It's going to be very difficult for Donald Trump to win his Stormy Daniels hush money case, a legal expert has said.
Greg Germain, a law professor at Syracuse University in New York, was reacting to the start of Trump's trial in Manhattan.
"The D.A. is going to have a much easier time than Trump. It's going to be very difficult for Trump to find jurors from the Manhattan jury pool who are likely to side with him, as Manhattan voters are overwhelmingly Democratic and quite liberal," Germain told Newsweek.
"Trump's base is suburban and rural. He generally does poorly in the big cities, and Manhattan is [in] the biggest," Germain said.
He added that Manhattan is one of the most liberal city districts in America.
Jury selection is set to take place on April 15 in Trump's hush-money case. More than 500 New Yorkers are expected to fill out questionnaires about their political beliefs before 12 are chosen, along with six alternate jurors. Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, is set to become the first former president in United States history to stand trial in a criminal case.
The prosecution seeks to prove that before the 2016 presidential election, Trump paid two women—adult film star Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal—not to disclose his alleged affairs with them. He is also accused of making payments to a former Trump Tower doorman who claimed to know that Trump allegedly fathered a child with another woman. Trump has denied all the allegations and says he is the target of a political witch hunt.
Former federal prosecutor, Joyce Vance, also said that Trump was unlikely to get a full acquittal.
Writing in her Civil Discourse legal blog on Monday, she said that only a prosecutorial error is likely to see Trump get a full acquittal.
"It is very unlikely that Trump will get an outright acquittal. That would require every juror to find he isn't guilty, which is very unlikely unless the prosecution has an unexpected flaw in their proof. It's far more likely Trump's lawyers will be looking for a holdout juror they can get past the prosecution," Vance wrote.
Vance explained that a holdout juror "is someone who the defense believes will be both on their side and capable of sticking to their guns and refusing to vote to convict, at least on felony charges, even if everyone else on the jury is convinced that's the appropriate outcome."
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About the writer
Sean O'Driscoll is a Newsweek Senior Crime and Courts Reporter based in Ireland. His focus is reporting on U.S. law. ... Read more