Day 3 of the Trump Criminal Trial was quite a chaotic one!!!
Started with fireworks about more of Trump's gag order violations, the worst one being a post with a direct quote attacking the jurors. After his post accusing jurors of being "undercover liberal activists", Juror #2 (an oncology nurse that was outed by the incredible amount of detail reported by journalists), decided to leave the jury!
Another juror (#4) was late to court, but had already ended up on the radar of the prosecutors after they discovered that a person with the same name had been arrested in Westchester for tearing down political ads in the 90's! When he finally arrived in court, he was promptly removed from the jury.
That leaves us with 5 jurors! We started with 7 and then lost 2 before lunch. CHAOS!
Oh, and Trump was on his phone and refused to stand for the jury. Both are offensive to the judge and the jury.
One of the best parts of this process is knowing that Trump has to sit in a chair, quietly, and listen to people from his own town bashing him to his face. Like this:
By the end of the day, the 2nd batch of 96 prospective jurors were whittled down to 18. Both the prosecutors and the defense have 4 strikes left each. And Judge Merchan can remove jurors who are clearly biased. While the 18 jurors were released, another 100 or so were given instructions to return tomorrow. Barring the majority saying they cannot be unbiased or the judge removing them for cause, we may have the full 18 jurors seated by the end of the day Friday (12 jurors, 6 alternates).
Earlier in the day, the judge ordered the press to limit the amount of personal information they report out. This is to protect the jurors and limit issues like what Jesse Watters and Donald Trump did to juror #2.
Both the defense and the prosecution used all their strikes up by 4:30pm, so all that was left is removal "for cause" which is a high bar to meet. All of a sudden we went from 5 jurors to 12!
Final juror count at the end of Day 3: 13 (Full jury and 1 alternate!)
