NEW YORK –
Donald Trump returned to a New York courtroom Tuesday as a judge works to find a jury panel who will decide whether the former president is guilty of criminal charges alleging he falsified business records to cover up a sex scandal during the 2016 campaign.
The first day of Trump’s historic hush money trial in Manhattan on Monday ended with no one yet chosen to serve on the panel of 12 jurors and six alternates. Dozens of people were dismissed after saying they did not believe they could be fair, although dozens of other potential jurors have not yet been questioned. Trump arrived at the courthouse shortly before 9 a.m. Tuesday and quickly greeted reporters as he entered.
It is the first of Trump’s four criminal cases to go to trial and may be the only one that could reach a verdict before voters decide in November whether the presumptive Republican presidential nominee should return to the White House. It puts Trump’s legal problems at the center of the tight race against President Joe Biden, in which Trump casts himself as a victim of a politically motivated justice system working to deprive him of another term.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as part of an alleged effort to prevent lewd (and, he says, false) stories about his sex life from emerging during his 2016 campaign. On Monday, Trump called the case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for “scam” and “witch hunt.”
The charges center on payments of $130,000 that Trump’s company made to his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen. He paid that sum on Trump’s behalf to prevent porn actress Stormy Daniels from going public with her claims of a sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier. Trump has denied that the sexual encounter ever occurred.
Prosecutors say the payments to Cohen were falsely recorded as legal fees. Prosecutors have described it as part of a plan to bury damaging stories that Trump feared could help his opponent in the 2016 race, particularly because Trump’s reputation was suffering at the time over comments he had made about women.
Trump has acknowledged reimbursing Cohen for the payment and that it was designed to prevent Daniels from making the alleged encounter public. But Trump has previously said he had nothing to do with the campaign.
Jury selection could take several more days, or even weeks, in the heavily Democratic city where Trump grew up and catapulted to celebrity status decades before winning the White House.
Only about a third of the 96 people from the first panel of potential jurors who appeared in court Monday remained after the judge excused some members. More than half of the group were excused after telling the judge they could not be fair and impartial and several others were fired for other reasons that were not disclosed. Another group of more than 100 potential jurors sent to court Monday have not yet been brought into the courtroom for questioning.
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Richer reported from Washington.