Former President Donald Trump’s jury selection remains underway in New York, with 7 out of 12 seats filled by Tuesday afternoon from a pool of 96 potential jurors. But so far, the jury of the former president’s “peers” seems to have a common attribute — they largely get their news from the same left-wing media that have spent years disparaging Trump.
Of the 96 possible jurors, more than half were “dismissed immediately Monday after indicating that they could not fairly reach a decision,” The New York Times (NYT) reported. Some jurors who made it through to Tuesday later stepped down, with one admitting “I don’t think I can be as impartial and unbiased as I hoped I could be,” according to the Times.
Meet Jurors 1-7
Of the currently selected jurors, two are from outside the 50 states, according to ABC News. One hails from Ireland, works as a salesman, and is reportedly set to serve as the case’s foreman. The juror told the court he reads MSNBC, The New York Times, the Daily Mail, and Fox News, and reportedly said he has “heard of some” of the other lawfare cases being waged against the former president.
Another juror is from Puerto Rico and called Trump “fascinating and mysterious,” according to ABC News. His typical news sources are the Daily News, The New York Times, and Google.
That juror reportedly said he finds it “really interesting” that when Trump “walks into a room … he sets people off one way or another. Really, this one guy can do all of this.”
There are also two lawyers on the case. One is a corporate lawyer originally from Oregon who reads the NYT, Google News, and the Wall Street Journal. According to ABC News, the juror “suggested that he could infer the former president’s intent without ‘reading his mind.'”
The other lawyer on the jury reads the NYT, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. The juror said he doesn’t “have opinions about [Trump] personally.” ABC News reported that “he supported some of Trump’s policies as president but disagreed with others.”
The remaining three jurors are female. One works as an oncology nurse and primarily gets her news from the NYT, CNN, Google, and Facebook. While she reportedly states she doesn’t “really have” an opinion on Trump, she added “No one is above the law.”
That phrase has been used by left-wing activists and politicians to justify the lawfare against Trump, despite the fact that President Joe Biden has escaped prosecution for improper retention of classified documents as well as an apparent foreign corruption scandal.
Another female juror, described by the NYT as a “young black woman,” is a born-and-raised New Yorker who teaches English Language Arts at a charter school. She primarily uses TikTok and Google to get her news but said she “doesn’t really care for the news,” according to ABC News.
“President Trump speaks his mind,” the juror reportedly said. “And I’d rather that than someone who’s in office who you don’t know what they’re thinking.”
The third female juror is a software engineer for the Walt Disney Company and goes to TikTok and the NYT for news. She assured the court she would “be fair and impartial.”
Jurors’ ‘News’ Sources Have a History of Leftist Activism
The majority of the media sources the aforementioned jurors use to obtain the news are corporate media outlets or Big Tech platforms with known biases against Trump and other non-leftists.
At least six of the jurors said they turn to the NYT for news. That paper helped spread the Russia-collusion hoax, with three of its reporters winning a Pulitzer Prize for their “reporting” which FBI official Peter Strzok, who ran the investigation into the alleged collusion, privately acknowledged was filled with “misleading and inaccurate” information, as pointed out by The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway.
After The New York Times published a story in 2017 titled “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian Intelligence,” Strzok wrote in private notes that officials “have not seen evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with [Russian Intelligence Officials]. … We are unaware of ANY Trump advisors engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials.”
The Times based its story on anonymous intelligence officials.
“Widely accepted by the media and political establishment,” the Times story did “much to cement the false and damaging Russia conspiracy theory,” Hemingway wrote.
By 2020, the Times’ editorial board had flat-out published an editorial titled “End Our National Crisis: The Case Against Donald Trump.” Its lede asserted that “Trump’s re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II.”
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Several jurors cited the Chinese-owned app TikTok as one of their sources for news, comporting with a general trend showing 4 in 10 TikTok users say they use the app as a regular news source, according to Pew Research. These consumers are “especially likely” to be Democrats, under 50 years old, and/or women, Pew noted.
As national security concerns boost an effort to ban the spyware, Democrats have fretted about losing the platform. Reuters noted that a “US ban of TikTok would rob Biden, Democrats of 2024 election tool,” noting Biden’s campaign uses TikTok to make videos like one “skewering” Trump “about cutting Social Security spending.” Politico published a similar report about young Democrats’ affinity for keeping TikTok around.
Several jurors also cited Google as a source of their news. Google has been known to amplify left-wing media while suppressing conservative perspectives and shooing readers away from stories like the Biden family corruption scandal. The platform “interfered” in elections at least 41 times over 16 years, a study from the Media Research Center found. “In every case, Google harmed the candidates – regardless of party – who threatened its left-wing candidate of choice,” the MRC concluded.
Jury Selection
Before questioning the prospective jurors, the prosecution and defense were given their identities so they could search the jurors’ social media activity, CNN reported.
Each side is allowed to preemptively strike 10 jurors for any reason, and may also ask the judge to strike jurors who show bias. If the judge finds cause, the struck juror is not included in the 10 preemptive strikes. One of Trump’s lawyers, Todd Blanche, asked the judge to remove potential jurors who claimed not to have opinions about Trump but whose social media posts, Blanche argued, indicated otherwise. Judge Juan Merchan removed two — including a man who “had posted ‘lock him up’ on Facebook” — but refused to strike three others, according to CNN.
Blanche objected to one potential juror — a woman who had posted a video she took of a crowd of people celebrating after Biden’s 2020 victory — but Merchan refused to strike her and chastised Trump instead.
One potential juror who was later excused because of a job conflict told reporters outside the courthouse that she believed in the importance of giving Trump a fair trial but then launched into a list of reasons why she disliked Trump and did not “approve of what he did as president.”
The jury isn’t the only player in the courtroom the Trump team has to worry about being influenced by bias. Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter Loren was identified by Politico in 2022 as president of Authentic Campaigns, a Democrat marketing firm that includes clients like Vice President Kamala Harris, and California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff. Merchan himself donated to President Joe Biden’s campaign in 2020 and to an anti-Trump group called “Stop Republicans.”
Why Is Trump in Court Anyway?
In one of Democrats’ several acts of lawfare against the former president, Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg indicted Trump on 34 counts related to allegations he had his then-lawyer Michael Cohen pay pornographer Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged affair. Bragg claims Trump broke the law by having his company classify the alleged payments to Daniels as “legal fees” instead of campaign expenditures. While “misreporting business expenses is normally, at most, a misdemeanor,” as former FEC Commissioner Brad Smith explained in these pages, Bragg is trying to turn it into a felony charge by arguing the misreporting was “done to cover up a crime.”
Bragg alleges Trump’s failure to report the payout as a campaign expenditure “prevented the public from knowing information that might have influenced their votes.” But as The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland has noted, “there is nothing unlawful about purchasing negative information to suppress its publication.”
