The classified documents indictment of Donald Trump would seem, on paper at least, to be the most straightforward of the four criminal cases the former president is facing. Reams of classified files were stashed in Trump’s office and storage room and he boastfully showed off to guests one such document he acknowledged was “secret”, federal prosecutors have
alleged.
His own lawyer is quoted in the indictment as saying Trump encouraged him to mislead investigators who demanded the documents back, and prosecutors have since secured the cooperation of a Mar-a-Lago staffer who says the ex-president asked about deleting surveillance footage at the Palm Beach property. But that doesn’t make the path to conviction easy, particularly with the case set for trial in a Florida courthouse expected to draw its jury pool from a conservative-leaning region of the state that supported Trump in the 2020 election. Those built-in demographics may be a challenge for prosecutors despite the evidence at their disposal, underscoring the impossibility of untangling the law from politics in an election-year trial involving a former president who is seeking to return to the White House.
“The more conservative the counties, the highest chance he has to find jurors that would be sympathetic with him,” said Richard Kibbey, a criminal defence attorney in Stuart, Florida, part of the Fort Pierce district where the jury pool is expected to be taken from. When it comes to finding truly impartial jurors, he added, “It’s going to be very difficult given the political climate across the country. Jurors will bring their own biases into the court room.” Unless the trial location is moved or its date pushed back, it will take place starting next May in Fort Pierce before US District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee who drew scrutiny last year for granting a Trump team request to appoint an independent arbiter to review the classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago. That decision was reversed by a unanimous three-judge appeals panel. For months, a grand jury in Washington had been hearing testimony in the case, leading to expectations that any charges against Trump would be brought there. The jury selection process is meant to weed out personal or partisan bias that could taint the case, with jurors instructed to make decisions solely on the basis of the evidence they hear. But in a federal court system where convictions overwhelmingly outnumber acquittals, defense lawyers — and prosecutors, for that matter — could nonetheless look to jury selection as a way to elicit an edge.
