Jack Smith fights to avoid MAGA juror bias in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents trial: report

20 December 2023

Never before in the United States' 247-year history has the likely presidential nominee of a major political party been facing four criminal indictments at the same time. One of the criminal trials that awaits 2024 GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump is the one for special counsel Jack Smith's federal Mar-a-Lago documents case.

Smith will need to prove to jurors in Florida that Trump endangered the United States' national security by storing, at Mar-a-Lago, highly classified White House documents that should have remained in Washington, D.C. when Trump left office on January 20, 2021. Trump and his legal team have maintained that any governments documents he had at Mar-a-Lago were declassified when he was still serving as president; Smith vehemently disagrees and alleges that Trump violated federal law.

In an article published on December 20, Law & Crime's Matt Naham describes Smith's efforts to avoid possible MAGA bias on the jury.

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"The Special Counsel's Office asked the judge presiding over former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago classified documents retention and obstruction prosecution to order up written juror questionnaires ahead of jury selection to root out 'potential bias' and 'winnow' the pool ahead of time," Naham reports. "In support of his argument, Jack Smith pointed to the way the courts handled pre-trial publicity in the cases of Boston Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling."

Smith, according to Naham, stressed to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon — the Trump-appointed federal judge assigned to the case — that the juror questionnaires he is requesting are "necessary."

The special counsel wrote to Cannon, "As described below, previous cases in this District in which questionnaires were used suggest that the Clerk's Office requires approximately ten weeks' time for the questionnaire process, which includes mailing questionnaires to potential jurors to be returned to the Clerk's Office in post-marked envelopes. In this case, that means that a final questionnaire would need to be approved before on or about March 11 for a May 20 trial."

Read Law & Crime's full report at this link.

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