Twelve New Yorkers who represent a cross-section of Manhattan residents have been sworn in as jurors for Donald Trump’s “hush money” case, after three days of selection in which almost 200 candidates were vetted for political bias by the court.
The panel — which includes a female physical therapist, a retired male 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. The court also selected the first of likely six alternate jurors.
Opening arguments in the criminal trial, the first 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, which is one of four criminal indictments he is facing.
Trump, a New York native and real estate tycoon, must be present in the Lower Manhattan courtroom throughout the six-week trial. Leaving the courthouse, he complained that the proceedings were preventing him from hitting the campaign trail as the presumptive Republican nominee in November’s election.
“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,” he told reporters. He clutched a stack of paper he said were printouts of 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 one woman’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.
Over the course of the week, dozens of potential jurors were dismissed for claiming they could not set aside their bias when it came to determining Trump’s fate.
Soon after court resumed on Thursday morning, an oncology nurse from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, who had been seated late on Tuesday, told Justice Juan Merchan that she had “friends, family and colleagues” contact her after piecing together from press reports that she had been chosen as a juror in the trial.
She added that as a result of the external pressure, she no longer felt she could be fair and unbiased, and was promptly excused.
Minutes later, lawyers for the Manhattan district attorney, who brought the case, revealed their research had uncovered that a male juror may not have been truthful about his past, and had been arrested for ripping down rightwing political posters in the Westchester County area of New York State in the 1990s. His wife may have been “previously accused or involved in a corruption inquiry”, the district attorney’s office said.
Merchan later excused him without further explanation.
Although prospective jurors’ names and addresses have been kept private for fear of reprisals, Merchan admonished the press for publishing “so much information” about their physical attributes and professional lives that some had become “very, very easy to identify”.
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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.