by WorldTribune Staff, April 16, 2024
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat, is asking potential jurors in the hush money trial of Donald Trump if they were supporters of the former president over the years while failing to ask the same questions about supporting Joe Biden, Trump’s lawyer said.
Bragg’s office is attempting to “stack the deck” against Trump in the jury selection, Jesse Binnall said during an interview on Breitbart News Daily.
Bragg has charged Trump with 34 felonies, accusing him of falsifying business records.
Jury selection is different in every jurisdiction and in every case, Binnall said. In Trump’s case, he added, they are “basing much of jury selection on these questionnaires that they’ve sent,” which “are very much in favor of the prosecution.”
Reporting from the trial in New York on Monday, Tom Howell Jr. of The Washington Times described two of the excused jurors:
“A young woman from Texas, who now lives in Harlem, was excused after she answered ‘yes’ to whether she had a strong opinion about Mr. Trump. She said Al Jazeera was on her media reading list and she enjoyed ‘going to the club’ in her spare time.
“Another excused juror, a woman in her 30s with short hair, was overheard in the hallway saying, ‘I just couldn’t do it.’ ”
The questionnaire, Binnall said, asks “a whole bunch of questions that are meant to weed out Trump supporters, but apparently they don’t have many questions that actually focus on who might be biased against President Trump.”
One example is the questionnaire asked if respondents had ever attended a Trump rally or volunteered for Trump’s campaign.
It also queries potential jurors on where they get their news about Trump.
“What media organizations do you get your news from, and, you know, looking for people who might be listening to talk radio, you know, watching cable news shows that might be seen as favoring President Trump, etc., etc. And they focused a lot of questions trying to find out if you have ever been involved in supporting President Trump at all over the years,” Binnall said.
“They don’t ask any questions if you’ve been involved in supporting Biden, if you might have political bias and biases that show that you might want to convict President Trump in order to affect the presidential election as a juror.”
Binnall continued: “As you’ve said, when you’re in a jurisdiction that was 85-15 Biden in 2020, that would be something that would be extremely important, and they just kind of whistle past the graveyard on that. So these jury questionnaires are — are very, very one-sided” and this as a “very large concern here.”
Bragg’s office and Judge Juan Merchan are “not likely to step them back on this,” Binnall said, adding that if there are just one or two jurors who actually give Trump a fair trial “then he’s going to be acquitted. .. And so they’re terrified of that.”
Trump lawyer: Alvin Bragg looking to ‘stack the deck’ against Trump during jury selection added by Editor Two on
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