presented,” the juror said. “I won’t take into consideration whatever happened in the past.”
She added that she “will be objective and neutral for this case or any case the justice system needs me to do.”
The juror is not currently employed. She said she doesn’t watch the news, only skims through headlines, and isn’t on social media.
Alternate 3
This alternate juror told the court he doesn’t have a strong opinion of Trump. “My opinion is Donald Trump is a man, just like I am,” he said.
He said he agreed with the legal burden of proof of establishing guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
“If there is evidence found against a man,” he said, “there should be consequences.” He said he thought that Trump had been treated fairly in the case.
He said he reads The New York Times and The Washington Post , and works in IT.
Alternate 4
Like several others on the jury, this alternate juror said she doesn’t have strong opinions about Trump.
She told the court she was “not a big news person” but reads The New York Times , Reuters, the BBC and social media. She works in the financial sector.
Alternate 5
This alternate juror said she gets news from The New York Times and Google.
She works in fashion.
Alternate 6
This alternate juror said she follows local news and listens to true crime podcasts. She works in construction.
Juror details:
Media play into Trump’s hands
A number of media outlets covering Donald Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial are playing right into the former president’s manipulative little hands, effectively assisting him with juror intimidation.
In real-time, specific details about prospective jurors are being blasted out on social media and on news networks – neighborhood names, marital status, job titles, things they like to do in their free time.
The result, as of Thursday morning, is one seated juror saying she couldn’t proceed out of fear her identity had been compromised.
Journalists have no business reporting jurors’ personal details
On Tuesday, Fox News lunkhead Jesse Watters was spitting out details on jurors who had been seated.
Speaking of juror No. 2, he said she gets her news from CNN and the New York Times and added: 'This nurse scares me if I’m Trump. Goodbye.'
That same juror told the court Thursday morning: 'Aspects of my identity have already been out there in public.
Yesterday alone, I had friends and family push things to me.
I don’t think at this point that I can be fair and unbiased.'
She was excused.
The judge scolded the press in attendance, and he was right to do so, as it’s not just Fox News working overtime to identify members of what is supposed to be an anonymous jury.
What’s the news value in small details about prospective jurors?
Politico published specific information about a prospective juror, including her neighborhood, job, hobby and the role she plays in a community organization.
On its website, ABC News had a story titled: 'Who are the first 7 jurors of Trump’s historic criminal trial.'
NBC News had an online story under the headline: 'A lawyer, a teacher and a software engineer: Meet the first jury members of Trump’s hush money trial.'
The public doesn’t pick the jurors, so there’s no public need to know
This level of reporting on what we journalists like to call 'civilians' is outrageous given the circumstances surrounding this trial.
There’s no inherent news value in knowing the hobbies or marital status of someone who might serve on the jury.
Each juror is vetted and decided on by defense attorneys and prosecutors – the public has no voice here.
It’s up to Trump’s lawyers and the Manhattan district attorney’s prosecutors to make sure the best people are chosen to consider the case and render a verdict.
Sharing minute personal details of people who are being asked nothing more than to perform their civic duty is low-brow, at best.
And attempting to ferret out the true identity of these people in hopes of spotting something to write or talk about is both dangerous and counterproductive to the administration of justice.
Threats and Donald Trump go hand-in-hand
Anyone paying attention knows threats and intimidation go hand-in-hand with Trump and his MAGA movement, and few know that better than journalists, who were long ago labeled 'the enemy of the people' by Trump himself.
So I’ll ask my fellow journalists out there:
What the hell do you think is going to happen to these people if you make it easy for others to identify them?
They will be targeted.
They will be threatened.
And what’s the news value in any of that?
The news here is that a former president and the all-but-certain GOP presidential nominee is on trial and he and his followers are so prone to dirty tricks and violent rhetoric that the jury requires anonymity.
Media outlets can’t become Trump’s unwitting accomplices
This feels like a trial for a mob boss, not a politician.
And the last thing the trial needs is thirsty-for-clicks media outlets tripping over each other to see who can be first to report on a potential juror’s favorite diner.
The people called for jury duty in this case are under enormous pressure, given the nature of the defendant.
They should be treated with respect and given the anonymity they need to honestly and effectively do their jobs.
