CNN anchor Jake Tapper got a more colorful story than he was expecting when he interviewed a former Trump attorney about jury selection strategy.
Former President Donald Trump is in a Manhattan courtroom as he faces 34 felony counts for falsifying business records regarding alleged hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election — a historic first-ever criminal trial of a former U.S. president.
Tapper was joined Monday morning by criminal defense attorney Bill Brennan, who represented Trump in a 2022 Trump Organization case before Judge Juan Merchan, who is also presiding over this current trial.
“Jury selection can make or break a trial,” said Tapper. “You’ve done jury selection in that very courtroom with that very judge, Merchan — what are you going to be looking for? What’s the best advice you could give the defense?”
In general, Brennan continued, his best advice for Trump’s current legal team was to “just take it slow, go through each individual questionnaire, and focus on the prospective juror you’re interviewing at the time…don’t worry about how long it takes.”
Tapper commented that Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs were “not exactly known as being ground zero for support of Donald Trump,” and asked Brennan what was “the best way to make sure you get a fair jury for a Republican president in a largely Democratic city?”
Brennan clarified that when the Manhattan DA brings charges, you only pick your jury from the island of Manhattan, and not boroughs like Queens or Staten Island that might be friendlier to Trump, “and I just can tell you, my personal experience was that that’s not a great demographic.”
“So given the limitations of Manhattan, how do you do it?” asked Tapper. “How do you find a fair jury?”
Tapper briefly interjected to report that the first photographs of Trump inside the courtroom had been released, and then Brennan launched into an anecdote about one particular juror:
We had a lady come up as a prospective juror. I’ve been picking juries about 35 years. She looked good to me, a lady in her mid-40s of Irish extraction. She spoke with a brogue, she worked in an Irish pub and in our questionnaire, questions 29 and 30 said, “do you have any former — do you have any strong feelings about the former president and if so, would they affect your ability to be fair?”
And she checked them. So I said, “Well, ma’am, would they be positive or negative feelings?” And she says, “oh, I despise that man.” And I said, I guess it was late in the day, Jake, and I said, “Oh, come on, don’t sugarcoat things for me. Speak your mind.”
She says, “Oh, speak me mind? I hate him!”
Tapper cracked up as Brennan imitated the woman’s Irish accent, and the attorney described how he was “floored” by her comments. This particular juror actually made it to the second round of questioning, Brennan said, because when the judge asked her if she was instructed on the law could she put those feelings aside and be fair, and she said she could.
That woman wasn’t what he considered to be a “dangerous juror,” Brennan explained. The ones he worried about were like a male juror who “just answers no questions and you just have a gut feeling.”
He then recounted how that questioning might go: “Sir, you seem to be the perfect juror on paper. There’s nothing about the former president that gives you pause?” “Nah, I’m fine, put me in. I’ll be great.”
“And that’s the juror that I worry about — the juror who has some type of ulterior motive to get on that case to settle a score,” Brennan concluded.
Watch the clip above via CNN.
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