Behind the scenes, Trump’s defense team is working to find and review the social media accounts of potential jurors, and when it discovers those who criticize the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee , she rushes to show them to the judge in order to try to get them. people laid off.
Turnaround times for such work are tight: Lawyers handling the case have received lists of names of potential jurors, some of whom are scheduled to begin questioning within hours, according to a person familiar with the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal operations.
The defense team fears it will face many hurdles to secure acquittal for Manhattan’s liberal jurors, according to people familiar with their thinking who also spoke on condition of anonymity. On Wednesday, Trump posted a message on social media calling it the “second worst place in the country.”
To combat what it considers a fundamentally unfair jury pool, Trump’s defense team has hired a jury consulting firm that analyzes all messages from jurors, according to the person, who declined to identify the cabinet.
This is not a particularly new strategy among wealthier defendants who can afford to pay for this type of work, but it is unique in the extent to which it is applied in a case involving Trump, someone about whom millions of Americans have chatted, joked, criticized and praised for years — which means there’s a lot more potential material on social media than his lawyers can exploit.
But this work of exploring the publications of potential jurors on social networks takes place under enormous time constraints.
New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan focused on moving jury selection forward quickly: Seven jurors were sworn in after less than a day and a half of jury selection earlier this week. Ultimately, the process will select 12 jurors and six alternates.
“We had to rush to do all the research and we will have to rush again” on Thursday, when jury selection resumes, a person familiar with the matter said.
This search is made more difficult by the fact that Manhattan has so many people, which means it’s harder to make sure they’re looking at messages from the right person with a given name. Additionally, any person can use multiple social media accounts under nicknames or pseudonyms.
The jury in this case is partly anonymous: their names are known to the lawyers handling the case but will not be made public.
Some members of the defense team wonder whether, now that they have shown their tactics in open court, some potential jurors will begin deleting old online posts before the trial resumes Thursday, this person said.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said the charges against the former president were unfair and deliberately filed in jurisdictions most hostile to him.
“The deck has been stacked against President Trump in a blatant abuse of our legal system, in which his persecutors have deliberately targeted some of the most Democratic jurisdictions in the country to present their false cases,” Cheung said.
Trump’s defense team used old social media posts to argue against the person sitting in the very first jury seat.
Blanche said the woman “has a series of extremely hostile Facebook posts.”
Merchan seemed confused by Blanche’s assessment. The post in question was a Facebook video of a spontaneous street celebration for Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, with comments suggesting she was also happy with the outcome.
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass called the claim “ridiculous.”
When questioned about this in court, the woman explained that she found herself witnessing a historic event near her home when she left the house to move her car that day, and she stressed that she knew she could still be a fair juror.
If Merchan decides that a person would not be fair and impartial, he can excuse any potential jurors. Alternatively, if one party objects, they can also remove certain jurors from the jury – but each side only receives 10 so-called peremptory challenges.
In the prospective juror’s old Facebook video case, the judge refused to fire her for cause, so Blanche used one of Trump’s challenges to fire her. These exchanges made clear that the defense was striving, even as its lawyers argued in court, to conduct quick searches on the people who seemed most likely to be chosen as jurors from a larger group that had was summoned to serve on the jury.
Trump’s defense team has taken the position that past critical or mocking online statements about him are evidence of bias and grounds for removal. Steinglass argued that in many cases, the age of the posts alone can make them largely irrelevant, not to mention that some of those discussed in court appeared to be Internet humor.
Merchan’s judgment on social media moved closer to prosecutors on Tuesday, but he agreed with the defense that an old comment crossed the line.
In this case, the prospective juror had written “lock him up” years ago in reference to Trump, who was president at the time.
“Everyone knows that if Mr. Trump is convicted in this case, he faces a potential prison sentence, which would be a prison sentence,” Merchan said. “I don’t think I can allow this juror to stay.”
When Merchan mentioned the possibility of prison time, Trump shook his head slightly in disgust.
So far, the judge has been rather skeptical of the defense’s allegations of dangerous bias presented by old social media posts.
Jurors questioned in court about their old social media posts often became defensive and rejected the idea that the old posts revealed anything important about their opinions or their ability to be fair.
“If you look at my social media, you can see that there is very little that I post there now that has anything to do with politics, it has become too vitriolic for the people, the people that I’ve known for years,” said a woman who posted political parody and humor posts in 2018 that the defense said showed she was anti-Trump. “I may have posted this, but I learned a lesson from it.”
If the judge continues to disagree with the defense’s arguments regarding most of the jurors’ social media posts, Trump could quickly overcome the number of challenges assigned to him and find himself with little say in the remaining panel members. Trump is also entitled to two peremptory challenges for each alternate juror.
In court Tuesday, Blanche suggested he might challenge jury selection in the future based on additional findings of social media posts related to his client.
Merchan said the pace of jury selection means opening statements could happen Monday, and if that schedule is met, Trump’s online researchers have just a few more days to try to influence the composition of the jury .
Increasingly, courts have had to deal with problematic social media posts that only came to light after the jury had sat or after a verdict had been returned.
This was the case in the prosecution of Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, who tried to have his conviction for lying to Congress overturned after discovering that his jury forewoman had published on social media an article about his arrest and published again shortly after his conviction.
The bar for a court to overturn a conviction based on juror misconduct is very high, and Stone’s attempt failed, although he later received a pardon from Trump.
washingtonpost
