Former President Trump’s criminal trial in New York City began Monday with a fundamental challenge: selecting a jury that can fairly judge one of the most famous and polarizing figures. “Picking a jury in a case involving someone as familiar to everyone as former President Trump poses unique problems,” Joshua Steinglass, senior trial counsel for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, said at a hearing — in what may be the understatement of the year, Politico reports. How, precisely, to pick a Trump jury — 12 people and a handful of alternates — is a question that prosecutors and lawyers for Trump have been grappling with in state and federal courts for months. Trump last week called the process “pure luck.” His lawyers will spend the next week hoping to prove him wrong. In the Manhattan hush money case, jury selection is set to begin Monday, and Justice Juan Merchan has settled on a questionnaire for prospective jurors. In the pending federal criminal trial in Florida, special counsel Jack Smith and Trump’s lawyers have proposed competing sets of jury questionnaires while they inch toward a potential start this year. Trump has faced two other juries in civil lawsuits in which he was found culpable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll.
Politico reviewed jury-related filings and transcripts from those criminal and civil cases. What’s emerged are the contours of a strategy aimed at getting inside the minds of jurors tasked with sitting on some of the most consequential trials in U.S. history — and identifying the ones who can tune out noise, politics and pressure in order to judge the man only on the evidence presented in court. Picking a jury is more art than science, designed to expose potential jurors’ explicit and implicit biases and smoke out even a well-meaning person’s subconscious leanings. To that end, prosecutors and defense lawyers, working with judges, typically craft interview questions aimed at delving into the minds of prospective jurors, sometimes in roundabout ways that can seem odd or invasive. When the defendant is Trump, those challenges are magnified. He has attacked prosecutors and judges, earned blanket media coverage across the nation and used his social media reach to convince millions of supporters that the criminal cases against him are politically motivated. On Monday, Merchan ruled that prosecutors can’t play the "Access Hollywood" tape for jurors, but he will allow them to introduce evidence of what Trump said on the recording. On the tape, which came to light during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump can be heard saying: “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything," adding: “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
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