Trump’s latest attack on jurors ‘worse than anything else’ he said: former prosecutor

Former President Donald Trump’s attacks on the jury are the most destructive thing he is doing in the Manhattan criminal hush money case, said former prosecutor Jeffrey Toobin on a CNN panel Thursday evening — and Judge Merchan should be worried about it.

The former president has mostly gone after potential witnesses, like his former attorney Michael Cohen, which also violates his gag order and has resulted in a contempt fine from Judge Juan Merchan. But he has also frequently claimed the jurors are liberal Trump haters who cannot be trusted to judge his case fairly.

“The judge is not supposed to be concerned about the given and take in the public arena, he’s trying to sort of hermetically seal his courtroom,” said former federal judge Nancy Gertner, also on the panel. “There’s no sort of invited response. Michael Cohen can say whatever he wants, although I suspect the prosecutors are probably calling up his lawyer now and saying, would you please shut up, like now, but that shouldn’t matter. The judge is only concerned about the people in front of him over whom he has authority and to make sure that they’re not responding.”

At the end of the day, she added, “Trump will have an opportunity to trash everyone, as he surely will, when this trial is over. So I wouldn’t worry about his First Amendment rights.”

“I think Merchan was somewhat sympathetic to the Michael Cohen issue, because Michael Cohen has been beating the hell out of Trump and there is a sense of fairness about the response, but that line about the jury, that’s the thing that’s worse than anything else Trump has said, because that means he has been looking into the jurors backgrounds,” said Toobin. “That means he has reached conclusions about them and, Your Honor can correct me, but I think judges are especially concerned about jurors much more even than witnesses, especially public figures like already seen. A juror who was in the jury pool could say, you know, I don’t wanna, I don’t want to deal with this anymore. So I mean, he could be concerned about that this is not a jury that has been sequestered, right? We don’t really do that anymore.”

“And so these are threats that could affect the very decision-makers in this case, as opposed to the public in general, which are more concerned about in gag order just before the trial,” Toobin added.