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The dry rituals of court only made the proceedings more surreal, as New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan warned Trump he could be removed or sent to jail if he disrupted the trial or failed to appear, and prosecutors said they would seek to hold Trump in contempt even before a single potential juror had been questioned.<\/p>\n
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was openly contemptuous of the trial when he spoke to reporters at the end of the day in the courthouse hallway. \u201cWe are not going to be given a fair trial,\u201d he said, calling the prosecution \u201ca scam.\u201d<\/p>\n
Inside the courtroom, however, Trump was anything but disruptive. He frequently appeared bored or uninterested in the legal jousting that took up the entire morning session, but was mostly attentive once jurors began to be questioned.<\/p>\n
Shortly after the lunch break, as Merchan read a lengthy series of instructions to prospective jurors, Trump closed his eyes and at times appeared to nod off. He then would abruptly catch himself and stiffen his posture.<\/p>\n
The former president\u2019s most animated moments in court came when the judge was not on the bench. Trump chatted with his lawyers at the defense table, sometimes making them laugh or smile.<\/p>\n
While hundreds of potential jurors waited on another floor of the courthouse, lawyers sparred for hours Monday morning over what evidence should be shared with them, and a host of other legal issues large and small.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until midafternoon that the first batch of 96 potential jurors entered the courtroom to begin the voir dire screening process. Almost immediately, half of them were gone, having raised their hands when asked who could not be fair or impartial in a case involving Trump.<\/p>\n
One prospective juror who stayed to be questioned said during that process that she did have strong feelings about Trump that could interfere with her ability to be fair. A Harlem resident who recently started working at Bloomingdale\u2019s, she said in her free time she liked to sing, watch TV and \u201cgo to the club.\u201d<\/p>\n
She was excused from jury duty after lawyers conferred with the judge. Walking out, she told a court officer, \u201cI just couldn\u2019t do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just 10 prospective jurors had been questioned by the time the trial adjourned for the day at 4:30 p.m. The proceedings will resume Tuesday at 9:30 a.m., with hundreds more people waiting with their jury summonses. Lawyers must agree on 12 jurors and a handful of alternates \u2014 a process that could take weeks.<\/p>\n
Merchan tried to keep the high-profile case on an even keel, at one point urging prosecutors and defense lawyers to \u201csit down, relax\u201d while he laid out the issues yet to be decided.<\/p>\n
But he also angered Trump by ruling that he could not be excused from the trial to attend Supreme Court arguments next week over Trump\u2019s claims of immunity in one of his three other pending criminal cases. And Merchan was noncommittal when Trump asked for a day off next month to attend his son Barron\u2019s high school graduation.<\/p>\n
The former president has used the many criminal and civil trials he faces as a rallying cry for his Republican base, and has successfully managed to turn some of his court appearances into campaign fodder. He is not required to attend the April 25 Supreme Court argument in the immunity case, and did not attend a February oral argument in a different case \u2014 about whether he could be barred from the ballot in Colorado \u2014 that also had the potential to reshape his candidacy.<\/p>\n
Trump has repeatedly criticized Merchan as biased against him and tried \u2014 without success \u2014 to remove the judge from the case.<\/p>\n
On Monday, Merchan signaled his displeasure with Trump over recent public statements attacking Trump\u2019s former lawyer Michael Cohen, a key witness in the case, after the judge had issued a gag order explicitly barring such comments.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors argued Trump had made three social media posts in the last two weeks that violated the judge\u2019s order. They asked that he be fined a total of $3,000, found in contempt and warned he could be sent to jail if he keeps making such comments.<\/p>\n
When Trump\u2019s lawyer Todd Blanche responded that his client had to be able to respond to political and public attacks from Cohen and others, Merchan archly asked the lawyer to point out where in his gag order he\u2019d made an exception like that. The judge scheduled a hearing on the matter next week.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s unique status as a defendant who also happens to be a former and potential future president arose frequently in the opening hours of the trial \u2014 the first of four that Trump faces, and the only one that has not been significantly delayed by pretrial proceedings and appeals.<\/p>\n
