New York: A juror in Donald Trump’s hush money trial was dismissed Thursday after expressing doubt about her ability to be fair and impartial, and the status of a second New Yorker picked for the panel was in limbo amid concerns that some of his answers in court may not been accurate.
The setbacks in the selection process emerged during a frenetic morning in which prosecutors also asked for Trump to held in contempt and fined over a series of social media posts this week, while the judge in the case barred reporters from identifying jurors’ employers.
The seating of the full jury — whenever it comes — will be a seminal moment in the case, setting the stage for a trial that will place the former president’s legal jeopardy at the heart of the campaign against Democrat Joe Biden. The trial will also feature potentially unflattering testimony about Trump’s private life in the years before he became president.
The jury selection process picked up momentum Tuesday with the selection of seven jurors. But on Thursday, Judge Juan Merchan revealed in court that one of the seven, a cancer nurse, had “conveyed that after sleeping on it overnight she had concerns about her ability to be fair and impartial in this case”. And though jurors’ names are being kept confidential, the woman said her family members and friends questioned her about being a juror.
Prosecutors also raised questions about a second juror, a man who works
in information technology, saying they had located an article from the 1990s about a man with the same name as the juror being arrested for tearing down political advertisements in suburban Westchester County. The posters were on the political right, prosecutors said.
The man said under questioning this week that he had not been convicted
of a crime.