Former US President Donald Trump has already made history in another way – with the start of the criminal case against him in New York for the hidden money in exchange for silence paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.
After marathon deliberations, the 12 jurors and six alternates were selected and the trial is set to begin on the merits, expected to last between 6 and 8 weeks in a Manhattan court. The case against Trump comes less than seven months before the next presidential election on November 5, in which the 77-year-old ex-president hopes to return to the White House.
The former Republican head of state is accused of arranging and ordering the transfer of $130,000 to Daniels in the final days of the 2016 campaign. The payment was made by Trump’s then-personal attorney, Michael Cohen, to help the porn star publicize her claims that a decade earlier she had an intimate relationship with Trump at a Lake Tahoe hotel.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying accounting documents so the money transferred to Daniels could be disguised as legal fees.
Three other criminal cases against Trump are unlikely to begin before Nov. 5, but because this one involves an extramarital affair, legal experts say it lacks the weight of the other three, a Reuters analysis shows.
The defense will argue that this is a politically motivated prosecution, said Adam Kaufman, a former Manhattan prosecutor.
And the prosecutor in the case, Alvin Bragg, points out that it is an illegal scheme to taint the 2016 election by “sweeping” a scandalous story that would hurt the Trump campaign. Trump’s lawyers have already countered that Daniels was paid, but that it did not violate campaign fundraising rules.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released in the first week of April showed that nearly two in three respondents considered the allegations in the case to be at least somewhat serious. One in four Republicans and half of independents say they would not vote for Trump if he were convicted of a felony.
Daniels and Cohen are among the witnesses to be called by the state prosecution. And Trump has announced that he plans to testify in his own defense, a risky move that will give prosecutors an opportunity to cross-examine him.
The prosecution’s main argument is that the money given to Daniels was part of a larger scheme to pay people with potentially negative information about Trump to keep their mouths shut before the election in which Trump defeated the Democrat Hillary Clinton.
The state indictment states that money for the porn star was entered into the records of Trump’s New York real estate company in the form of monthly legal fees.
Trump’s defense argued that payments by Trump to Cohen in 2017, when he was president, were indeed for legal services. Trump has called Cohen a “serial liar” and his lawyers are expected to attack his credibility as a trial witness.
In 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and testified that Trump ordered him to pay Daniels. Federal prosecutors who indicted Cohen, however, did not indict Trump at the time.
Trump has called the hush money lawsuit a political “witch hunt” aimed at thwarting his bid to defeat incumbent Joe Biden, Reuters notes. During jury selection, Deputy District Attorney Joshua Steenglass emphasized that the case is not a referendum on Trump’s presidency. “This case is really not about whether you like Donald Trump,” Steenglass pointed out. “The case is about the rule of law and whether Donald Trump violated it,” the agency quoted him as saying.
In a report from the first day in which jurors were selected, Agence France-Presse stated that everything in the courtroom resembled a “judicial soap opera”, and Trump himself, with his gestures and behavior, expressed his discomfort and disgust at what he happens.
The selection of a judicial jury as an episode of this “soap opera” was something never seen before, the world agencies unanimously noted. “There is hardly a person in New York who does not have an opinion about Donald Trump,” said lawyer Paul Applebaum, who is not involved in the case. “Many people are convinced that he is either Satan incarnate or Jesus has returned,” Applebaum emphasized. quoted by Reuters But even given the fact that Trump is a polarizing figure, and that Manhattan is considered a Democratic stronghold, having an opinion about Trump was not enough to reject potential jurors.
In the questionnaire approved by the judge in the case, Juan Mercan, of a total of 42 questions, more than 10 were about Trump. The prosecution and the defense had the right to reject without justification 10 potential jurors each, while for each subsequent one they had to justify to Judge Merchan why the person would not be impartial.
Trump’s defense tried unsuccessfully to move the case to another court district, arguing that he could not get a fair trial in Manhattan. In 2020 in Manhattan, Biden beat Trump with 85% of the vote. On April 8, an appeals court rejected Trump’s attempt to delay the start of the case.
Trump’s camp tended to select jurors from less educated, working-class men with negative attitudes toward law enforcement informed by more conservative media. The state prosecution was looking for women, more educated people, the so-called “white collars”, who follow the news of more liberal media, summarizes Reuters.