Criminal defendants, Merchan noted, have a right to participate in private sidebar questioning of potential jurors, but if Trump were to do that, he would be joined by Secret Service agents, creating logistical hurdles for court officials.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors have charged Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records \u2014 part of what they say was a criminal scheme to cover up Cohen\u2019s 2016 payment to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels so she would keep quiet about her alleged tryst with Trump years earlier.<\/p>\n
Cohen was reimbursed for those payments after Trump won the 2016 presidential election, but those payments were categorized as a legal retainer. Concealing the true purpose of the payments amounts to a crime, prosecutors charge.<\/p>\n
In a case so closely tied to an alleged sexual liaison, lawyers spent much of Monday arguing over what a jury can be told about other purported indiscretions in Trump\u2019s life.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors wanted to tell the jury that he also had an affair with Karen McDougal, a Playboy model, at a time when his wife, Melania Trump, was pregnant with his child.<\/p>\n
Blanche argued that would poison the jury against his client, for something that was not a crime and has no bearing on the charges he is facing.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe risk of unfair prejudice is through the roof,\u201d Blanche said, \u201cfrom salacious details about a completely different situation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass argued that the details of the McDougal affair were important to show Trump\u2019s state of mind and behavior when allegations of sexual impropriety surfaced against him.<\/p>\n
The judge said the jury could be told about the affair, but not the additional detail that at the time Melania Trump was pregnant. That detail, he said, was prejudicial, although he reserved the right to change his thinking on that matter as other evidence is introduced during the trial.<\/p>\n
Since the 1980s, Trump\u2019s fame and notoriety have been fueled partly by the tabloid press, and prosecutors made clear they aim to use that back-scratching relationship against him to show that he made the hush money payment to keep voters from learning about his embarrassing peccadilloes.<\/p>\n
Merchan agreed to allow prosecutors to tell the jury about a 2016 meeting at Trump Tower with Trump, Cohen and National Enquirer executive David Pecker, who allegedly tried to help Trump\u2019s presidential campaign. Prosecutors say the three men discussed publishing positive stories about the real estate mogul turned candidate, and negative pieces about his political opponents.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors are expected to use that type of information to support their argument that Trump intended to help his campaign image when he covered up the $130,000 payment to Daniels. That money allegedly kept her quiet during the campaign about a sexual encounter she says she\u2019d had with Trump 10 years earlier.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe entire point of the Trump Tower meeting was to control the flow of information that reached the electorate to accentuate the positive, hide the negative and exaggerate information that would be harmful to Trump\u2019s opponents,\u201d Steinglass argued.<\/p>\n
Blanche countered that the meeting was not part of any charged criminal conduct, and said such sessions are common for candidates.<\/p>\n
While they lost that argument, Trump\u2019s lawyers convinced Merchan that jurors should not be told about a number of women who came forward in late 2016 to accuse Trump of sexual misconduct in the wake of an \u201cAccess Hollywood\u201d recording in which he bragged about grabbing women.<\/p>\n
Merchan called those accusations \u201cvery, very prejudicial,\u201d adding that they are \u201cjust a rumor, just gossip, complete hearsay. Did it happen? There\u2019s nothing to prove that. For me to allow the defendant to be prejudiced based just on a rumor is not fair.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steinglass had argued that his team should be allowed to mention, in general terms, those claims to the jury, to show how Trump reacted to them.<\/p>\n
Trump \u201cbecame almost obsessed with addressing these allegations,\u201d the prosecutor said, because the candidate worried the stories would hurt him with women voters.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is really the key, specifically with female voters,\u201d Steinglass argued.<\/p>\n
Isaac Arnsdorf contributed to this report.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This post appeared first on The Washington Post<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
NEW YORK \u2014 The opening day of Donald Trump\u2019s criminal trial delved deep into his tabloid fodder sex life, as lawyers and the judge debated how many salacious details jurors should eventually hear as they decide whether he broke the law to cover up hush money payments. The historic first trial of a former U.S. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3177,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}