Jury consultant tells CNN Trump team should be ‘extremely happy’ about jurors being booted from trial

A jury consultant told CNN on Thursday that former President Donald Trump’s legal defense should be thrilled about jurors getting excused from his hush money trial.

The jury decreased from seven sworn in to five on Thursday after two were dismissed. One of the jurors expressed concern about her ability to be impartial after friends and colleagues asked if she was on the jury based on press reports, which jury consultant Carolyn Koch on “CNN News Central” said could benefit the Trump defense team.

“What’s happened with juror number two, if others start to get wind of that, I think people are going to start to get the jitters,” Koch said. “And if I’m on the defense side of it, that’s going to make me extremely happy, because any unraveling of this is in my best interest.”

The judge overseeing the case directed the press not to report physical descriptions of jurors or details about their employers, multiple reporters in the courtroom said Thursday.

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Another juror on the case, who is an IT consultant, was also dismissed after prosecutors expressed worries that he may not have honestly answered jury selection questions about whether he or a relative had been convicted of a criminal offense, according to The New York Times. Prosecutors found an article characterizing someone with the same name who was arrested in the 1990s for taking down right-wing political posters, though it is not certain if the juror verified this was him, according to the Associated Press.

“In my experience in cases that were high-profile involving political issues or serious crimes and questionnaires were being used, they were written questionnaires that the lawyers got in advance, and so both sides weren’t scrambling in open court with lots of people there trying to, on the spot, figure things out,” Koch said. “They had time in advance to really scour the landscape to make sure that on the day of jury selection, people are properly vetted. So you‘re not going to have surprises like that.”

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