Potential Trump jurors more often than not lean politically left, New York Times’s reporter Maggie Haberman said Thursday.

Haberman’s statement confirms a widely held belief among Republicans that former President Donald Trump will not receive a fair criminal trial in Manhattan. President Joe Biden won over 86 percent of the Manhattan vote in 2020.

“One thing that’s been striking during this round of voir dire is there a lot of people who, based on their answers, are more left-of-center than not, politically,” wrote Haberman, who doubles as a political analyst for CNN.

“But some seem to be trying to show they can consider alternative viewpoints, and others seem to want to show they believe in the concept of jury service as independent from personal opinions,” she added.

In high-publicity court cases, judges and attorneys carefully evaluate “stealth jurors,” individuals who want to be selected for the case to steer the verdict.

“Only about 12 percent of the people in this area voted for Trump,” constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley told Fox News. “The jurors you have to worry about are the ones who are sort of ‘Trojan horse jurors,’ who are hiding bias that doesn’t appear on social media or are involved in any formal charges like the one that was just removed today.”

Potential jurors in the Trump case face 42 questions during the jury selection. Some say the questions benefit the prosecution. The jurors also face scrutiny from lawyers for the prosecution and the defense.

“Now we have seen jurors who have later been found to have misrepresented their histories in a couple of prior cases involving Trump associates,” Turley continued. “In both those cases, the judges in Washington, DC, refused to reconsider the verdict. And so this is a very important stage to try to filter out these types of jurors.”
New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan excused two jurors on Thursday. One was because the woman raised concerns about her identity becoming public. The second for unknown reasons, according to court reporters.

The judge sat 12 jurors and one alternate so far in the case. Five more alternates are needed for a total of 18.

Thursday was the third day of the jury selection process, which could wrap up early next week.

Democrat Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Trump with 34 felonies, accusing him of falsifying documents to conceal a sex scandal. The trial is the first criminal trial of a president of the United States.

Only about one-third of U.S. adults believe Trump did something illegal regarding the case, an AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found Tuesday.

The case is New York v. Trump, No. 71543-23, in the New York Supreme Court for New York County.

Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former GOP War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.