An attorney for Donald Trump predicted Sunday the former president would be acquitted of the charges he faces in his New York hush money criminal trial if the judge impaneled a “fair and impartial jury.”
“It’s absolutely outrageous,” Trump attorney Will Scharf told Fox and Friends Sunday about the 34-count indictment against Trump for falsifying business records in relation to an alleged cover-up of a $130,000 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.
Scharf added, “And I think any fair and impartial jury will see through all the sensationalism and all the media coverage and would feel honor bound to vote to acquit here, and we’re hoping that’s what will play out in New York.”
After 12 jurors and six alternates were sworn in Friday afternoon, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan said opening arguments in the first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president would begin Monday morning. The trial will be ongoing for weeks and is slated to take place each day except for Wednesdays.
The jury selection process spanned the first week of the trial and took on the appearance of a focus group that gave hundreds of everyday New Yorkers the chance to give their opinions and viewpoints on the former president in an effort to whittle down a fair and impartial jury.
Potential jurors with the most opinions never had a real chance to become impaneled. Nearly half of the nearly 200 potential jurors called over the course of the week told Merchan they could not be fair and impartial by a show of hands, and the judge excused them from the jury pool.
The final jury includes a variety of New Yorkers who said they could gauge the case impartially, including two jurors who are career attorneys, an uncommon circumstance that some legal experts say could work in Trump’s favor if his defense team mounts a technical legal argument to try and win an acquittal.
Scharf’s prediction comes as Trump has decried the New York indictment, and three others he faces in separate cases, as a “witch hunt” waged by his political rivals, who he says could not defeat him in the 2024 presidential election without relying on the courts.
Trump took to social media on Saturday to deliver another scornful message against the case, calling it a “‘RUSHED’ TRIAL TAKING PLACE IN A 95% DEMOCRAT AREA…”
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In response to a CNN legal analyst who compared the severity of the hush money case to a five on a scale of “one to 10,” Scharff said, “I’d rate this case a zero.”
“The fact that this case is seeing the inside of a courtroom at all is an absolute outrage and speaks to the politicization of our system of law enforcement in the courts, under the Biden administration and their political allies across the country,” Scharff said.