Trump and his assorted minions will do all they can to jam up the mechanics of these proceedings.
We know this.
So we certainly don’t need minor-scoop-hungry journalists abandoning basic news judgment and putting good people in danger while acting as the defendant’s unwitting accomplices.
Who’s Afraid of Judging Donald Trump?
Lots of People
On Monday afternoon, ninety-six New Yorkers were ushered through metal detectors and into a courtroom on the fifteenth floor of the criminal courthouse in lower Manhattan.
They had been selected as prospective jurors in the People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump—the first-ever criminal trial of an American President.
As court officers led them into the gallery, several craned their necks to get a look at the defendant.
There he was: his face exactly as orange and mottled as it looks on TV, a long red tie draped over his paunch.
He stared right back at them, and leaned over to whisper something in the ear of one of his attorneys.
One prospective juror broke out in giggles, and put a hand over her mouth.
A clerk had everyone stand and swear to tell the truth during the jury-selection process.
“A fair juror is a person who will keep the promise to be fair and impartial,” Judge Juan Merchan said. “Please raise your hand if you believe you cannot be fair and impartial.”
More than half the hands in the room went up.
Merchan excused these unfair and partial people one by one.
“I just couldn’t do it,” one dismissed potential juror was heard saying out in the hall.
Who could?
It takes a special kind of person to be completely impartial when it comes to Donald Trump.
The judge and the lawyers on both sides of the case needed to find twelve such people for the jury, and also half a dozen more who could serve as alternates.
The thirty or so candidates who’d remained in the courtroom were asked to read through a long questionnaire—forty-two questions, along with numerous sub-questions.
The first prospective juror was a young woman who said she lived in midtown and worked in business development.
She felt that she could be fair and impartial, but she also had vacation plans that coincided with the trial.
She was excused.
The second prospective juror was a middle-aged white man with thick-framed glasses, who said he was a creative director at a clothing company.
“I’m here to judge the facts that are presented and not the individual,” he told the court.
He said he had never read any of Trump’s books and did not consider himself a supporter of the QAnon movement, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the Boogaloo Boys, or Antifa.
In his spare time, he said, he enjoyed hiking and cooking, and playing with his dog.
Was there any reason at all that he could not be a fair and impartial juror?
No, he said.
And yet the dog-loving creative director was too good to be true.
Trump’s team discovered a spicy Facebook post that he made in 2017.
“Good news!! Trump lost his court battle on his unlawful travel ban!!!” he wrote. “Get him out and lock him up.”
Under questioning from Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche, the man acknowledged that the Facebook account was indeed
his. “I had strong feelings at the time,” he told the judge. “Today, like I said, I could be unbiased and open about what we are talking about today. But, you know, that was a place and time.”
Merchan wasn’t having it; he granted the defense’s request to have the potential juror axed.
“If I cannot credit a juror’s responses, then we cannot have him on the jury,” Merchan said. “This is a person who has expressed, at least at one time—it was several years ago—the desire that Donald Trump be locked up,” Merchan said. “Everyone knows that, if Mr. Trump is found guilty in this case, he faces a potential jail sentence, which would be lockup.”
By Thursday morning, only seven jurors had made it through the questionnaire, in addition to several rounds of follow-up questions from the prosecutors and Trump’s attorneys, and had been sworn in as members of the official jury.
They tended to be the people who had given the most inscrutable answers.
The foreman is an immigrant, a native of Ireland who now lives in upper Manhattan, and who said he gets his news from the Times, Fox News, and MSNBC.
Another juror, a young Black woman, seemed well aware of Trump’s baggage.
“Obviously, I’m a person of color, so I’m around people who did have an opinion during the election,” she said.
Yet she expressed a certain admiration for the defendant.
“President Trump speaks his mind,” she said. “I would rather that in a person than someone who’s in office and you don’t know what they’re doing behind the scenes.”
What was Trump doing during all this?
Brooding, mostly.
At several points, reporters noticed that he seemed to have dozed off, his eyes closed and his eyebrows slack, his chin occasionally drifting down toward his chest.
At other times, he spoke animatedly with Blanche, slapping his lawyer’s arm with the back of his hand.
