Former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy suggested Tuesday that former President Donald Trump’s attorneys leave an option open for a jury to convict the former president on misdemeanor charges.
Jury selection began Monday in the trial centered around an alleged $130,000 payout to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016 during Trump’s successful run for the White House. McCarthy discussed a potential strategy that attorneys for the former president should pursue in response to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg “making up” a campaign finance law.
Dozens of potential jurors were dismissed Monday as the jury selection process started, according to pool reports.
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“I’m not saying he needs to say ‘I’m guilty of the misdemeanor,’” McCarthy told “America’s Newsroom” co-host Bill Hemmer and guest co-host Martha MacCallum. “What I think he needs to do, I believe legally he is entitled to this, is to get the judge to give the jury the choice to convict him of the lesser-included offense, which is the misdemeanor falsification of business records as opposed to the 34 counts here which are the felony falsification in order to conceal another crime. Because, if the jury feels like they need to convict him on something, the simple falsification of records, the evidence of that is stronger than this idea that he did it to conceal a campaign finance violation which Bragg doesn’t have authority to enforce.”
“But the upside for Trump, if they were to convict him of the misdemeanor instead of the felony, the statute of limitations on the misdemeanor is two years,” McCarthy continued. “It lapsed in 2019. so he’d have an argument that the case needed to be thrown out.”
Bragg secured a grand jury indictment against Trump in late March on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the case surrounding the alleged payout to Daniels, arguing that the falsified records concealed another crime.
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McCarthy predicted it could take a long time to seat a jury, noting he was involved in a trial where it took a month to select a panel, which made it difficult for him to put potentially problematic jurors on his radar. Both Clay Travis of Outkick and “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert made comments Monday that apparently urged people to find a way onto the jury.
“You try to weed out all the people who don’t want to sit. I actually think it’s good for President Trump. It’s good for the state, too,” McCarthy said. “If you get jurors who honestly say ‘I either can’t be fair’ or ‘I just don’t want to be here,’ because those are not jurors you want on the jury. What you worry about is the people who try to get on the jury, not the people who honestly tell you they don’t belong on the jury.”
First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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