NEW YORK — Jury selection began Monday in Manhattan criminal court for Donald Trump's hush-money trial — the first time in U.S. history a former president is being tried on criminal charges.
More than half of prospective jurors in the first panel of 96 people were excused after saying they could not be fair and impartial.
An 18-person jury selection is expected to take several days and the trial is expected to last about six weeks — even as Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, campaigns to be president once again.
Trump faces 34 felony counts alleging that he falsified New York business records in order to conceal damaging information to influence the 2016 presidential election.
To start the day in court Monday, the parties debated potential evidence and whether Trump has violated a gag order.
The judge overseeing the case, Juan Merchan, had issued a gag order on Trump that specifically bars him from making, or directing others to make, public statements about witnesses, prosecutors or jurors. He later extended the order to cover the families of those people after Trump went after the judge's daughter by name on the former president's social media site.
Merchan said he will hold a hearing on April 23 about the prosecution's request to have Trump held in contempt of the gag order for several social media posts about potential witnesses in the case.
"Trump wants to be present at everything"
Arriving to the courtroom Monday, Trump reiterated his complaint that the case is political persecution.
"This is a persecution like never before," he told reporters. "It's an assault on America and that's why I am very proud to be here, this is an assault on our country."
To the extent possible, Trump plans to be involved in court conferences and the jury selection process, defense attorney Todd Blanche said Monday.
"President Trump wants to be present at everything," Blanche said.
Merchan warned that if Trump disrupts the proceeding, he could be jailed, with the trial continuing in his absence.
The trial comes just months before the presidential election in November. Most polls show Trump in a tight race with President Biden, his successor to the presidency. Trump must balance his legal troubles — he faces dozens of state and federal charges — with the election cycle, though his predicament hasn't dampened enthusiasm for him among his most ardent supporters.
Trump's other major trials — related to his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, his handling of classified documents and alleged election interference in Georgia — are in various stages of delay, and it is unlikely that a verdict in any of them will come before the election.
A decision in the New York criminal case could come by summer of this year.
At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments later this month on whether Trump enjoys blanket immunity for his actions as president, and what it decides could have ramifications for the presidency.
The district attorney hopes to make this case about 2016 election interference
A grand jury indicted Trump in the spring of last year, marking the first time a former or sitting president faced criminal charges. Republicans quickly dismissed the indictment as an overreach of power by District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who had brought the charges. Trump has pleaded not guilty.
At the center of the trial are 11 "hush money" payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels who, at the time Trump was first running for president, threatened to go public with accusations she'd had an affair with him not long after he married Melania Trump.
The lawsuit alleges that payments were made from Trump's flagship Trump Organization to Michael Cohen, then a vice president and counsel at the company. The payments were described by the Trump Organization falsely as "legal retainers"; they were, in fact, reimbursements to Cohen for paying Daniels.
Cohen transferred that money to Daniels less than two weeks before the 2016 election. After Trump won, he reimbursed Cohen, including with his own personal checks. Trump has denied an affair with Daniels, but in 2018 he admitted reimbursing Cohen for money paid to her, arguing it had nothing to do with the campaign.
The indictment also includes a separate $150,000 payment to another woman — the Playboy model Karen McDougal, who has spoken openly about her experience — who also claimed to have had an intimate relationship with Trump.
The fact of the payments and the false records isn't in dispute. What Bragg has to prove is that Trump made them in order to further other crimes, such as violating campaign finance law and mischaracterizing the payments for tax purposes.
In 2018, Cohen admitted to paying Daniels $130,000 — pleading guilty to eight counts including criminal tax evasion and campaign finance violations — and implicated Trump. At his plea hearing, Cohen said he organized these payments in coordination with and at the direction of then-candidate Trump.
Trump will balance the courtroom and the campaign
As he campaigns for the 2024 presidency — with enough delegates to formally claim the Republican nomination — Trump is facing a combined 88 state and federal charges, including several related to his efforts to try to stay in office after he lost the 2020 election to Biden.
This year judges in New York have already ruled against Trump in civil trials: He's been ordered to pay over $355 million for committing business fraud and to pay former columnist E. Jean Carroll $83 million for defamation.
He also faces charges in federal court in Washington related to his role in the Jan. 6 attack and in Florida for his handling of classified documents. He also faces state charges in Georgia over allegations of election interference.
Trump has received his own string of legal victories on all of these cases in the last month. The Florida and Washington cases are delayed until the Supreme Court rules on whether Trump enjoyed broad immunity as president. A judge in Georgia threw out three counts against Trump on the basis that they weren't detailed enough. Prosecutors could appeal the ruling, or go back to a grand jury and indict Trump again with more details. Trump now faces 10 felony counts in the state.
As opposed to his civil trials in Manhattan, where he was not required to attend hearings in person (though he did on several occasions), Trump will be required to spend every day of this criminal trial in the courtroom unless a judge rules otherwise. This puts him in New York nearly every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday for at least the next two months. Speaking to reporters after a pretrial hearing in February, Trump vowed to attend court during the day and attend campaign events at night.
Trump has spent the last several months using stops in New York courthouses as opportunities to speak to the press about the cases, and about his campaign platform. He has baselessly called the trials politically motivated and railed against them at his rallies across the country.
His snowballing legal troubles have been used to fundraise for his campaign. There were big spikes in donations around news events related to the cases he's been involved in and court appearances he's made. The largest amount of any single day came when his mugshot was released for his criminal case in Georgia.
Trump's solicitations for donations from his supporters typically label the trials, without evidence, as "witch hunts" and "election interference." Recent Federal Election Committee filings show he isn't raising as much as he previously did during these legal events.
Trump went from raising about $4 million after pleading not guilty to the alleged hush money payments in New York and again after pleading not guilty to election interference charges in Georgia, according to Reuters, to only bringing in $200,000 and $400,000 in November and December following major court appearances in his civil fraud trial, including his first testimony on the witness stand.
For now, his run-ins with the law have not deterred potential voters and in some instances, it has bolstered support for him. However, a conviction may not play well with independent and swing voters.
Although polls generally favor Trump, the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released last month showed that if Trump were convicted of a crime, Biden opens a 6% point lead, due largely to independent voters.