Coming in and out of the courtroom during recesses, he sometimes stopped to talk with the reporters waiting in the courtroom hallway.
“Every legal pundit, every legal scholar, said this trial is a disgrace,” he said, on Tuesday morning, lying. “This is a trial that should never happen. It should have been thrown out a long time ago.”
At the defense table, he often slumped, perking up only when a potential juror said something he particularly approved or disapproved of.
He smiled and nodded, enthused, when the director of sales and revenue at a software company claimed to have read several of his old books, including “The Art of the Deal” and “How to Get Rich.”
When Blanche questioned a prospective juror who had filmed videos of Upper West Siders celebrating the 2020 election results, Trump muttered something under his breath and gestured aggressively.
“I won’t tolerate that,” Merchan snapped. “I will not have any jurors intimidated in this courtroom.”
And yet many of the would-be jurors have been intimidated, if not by Trump, then by the prospect of serving on a jury in such a high-profile case.
The stakes felt higher than ever on Friday afternoon, when, just before the court broke for lunch, a man doused himself in accelerant and set himself on fire, in a small park across from the courthouse.
(The man, who is reportedly in critical condition, threw pamphlets into the air before lighting the fire; the N.Y.P.D. has described the flyers as conspiracy-oriented.)
Even before this, the judge announced that one of the seven people who’d made it onto the official jury had called in to say that she was having second thoughts.
She’d heard from friends, family, and colleagues who told her that she was being talked about, online and on TV.
On Tuesday night, Fox News’s Jesse Watters did a segment on his prime-time show where he went through the chosen jurors one by one, and put graphics listing their occupations, racial backgrounds, and reading habits.
Everything but their names.
“The fate of a billionaire real-estate tycoon, TV celebrity turned forty-fifth President of the United States, is in the hands of New York City lawyers, teachers, and Disney workers who like to dance and get their news from the Times,” Watters said, smirking.
Merchan understood the juror’s concerns and allowed her to withdraw from the jury.
Anonymous juries are anonymous for good reason, he said: “It kind of defeats the purpose of that when so much information is put out there that it is very, very easy for anyone to identify who the jurors are.”
He admonished the reporters in the courthouse and said he was “directing” them to refrain from identifying potential jurors’ employers, or describing “anything that you observe with your eyes and hear with your ears related to the jurors,” such as their accents.
First Amendment lawyers told the New York Law Journal that Merchan’s prohibitions were “dubious” at best.
A judge can’t really keep journalists from reporting on what is said in an open court.
But, online, many journalists seemed to side with Merchan, and spoke up out of concern for the safety of the jury pool.
“What of editorial standards? we don’t report everything all the time,” one former BuzzFeed reporter wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter).
Having reporters choose what to censor in real time seems like a bad approach to a case that tests the very limits of judicial power and America’s constitutional order.
Merchan’s suggestion was that the reporters in the courtroom simply use “common sense.”
In the lead-up to the trial, many law professors and former prosecutors were of the opinion that an acquittal was a long shot for Trump.
“The allegations are, in substance, that Donald Trump falsified business records to conceal an agreement with others to unlawfully influence the 2016 Presidential election,” Merchan told the prospective jurors, on Monday. “Specifically, it is alleged that Donald Trump made or caused false business records to hide the true nature of payments made to Michael Cohen by characterizing them as payment for legal services rendered pursuant to a retainer agreement.”
The payment at the center of the case went to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film star who was prepared to go public with her past affair with Trump.
Trump has pleaded not guilty, but many legal observers believe a hung jury is the best outcome he can hope for.
He needs just one obstinate fan to make it into the final jury box.
On Tuesday afternoon, it seemed like he had almost found his guy, a young, fit man who looked to be in his thirties, with slicked-back hair.
But, before he even got to the questionnaire, the man requested to be excused.
“Your Honor, as much as I would love to serve for New York and one of our great Presidents, I could not give up my job for six-plus weeks, which means I would be working eighty-plus hours a week,” he said.
The judge excused him.
President Trump’s fate is in the hands of 12 regular people. Who are they, and how will each of them impact the case? Dr. Phil uses 15 years of trial science expertise to break down how this trial won’t be tried in the courtroom, but in the jury room.
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