One of the panelists suddenly removed from the Donald Trump hush money jury in New York blasted the judge in the case Thursday as a coward and the prosecutors as unfair.
Herson Cabreras, previously only known as Juror No. 4, told USA Today in an interview that he was taken aback by Thursday’s dismissal over an undisclosed criminal case after he had been empaneled Tuesday.
“That surprised me, that really surprised me,” Mr. Cabreras said in the exclusive interview. “I said, ‘Wow, something else is going on here.’ But they decided not to take me, and that’s it. What can I say? So I said, ‘Fine.’”
Mr. Cabreras, who is in his late 70s, was dismissed after prosecutors raised a 1991 incident in which he was accused of tearing down political campaign signs in a New York suburb, a majority of them Republican signs.
He did not mention the case in a questionnaire asking about his previous legal cases, but he said he hardly remembered the case until the prosecution asked about it Thursday.
“I didn’t expect they were going to go into my history of 30 years and pull out something I didn’t even remember,” he said. “I just thought it was an excuse” to get him off the jury.
Mr. Cabreras said he expected Judge Merchan to intervene, but he let prosecutors have it their way.
“I looked at him, like, ‘Aren’t you going to say something?’” Mr. Cabreras said. “I’m sitting there, I’m the target, and he’s supposed to be judging. And he just let it happen, he didn’t say anything.”
He said he’d been put into a “competition” between the judge, the prosecution and the defense.
“Everybody wants to look good and fair in front of the public, but they don’t act fair,” he said.
The incident gave Mr. Cabreras a bad impression about Judge Merchan, whom he called a “cowardly judge,” for letting prosecution go into details from decades ago.
“I feel sorry for the other jurors,” he said. “If the way they treated me is any indication of how they’re going to treat other potential jurors, then I feel sorry for them.”
As a possible motive for why prosecutors would want to remove from the jury a man who vandalized mostly Republican signs and who was associated at the time with staffers to then-New York Mayor David Dinkins, a Democrat, USA Today cited a now-famous comment about Mr. Trump he‘d made in his initial questioning.
Mr. Cabreras called Mr. Trump “fascinating and mysterious,” which he downplayed in the USA Today interview as an obvious fact that implies neither support nor opposition.
Wherever Mr. Trump goes, “he stirs up all kinds of things,” he explained Thursday. “The guy walks in, and people go crazy. That’s what I meant.”
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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