Trump hush-money trial: Juror excused over concerns identity made public - BBC News
Jury is shrinking, not growing
Kayla Epstein in New York
Jury selection is now into its third day, and we have actually lost a juror rather than gaining any.
We are now down to six. Here is how we got here:
As my colleague Madeline Halpert reported earlier, Juror #2 asked to be excused because people in her life had started to figure out her identity based on news reports.
It goes to show the extremely high stakes not just for Donald Trump, his lawyers, and the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, but the 12 regular people who will be swept up in the trial along with them.
The court went back and forth over the most revealing questions – about employers and employment history. Justice Merchan ultimately agreed with Trump’s lawyers that it was important to obtain information about prospective juror’s employers.
But he issued a caveat: those answers will be struck from the court records, and he directed the dozens of reporters watching from an overflow courtroom not to publicly report those answers.
*** A further update posted just now ... ***
Madeline Halpert reporting from court
We've just been told that juror number four has been excused.
That means we're now down to five jurors. We don't know why exactly he was dismissed.
This is just another form of delay tactics by the defense, nothing more.
The longer they drag out jury selection, the longer the trial runs, which gives them more time for everything from prepping the defense to giving the ranting monkey more time for his campaign.
Do you have proof of that or are you just guessing?
Let's see, first there was complaints on Truth Social about not being able to dismiss an unlimited number of jurors without reason for dismissal:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-gripes-he-cant-reject-unlimited-jurors-in-new-york-hush-money-trial/ar-BB1lNmzY
Then just hours ago the DA asked the Judge to hold him in contempt for poor remarks regarding potential jurors:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/da-asks-judge-to-hold-trump-in-contempt-for-disturbing-truth-social-post-attacking-prospective-jurors/ar-AA1nffCs
Then there's the mountains of previous trial evidence showing the same acts of slowing down the judicial process, which simply eludes anyone to the same conclusion I gave: It's a delay tactic.
maybe a middle ground -
he (ie trump) and his team have done the slow walk and delay for everything we’ve seen publicly regarding legal matters. everything takes so much longer than it needs to (and then it’s a problem), so perhaps years of empirical evidence leads to an educated guess.