CNN’s Elie Honig Warns Trump Legal Team That Jury Foreperson Watching Fox News Might Not Be As Helpful As They Hope

CNN’s chief legal analyst, Elie Honig, joined Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday and looked at the seven jurors that have so far been chosen for Donald Trump’s hush money trial in New York City.

“Jury selection, it’s a fascinating exercise, and it’s really more art than science. You’re trying to read human beings, inherently dynamic and unpredictable, but we’ve learned some really important, I think, potentially revealing details about these seven jurors,” Honig began, adding:

These jurors will be on the case. So far we know four males, three females. Let’s take a quick look at what we have for juror number one. Juror number one will be the foreperson.

No magic powers associated with the foreperson. That’s the person who generally communicates on behalf of the jury with the judge, and tends to lead the deliberations in the room. What jumped out at me? This. Nothing remarkable in the bio, but this is a person who said he watches both Fox News and MSNBC. That’s an interesting combination. If I’m Trump and I got anyone who watches any Fox News, I want a chance that that person is going to go on the jury.

Honig then poured a little bit of cold water on the foreperson being potentially favorable to Trump. “But I have to note this. In New York, I picked juries in New York, people sometimes confuse Fox News with the local Fox Five, and the jury form does not separate those two,” Honig added, arguing:

So it could be that he’s actually talking about the local news, which is really not partisan.

Honig then looked at juror numbers two and three and also noted their media habits:

Let’s go to juror number two. Turn number two is a nurse here in New York. You get a lot of medical professionals, a lot of hospitals there. In my experience, medical professionals tend to be technical. They’re capable of separating facts from emotion. And really prosecutors want that. It really depends on how strongly you feel that your case is based when you get down to the technical elements of it. So you’re always going to have nurses, doctors, medical professionals, a native New Yorker watching CNN, that’s good to see.

Juror number three. Okay. Juror number three. Now, this is interesting. Well, this is a lawyer. And typically the rule of thumb is lawyers don’t like lawyers on their juries. At the prosecutor’s office, we almost automatically got rid of any lawyer. But it’s also hard to do because you do have a lot of lawyers in Manhattan. The concern is that a lawyer might just take over the jury. They might say, listen, I’m a lawyer, forget about the judge, I know what’s going to happen here. But it’s hard to see the jury with no lawyers on it. Interestingly, he does read the Wall Street Journal, which has been quite critical of this particular case in its editorial pages. So juror number three, I think, would please me from Trump’s point of view.

Watch the clip above via CNN.