THE CONTINUING ADVENTURES OF DON SNORELEONE

"I'll make him an offer he can't understand."

Prosecutors with the Manhattan DA’s Office accused Donald Trump of violating his gag order seven more times on Thursday morning. Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said that several social media posts Trump had made about Michael Cohen had crossed the line, and added that another post which quoted Fox News host Jesse Watters as accusing “liberal activists” of trying to sneak onto the jury, was “disturbing.” Steinglass said that while the DA’s Office is currently seeking financial penalties, it may open the door to tougher measures at the hearing to Show Cause next Wednesday.

Trump attorney Todd Blanche - who for some unexplainable reason has apparently decided to go “all in” on torching his professional reputation as a previous-respected federal proscutor priot to taking on Don Snoreleone as a client - defended the posts as “responding to political attacks,” and feigned confusion over whether the gag order applied to social media posts that repost comments made by others.

The court proceedings this morning also saw one already-selected juror dismissed. The juror, an oncology nurse, appeared in court to say that she did not believe she could be fair and impartial.

“Yesterday alone I had friends, colleagues, and family push things at my phone regarding, questioning my identity as a juror,” the juror said. Merchan agreed to excuse her.

Steinglass said that the DA’s Office had found information suggesting another juror had misled the court. That juror had told the court that neither himself nor anyone close to him had faced criminal charges or investigation. But Steinglass said prosecutors had identified an article from the 1990s in which a person with the same name as the juror had been arrested “in Westchester for tearing down political advertisements.” Separately, Steinglass said that the juror’s wife had been “accused or involved in a corruption inquiry” in the 1990s before entering into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Manhattan DA’s Office. Steinglass told Merchan that the juror had removed posters “on the political right.” The juror appeared at court late. After two lengthy bench conferences, Merchan excused the juror.

By the end of the day, a full jury of twelve has been selected for Donald Trump’s New York City hush money prosecution. One alternate has also been selected, with an additional five alternates expected to be chosen on Friday.

This clearly shows how the Don’s juror intimidation campaign is working. The New York Post has “reporters” working to publicize the names of the jurors, using the information about them stated in court. This despite the court’s decision to keep the jurors anonymous in the proceedings.

Throughout the jury selection process, Trump’s attorneys have tried to shape the jury using a strategy that implicitly upends one of the basic principles on which selection relies. The strategy is to attack a bedrock assumption of jury selection as fallacious - that jurors are able to be impartial.

That strategy has resulted in Trump’s attorneys seeking to disqualify jurors using for-cause challenges that go further than identifying instances in which the people showed real bias, to ask Justice Juan Merchan to excuse the prospective panelists. During their questioning, they treated any sign that a potential juror has a political perspective as meaning that perspective must put them at odds with Trump, and thus an indicator of disqualifying bias. At one point, a juror who described Trump as not her “cup of tea” and “selfish,” but conceded she agreed with some of his policies, earned a vigorous challenge from attorney Susan Necheles.

Merchan shot down that and other challenges, but for liberals who spent much of the Trump administration posting on social media about their disdain for him, his behavior, and his government’s policies, it turned into a surreal nightmare in which Trump’s attorneys have dug up those statements, confronting the posters with them with Trump himself in the courtroom.

The overarching strategy is that instead of operating within the normal process of jury selection, which assumes that people are capable of setting aside whatever political beliefs or biases they may have in order to render a good faith judgment on the evidence, it implies the jurors are incapable of both being impartial in their judgment of him and participating in a political system in which he is a main actor.

One juror told the court during selection that while she didn’t like Trump’s “persona,” it wouldn’t affect her ability to be fair. “I don’t like some of my coworkers.” Necheles made a for-cause challenge to that juror, saying that she was anti-Trump and irredemably biased. Merchan pushed back, saying that Necheles was taking things out of context, and denied her request to excue the juror for cause

The attorneys tried to use for-cause challenges to disqualify two jurors in part because their spouses had made statements critical of Trump. Merchan denied both challenges, saying he couldn’t find a juror was biased due to their partnership with someone of different political beliefs.

Trump has often sought to paint the political system as either for him or against him, with no gray area, and he’s directed his attorneys tp try and do the same in jury selection. It’s also a manifestation of the main element of Trump’s political strategy: stay on the offensive, always, bulldozing whatever rules might come in the way. Always attack, and figure out your next move later.

At the end of the day, Judge Merchan swore the 12 jurors for the trial, saying the remaining five alternates would be chosen on Friday.

Don Snoreleone will finally face justice this coming Monday. It’s been a lifetime coming. Now the betting becomes how long it will take for him to blow a gasket in court as he is forced to sit there listening to people he has known and worked with lay out the evidence of his criminality.

Perhaps he should now continue playing Don Snoreleone.

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