One juror who sat for six weeks listening to the evidence presented in a Manhattan courtroom against former President Donald Trump reportedly appears sympathetic towards him.
The jury on Wednesday will begin to consider whether or not Trump, beyond a reasonable doubt, committed a crime of falsifying records to conceal a second crime. Many legal experts believe there is no good case against Trump.
Some legal experts, such as constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, expect the jury will either render a guilty verdict or produce a hung jury that results in a mistrial.
The prospects of a hung jury could be based on a report of one juror who made “friendly eye contact with Trump from time to time as the jury enters the room and walks right past the defense table.”
Marc Caputo wrote in the Bulwark:
“There are eight people on that jury who definitely hate Trump. If there’s one person who doesn’t, it’s [this] juror,” said one court attendee who, like others for this story, relayed their observations on condition of anonymity to The Bulwark, which is also protecting the privacy and safety of the juror in question by not disclosing identifying details.
As the trial has progressed since April 15, these sources relate, this juror has appeared to nod along in seeming accordance with the defense at times. On other occasions, the juror has seemingly reacted favorably to and made eye contact with Trump’s congressional surrogates who began joining him in court in recent weeks.
The jurors, however, more often than not lean politically left, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman recalled during jury selection.
Haberman’s statement confirmed a widely held belief among Republicans that Trump will not receive a fair criminal trial in Manhattan. President Joe Biden won over 86 percent of the Manhattan vote in 2020.
In high-publicity court cases, judges and attorneys carefully evaluate “stealth jurors,” individuals who want to be selected for the case to steer the verdict.
“Only about 12 percent of the people in this area voted for Trump,” Turley told Fox News during jury selection in April. “The jurors you have to worry about are the ones who are sort of ‘Trojan horse jurors,’ who are hiding bias that doesn’t appear on social media or are involved in any formal charges.”
Potential jurors in the Trump case faced 42 questions during the jury selection. Some say the questions benefited the prosecution. The jurors also faced scrutiny from lawyers for the prosecution and the defense.
“Now we have seen jurors who have later been found to have misrepresented their histories in a couple of prior cases involving Trump associates,” Turley continued. “In both those cases, the judges in Washington, DC, refused to reconsider the verdict. And so this is a very important stage to try to filter out these types of jurors.”
Increasing numbers of Americans see Trump’s criminal trial as irrelevant to his fitness for reelection, a CNN poll recently found, and only 13 percent believe Trump is being treated the same as other “criminal defendants.”
A majority of Americans doubt Trump’s criminal trial will conclude with a fair outcome, the CNN poll found. Only about one-third of American adults believe Trump did anything illegal regarding the case, an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found in April.
Related: WATCH — Trump’s Lawyer Alina Habba: Democrats “Can’t Stop Him with the Votes” so They’re Using “Lawfare”
Matt Perdie / Breitbart News
The case is New York v. Trump, No. 71543-23, in the New York Supreme Court for New York County.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former GOP War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.