Trump hush money trial closer to opening statements after 12 jurors selected

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• William Brangham:

  A full jury has been seated in former President Trump's criminal trial. But jury selection has had a rocky start, as two previously selected jurors were dismissed. And prosecutors again accused the former president of violating a gag order and asked the judge to hold him in contempt.

  I'm joined now by former federal prosecutor Jessica Roth.

  Jessica, great to have you back on the program. A bit of a whiplash with this jury. It was up and then it was down and now there was a full jury seated.

  Two issues came up with regards to these jurors being dismissed. One, a juror was worried that her identity was being revealed in the process. A second was concern over whether another juror was somehow hiding his or her true intentions about why they wanted to sit on the jury.

  Are those just normal concerns, especially in a case like this?

• Jessica Roth, Former Federal Prosecutor:

  Well, they raised two distinct concerns, these two jurors.

  The first juror who said that she was concerned essentially about her privacy and I think implicitly her safety because she thought that her identity essentially was being found out, that's particular to this case. You usually don't see those kinds of juror concerns about their safety and privacy in a case, for example, involving falsification of business records, which is, of course, the charge here.

  You might see that in an organized crime case or a terrorism case. But, of course, this is an unusual case that's, at its heart, a white-collar case involving the former president of the United States, but who is — has engaged in a pattern of conduct and speech online, in particular, that really has caused threats to people who are involved in legal proceedings that are associated with him.

  And so it's highly unusual that you would have a juror in a case like this expressing those kinds of concerns. And it's unique to the circumstances presented by Donald Trump and his followers. So that particular instance with the juror was of grave concern to me, because I'm concerned not only about that juror, but about other jurors who similarly may develop concerns about their safety and privacy and those of their families as this case goes forward.

  The second juror presented a different kind of issue. And that was somebody who appeared possibly to be trying to get onto the jury potentially because of some bias that this person harbored, so a sort of motivated, biased juror who would have been potentially lying about their own past, failing to disclose something that might have caused the lawyers to strike that juror for cause or using a peremptory challenge.

  And the worry with somebody like that is less about whatever it is they're concealing and more the fact that they're concealing it, because that suggests they might not be a fair and impartial juror.

• William Brangham:

  I see.

  Prosecutors, as I mentioned, have also asked Justice Merchan to hold Trump in contempt of court, arguing that he has repeatedly violated the gag order that the judge placed on him, which bars him from attacking witnesses, jurors, the judge, other members of his family.

  Merchan said he's going to have a hearing about this next week. Do you think that this has gotten to the point, with the former president's behavior, that the judge does need to issue some kind of censure or worse?

• Jessica Roth:

  I think the judge absolutely has to take some firm action here that involves a sanction.

  The question is, what will the sanction be? As of the last time the district attorney's office had filed a motion in this regard and briefed it, they were asking for monetary sanctions and a reprimand and a stern warning that future conduct would lead to even more severe sanctions. They had asked for $1,000 fine per instance in which Mr. Trump violated the order.

  But that was when I think there were only three instances that they were pointing to, and those involved witnesses in the case. Now what we have are instances of Mr. Trump allegedly violating the gag order, and I think that the record's pretty clear that he did, with respect to jurors, who also were listed on that order, prohibiting from making comments outside of the courtroom about those people.

  And so I think a lot is going to turn on how the judge handles this next week, not only for these particular instances of misconduct and violations of the order, but it's going to set the tone for the rest of the case, in terms of how strict he's going to run this courtroom.

• William Brangham:

  Jessica Roth, always good to hear from you. Thank you so much.

• Jessica Roth:

  My pleasure.