12 jurors picked in Trump trial after arduous selection process

The 12 jurors set to sit on Donald Trump's hush money trial have finally been selected after almost 200 candidates were considered, with more than 100 excused due to their inability to be impartial.

Judge Juan M. Merchan has spent the majority of the first week of the trial considering two groups of 96 potential jurors.

Although the 12 have now been selected, Merchan still needs to find six backup candidates so the selection process will continue.

The first round found seven jurors out of a group of 96, but on Thursday morning two were excused before the second round of vetting for the next group began.

57 out of the second round of 96 potential jurors were excused almost immediately after selection began.

48 people indicated that they could not serve fairly and impartially.

An additional nine said they couldn’t serve for some other reason, which they were not asked to state.

Prospective jurors have been grilled on their social media posts, personal lives and political views as the lawyers and judge search for biases that would prevent them from being impartial.

Inside the court, there’s broad acknowledgement of the futility in trying to find jurors without knowledge of Trump, with a prosecutor this week saying that lawyers were not looking for people who had been “living under a rock for the past eight years.”

Of the two selected jurors Merchan dismissed on Thursday one came after prosecutors raised concerns that the man may not have been truthful about whether he had ever been accused or convicted of a crime.

The second, a female nurse, "conveyed that after sleeping on it overnight she had concerns about her ability to be fair and impartial in this case," according to the judge.

Prosecutors on Thursday also asked Merchan to sanction Trump over seven more social media posts they say violate a gag order that bars Trump from attacking witnesses.

The prosecution on Monday sought a $3,000 fine against Trump over three Truth Social posts.

Merchan had already scheduled a hearing for next week on the prosecution’s request for contempt sanctions over Trump’s posts.

Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records as part of an alleged scheme to bury stories he feared could hurt his 2016 campaign.

The allegations focus on payoffs to two women, porn actor Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal, who said they had extramarital sexual encounters with Trump years earlier, as well as to a Trump Tower doorman who claimed to have a story about a child he alleged Trump had out of wedlock.

Trump says none of these supposed sexual encounters occurred.

The case is the first of Trump's four indictments to reach trial.

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