Judge Juan Merchan’s anti-Trump bias is so bad he isn’t even pretending to make the jury selection process fair.
Earlier this week, Fox News' Jesse Watters reported on how the process has been rigged against Trump, and he brought up how liberal activists are trying to sneak onto the jury.
"They are catching undercover liberal activists lying to the judge. They’re saying, 'Oh, have you ever said anything on social media about Donald Trump?' 'No, I can’t remember.' 'Well, what about this post where you said he should be in prison?' 'Oh yeah, that one.' 'Strike!' and they keep throwing these undercovers at him."
"And thank God they’re doing the research on these people so far," he added.
But not everyone who has been caught lying was booted. One of 12 seated jurors includes a woman who lied on her questionnaire to cover up her anti-Trump views.
Trump’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, sought to have Juror No. B133 removed because she had posted a video on social media celebrating Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
“This is a woman who said she never attended a Trump rally,” Susan Necheles, another of Trump's attorneys, pointed out before adding that this was “clearly an anti-Trump event.”
However, prosecutor Joshua Steinglass argued that the video depicted a celebration, not a rally. He clarified, “This is somebody filming people celebrating from a remote distance.”
Related: Liberal Activists Are Trying to Sneak Onto Trump Jury. But It’s Trump Who May Get in Trouble??
The woman is an employee of the city's Department of Education who lives on the Upper West Side. “It reminded me of the 7 o’clock cheer for the healthcare workers (during the COVID pandemic), which we did for a very long time out on the fire escape, and it was just a New York City celebratory moment,” she explained to the court.
The woman had another social media post that drew concerns from Trump’s legal team, yet the woman insisted she could put aside her biases, and Judge Merchan refused to remove her from the jury pool.
“The juror came in, she was confronted with both of these [posts], and she provided what I believe were reasonable explanations of both,” he explained.
Does this sound like a fair process to you?
I don’t doubt she is not the only anti-Trumper who lied to get on the jury. Others have, thankfully, been less successful.
That attrition speaks to the difficulties that lawyers have faced in finding people who feel they can be fair in a trial of a man who inspires strong emotions. And there were second thoughts: Several potential jurors told the judge that they would be impartial, only to later admit that they simply could not.
There were also moments of unintentional hilarity: One potential juror, who had said she could be fair, was confronted by the defense team over social media posts she’d made in the past, including one in which she called Mr. Trump a racist and a sexist.
Reading it aloud, she stopped.
“Oops,” she said. “That sounds bad.”
She was excused.
That was clearly a case where it would have been more difficult for Merchan to allow the potential juror to be seated.
Remember how Sunny Hostin was worried about pro-Trump people getting on the jury by lying? Well, in reality, we’re seeing anti-Trump people getting on the jury by lying, and Judge Merchan is letting them whenever it’s possible.
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