According to the lawyer Applebaum, everything depends on what questions are asked to the potential juror after he has been previously researched, but there is also a dose of luck in the selection process. Applebaum points out that for both the prosecution and the defense, the selection of jurors is so stressful that it feels like going down Niagara Falls in a barrel,” Reuters quoted him.
As Tadeusz Hofmeister, a law professor at the University of Dayton who has researched juries, noted for the Associated Press, in many landmark cases, the prosecution and defense are on the lookout for so-called “stealth jurors” (similar to stealth technology, from English by stealth – “stealthfully, silently”, author’s note). These are people who try to answer questions in such a way as to be liked by jurors because they want to influence the jury’s decision, to benefit from their participation in the trial or to carry out other personal plans, summarizes the AP.
The AP notes that the initial pool of nearly 200 potential jurors was also thoroughly vetted on social media. In the posts of these people, the state prosecution and the defense have looked for signs of hidden problematic information or extremist views.
A potential juror was rejected by the defense because in 2017 he wrote about Trump in a post that “he should be sent away in a warm place.” The defendant’s lawyers also rejected another candidate who posted a video of New Yorkers celebrating Biden’s election victory.
According to Tama Cudman, a veteran criminal defense attorney quoted by the AP, “we never get what we want. We’re just looking to get rid of people who seem to us to be dangerous to the client. We realize that a good jury was selected if nobody’s happy. The prosecution didn’t get what they wanted. But they all got rid of the people who really stood on end.”
Jo-Ellen Dimitrius – Jury empanelment consultant who worked on Ow’s trial. Jay. Simpson, says social media checks have become key in recent years. She likens jury selection to a “jury polygraph.” Asking the right questions is important because the person may have deleted or restricted their Internet activity. Trump’s team also rejected a juror candidate who posted a meme of Trump being beheaded.
However, Judge Merchan told defense lawyers that the question is not whether “someone agrees politically with your client or not, the question is whether he can be honest and impartial,” the AP quoted him as saying.
Either way, Trump has already ruled that this case against him and the other three constitute a weaponization of law enforcement by Democratic prosecutors and other government officials. Trump claims they are at the heart of the trumped-up allegations, which are an attempt to derail his presidential campaign.
The money-for-hush criminal case itself is challenging and testing the US justice system. Because it is about bringing a former head of state and former commander-in-chief to court, AP notes.
As Judge Merchan ordered Trump to attend court hearings, he announced that he would “campaign at night.”
A unique aspect of the opening case is that Trump’s former personal attorney and confidant Michael Cohen, who told Vanity Fair magazine in 2017 that he would take a bullet fired at Trump, is now the prosecution’s key witness . In a period of 15 years, Cohen went from being Trump’s lawyer and a man who fixed his troubles (the so-called fixer) to a fierce antagonist of the businessman-turned-politician, summarizes Reuters.
Cohen turned against Trump midway through his presidency, when federal investigators were investigating his role in the payments to Daniels and other acts involving him, Reuters recalled.
In 2019, Cohen testified before a committee of the US Congress and stated: “I’m ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is like. He’s a racist. He’s a crook. He’s a fraud,” Reuters quoted him as saying.
A year earlier, when the payments to Daniels came to light, Reuters noted, Cohen initially said he had paid Daniels with personal funds and had not been reimbursed. However, he later pleaded guilty to violating federal campaign finance law in connection with the payment to Daniels. Cohen then testified before Congress that Trump told him to pay, and the money was either refunded to him in installments. Cohen also showed a copy of a $35,000 check from Trump’s personal bank account.
Cohen was sentenced to 3 years in prison and served nearly a year before being released.
Relying on the disbarred Cohen’s testimony is risky for the prosecutor in the Bragg case, given that the lawyer has a history of perjury.
On the other hand, Cohen has admitted that much of his criminal behavior stemmed from his unreserved devotion to Trump. In 2023, Cohen said in an interview with Reuters that he expected Trump and his allies to attack him. “(They act) completely like a textbook,” Cohen summarized at the time.
The unprecedented process, […] promises to be both more comprehensive and less factually spicy than the “money vs. silence” label might suggest, commented the Christian Science Monitor.
“This is a complicated case, and I think not enough attention has been paid to how difficult it is going to be for the prosecution to prove its case,” said Paul Collins, a professor of law and political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
