(New York) The historic trial of Donald Trump resumes Thursday in New York, with the prospect of a possible constitution of the jury by the end of the week which would open the way to the debates on the merits.
Since Monday, for the first time a former American president has appeared in a criminal trial. Donald Trump is on trial in a case of payments to buy the silence of a former adult film star, Stormy Daniels, a few days before the 2016 election which he won narrowly against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Seven of the twelve jurors needed (plus six alternates) were sworn in Tuesday evening, before a one-day break in the trial on Wednesday.
Judge Juan Merchan said he hoped to conclude the jury selection process by Friday evening, which would allow opening arguments for the prosecution and defense to begin as early as Monday.
“This is going to accelerate” because each of the two parties has already used six of the ten authorized juror challenges, fiercely anti-Trump conservative lawyer George Conway said on MSNBC on Wednesday.
“There is no reason why they cannot be completed by Friday,” he added.
Donald Trump claimed on Wednesday on his Truth Social network that he had just discovered that the number of juror challenges was limited, once again calling out the “witch hunt” orchestrated according to him by the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden.
Life under scrutiny
The potential jurors, anonymous citizens plunged overnight into a historic affair, find their lives scrutinized.
They must answer a long questionnaire on their profession, family situation, sources of information, centers of interest, and their opinion on Donald Trump, but also to even more detailed questions from the prosecution or the defense, which has tracked down any sign of possible bias against the defendants, particularly in their publications on social networks.
More than three years after leaving the White House in chaos, Donald Trump theoretically faces a prison sentence. This would not prevent him from being a candidate in the presidential election on November 5, where he dreams of revenge on Joe Biden, but would project the campaign into the unknown.
If he were found not guilty, however, it would be a major success for the Republican candidate.
Especially since he managed through appeals to postpone his three other criminal trials, two for illicit attempts to reverse the results of the 2020 election, and one for supposedly casual handling of classified documents.
In the trial that began Monday, Donald Trump is charged with falsifying accounting documents from his company, the Trump Organization, which allegedly aimed to hide, under the cover of “legal fees”, the payment of US$130,000 to Stormy Daniels by his personal lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen.
In exchange, the ex-star of adult sons had agreed to keep quiet about a sexual relationship with the billionaire in 2006. Donald Trump has always denied this relationship and his defense ensures that the payments were in the private sphere.
But prosecutor Alvin Bragg intends to demonstrate that these are indeed fraudulent maneuvers to hide information from voters a few days before the vote.