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Twelve New Yorkers drawn from a cross-section of Manhattan society have been sworn in as jurors for Donald Trump’s “hush money” case, after almost 200 candidates were vetted for political bias by the court.
The panel — which includes a female physical therapist, a retired male Lebanese wealth manager, a male investment banker, a male security engineer, two male attorneys, a female English teacher and an Irish-born salesman from Harlem — was finalised just after 4.30pm local time on Thursday, after three days of questioning. The court also selected the first of likely six alternate jurors.
Opening arguments in the criminal trial, the first ever against a former US president, are expected to commence on Monday morning.
Trump is facing trial on 34 criminal counts of falsifying business records for alleged payments made in the run-up to the 2016 election to buy the silence of a porn actor who claimed she had an affair with him 10 years prior. He has pleaded not guilty in the case, one of four criminal indictments he is facing even as he mounts another bid for the White House.
Like any criminal defendant, Trump must be present in the Lower Manhattan courtroom throughout the six-week trial. Leaving the courthouse on Thursday he complained that the proceedings were preventing him from hitting the campaign trail.
“I’m supposed to be in New Hampshire. I’m supposed to be in Georgia. I’m supposed to be in North Carolina, South Carolina,” Trump told reporters. The 77-year-old clutched a stack of papers handed to him by an aide that he said were printouts of numerous news articles criticising the indictment, which he once again decried as a “hoax”.
The third day of jury selection in a Manhattan criminal court had earlier got off to a rocky start. Two previously selected jurors were excused by the court after an oncology nurse’s identity was pieced together by family and friends from publicly reported details, and another man was connected to an arrest for ripping down rightwing posters in the 1990s.
Dozens more potential jurors were dismissed for claiming they could not be impartial in deciding the former president’s fate — including one who was excused after Trump’s team unearthed social media posts in which she had called him a “racist”, “sexist” and “narcissist”. After that four men and three women were seated in quick succession.
During questioning, a man with an MBA in finance who lives in Hell’s Kitchen and works in investment banking said he read “basically everything” and followed the former president’s Truth Social posts but did not have “any firmly held opinions or strong beliefs”.
A woman who is a product development manager said she did not like Trump’s “persona” or “how he presents himself in public”. She said she found him “selfish and self-serving” — adding that she also did not like some of her coworkers, but still managed to treat them fairly.
Both were later seated, alongside a man who works for an ecommerce company. He said he did not follow the news, but listened to podcasts on behavioural psychology.
Although prospective jurors’ names and addresses have been kept private for fear of reprisals, Justice Juan Merchan, who is overseeing the case, admonished the press for publishing “so much information” about their physical attributes and professional lives that some had become “very, very easy to identify”. He then forbade the media from reporting details of jurors’ current or former places of employment.
Prosecutors on Thursday also renewed their request for Merchan to hold Trump in contempt for violating a gag order that prevents him from talking about many of the people involved in the case, pointing specifically to a social media post shared by the former president that seemed to imply some prospective jurors were “undercover Liberal Activists”.
Merchan said he would rule after oral arguments on the issue, which are scheduled for Tuesday. He also declined to order prosecutors to reveal the first three witnesses in the case to Trump’s legal team, saying he had no faith that the former president would not go after them on social media.
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