Select twelve impartial citizens to judge Donald Trump: the long and delicate jury selection process entered a crucial phase Tuesday in the historic trial of the former US president.
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At midday, twelve jurors, the required number, were preselected after answering a long questionnaire and revealing entire sections of their lives in court: their profession, their family situation, their sources of information and even their hobbies.
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But the process is far from over: one of Donald Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche, has in turn begun to cook each of the jurors, to detect any suspicion of impartiality against his client, the first former President of the United States to appear on criminal charges.
AFP
The prosecution and defense have the power to challenge a certain number of them without having to provide justification.
In the middle of the presidential campaign, Donald Trump, 77, must silently attend this long and tedious process, at a time when his rival Joe Biden is campaigning on the ground in his hometown of Scranton, in the state of Pennsylvania, disputed and crucial for the November election.
Suspicious payments
“It’s a trial that should never have existed (…) and we have an anti-Trump judge,” said the former Republican president about Judge Juan Merchan who ordered him to be present on Monday at hearings, i.e. four days a week.
“I should be right now in Pennsylvania and Florida, in many other states, in North Carolina, in Georgia, campaigning,” added Donald Trump, before sitting down in his chair. warned.
“All this comes from the White House, from Biden, who does not know how to put two sentences together,” said the man who describes his legal cases as “political persecution”.
Donald Trump is being prosecuted for payments intended to buy the silence of former porn star Stormy Daniels, a few days before the 2016 election which he won narrowly against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Of the first group of 96 potential jurors admitted into the courtroom Monday afternoon, two-thirds were immediately exempted, the vast majority because they declared themselves incapable of being impartial.
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The others, anonymous citizens, find themselves thrown overnight into the frenzy of this unprecedented trial. A nurse in an oncology department, a bookseller, an accountant, a professor from Harlem who “does not like the news or newspapers”, a “happy retiree”, grandmother of four children have thus unpacked their lives facing the former president.
“I’m not 100% sure that I could be impartial,” said a potential juror, before being challenged by the judge.
When potential jurors take their seats in the box, Donald Trump turns his head in their direction, seeming to size them up.
This decisive stage of the trial could extend until next week, or even beyond.
Makeup of campaign accounts
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.
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If he is found not guilty, 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.
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 $130,000 to Stormy Daniels by his personal lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen.
In exchange, the latter 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.
“No one can seriously dispute that the reason he (Michael Cohen, Editor’s note) and Trump came up with this ploy was to deprive voters of information that could have changed the outcome of an extremely close election,” he said. explained legal analyst Norman Eisen, on the website of the CNN news channel.