Former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial will begin in earnest Monday after successfully assembling a jury of Manhattanites who will convict or acquit the GOP presidential nominee in the heat of the campaign.
“We have a full panel,” Judge Juan Merchan announced Friday.
The jury consists of seven men and five women, plus six alternates who will step in if the full members run into a conflict or cannot deliberate for some reason.
They are expected to hear opening arguments from both sides Monday and leave by midafternoon in observance of Passover.
Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, will be inside a drab New York courtroom for about six weeks as he is tried on charges he criminally concealed payments to avoid bad press ahead of the 2016 election.
Mr. Trump faces 34 counts of falsifying business records in the case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Prosecutors allege Mr. Trump funneled payments to his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to conceal hush money paid to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels and two others to avoid bad press around the 2016 election.
Ms. Daniels says she had a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump nearly two decades ago. He denies the claim.
Mr. Trump pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges and says Democratic prosecutors are trying to stop his presidential campaign.
“I’m sitting in a courthouse all day long,” he said. “This is going on for the week and it will go up for another four or five weeks. And it’s very unfair. And people know it’s very unfair.”
Prosecutors have refused to divulge who they intend to call as their first witnesses, saying they’re worried Mr. Trump would intimidate them on social media.
Judge Merchan and counsel for both sides spent the past week vetting jurors to hear the case. It had its hiccups, with two jurors getting booted over worries about public identification and a brush with the legal system.
Jurors were dismissed en masse after they reported they could not be impartial about Mr. Trump, who’s dominated the U.S. political landscape for nearly a decade and faces three criminal matters in other courts.
Yet the court managed to land a jury for one of the most famous people in the world within four days.
The pool of potential jurors is being drawn from Manhattan, a borough that is very liberal but also a global business center. Jurors’ media consumption seemed to reflect that, with many reporting, they read both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
One potential juror, who is originally from Europe, said he listens to both Fox News and NPR to get both sides of the political spectrum, though he stopped during questioning to say: “This is more stressful than I thought.”
One woman said she “didn’t believe in” watching the news and that her husband would send her any stories if they were important.
Mr. Trump sat quietly as potential jurors weighed in on him as a person, both good, bad and indifferent.
One juror said he grew up in New Jersey and probably dreamed of going to live in Trump Tower one day, but he didn’t care for Mr. Trump’s policies or how he uses his bully pulpit.
“It’s more the negative rhetoric — and bias that he speaks about — that is the most harmful,” the juror said Friday.
Another juror said she could serve on the jury, with one caveat: “I’m good with the time as long as we get to eat.”
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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