A Left-leaning columnist is admitting that the 12-person jury selected to serve on former President Donald Trump’s trial leans more Democrat than not.
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman confirmed a common belief among Trump supporters-- which is that the 2024 hopeful won’t get a fair trial in the majorly liberal city of Manhattan.
“One thing that’s been striking during this round of voir dire is there a lot of people who, based on their answers, are more left-of-center than not, politically,” Haberman wrote. “But some seem to be trying to show they can consider alternative viewpoints, and others seem to want to show they believe in the concept of jury service as independent from personal opinions.”
Attorney and legal scholar Jonathon Turley pointed out that only about 12 percent of New Yorkers voted for Trump in 2020. In comparison, President Joe Biden won the Manhattan vote by 86 percent that same year.
“The jurors you have to worry about are the ones who are sort of ‘Trojan horse jurors,’ who are hiding bias that doesn’t appear on social media or are involved in any formal charges like the one that was just removed today,” Turley said during an interview.
However, according to an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, only 35 percent of U.S. adults believe Trump did something illegal in that case charged by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg— who alleges the former president falsified business documents to cover up money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 election.
Thirty-one percent of Americans believe Trump's actions were unethical. However, they said he did not do anything illegal.
Meanwhile, 44 percent of the respondents said that they have very little or no confidence that the prosecutors in the Trump trial are unbiased.
On Thursday, the jurors selected will include seven men and five women who were chosen after answering extensive questions regarding their personal lives, political views, social media posts, and the ability to remain unbiased despite any past opinions they may have about the former president. They include people who work in areas of law, finance, nursing, and technology.
“Now we have seen jurors who have later been found to have misrepresented their histories in a couple of prior cases involving Trump associates,” Turley said. “In both those cases, the judges in Washington, DC, refused to reconsider the verdict. And so this is a very important stage to try to filter out these types of jurors.”