Sen. Bob Menendez watched as hundreds of potential jurors walked into a federal courtroom in Manhattan on Monday. They will choose twelve New Yorkers who will have more power over the Democrat’s reputation in the next two months than millions of New Jersey voters have had in the last 50 years.
Not like the trial of Donald Trump, which is happening right across the street, though, not many people in the courtroom seem to care much about the man himself.
Dozens of people who wanted to be jurors in the Trump trial were kicked off after telling a state court judge that they couldn’t be fair. About one-third of the 150 people who applied to be jurors in Menendez’s trial are likely to be kicked off after the first day. However, the people who were interested in being jurors seemed more worried about how a seven-week trial might affect their plans for vacations, jobs, and family duties.
The jury picking will go on Tuesday.
Some people who wanted to be jurors—some who said they were “news and politics junkies”—said they had read enough about the case and didn’t feel they could be fair. These people included an NYU film professor, a local government worker who handles contracts, and a housing lawyer. When the housing lawyer met with Judge Sidney Stein to talk about whether she could be on the jury, she said, “I get very worked up.” She said that the accusations in the case were “set off.”
The NYU professor said that he knew Menendez had already been tried once, so it was “hard to see him sitting back in court again with taxpayer dollars having already been through this once and being back.” But there weren’t many people who wanted to be jurors who were like that. Part of the reason for this is Trump’s constant divisiveness in American politics. Also, Menendez is not as well known as other senators who appear on Sunday talk shows, despite his power in New Jersey and Washington.
Another reason is that the Hudson River separates many of the political issues between New York and New Jersey, even though they share a television market. Menendez is being tried for the second time in ten years for cheating. He left a federal courthouse in New Jersey in 2017 after a mistrial in a different case because the jury could not agree on what to do.
That came after Menendez’s defense team paid close attention to the jury in that case. At the time, Menendez said that one reason he hadn’t taken the stand was because they thought that if they did, they might lose a juror who was going to be excused for the holiday. Women in Menendez said that the defense thought “she believed in our innocence” because of how she responded to both sides’ cases.
His lawyers tried earlier this year to move the current case to New Jersey, saying that the “overwhelming bulk” of the acts listed in the federal indictment took place there. “Surely,” his lawyers wrote, “it has nothing to do” with the last case, in which a “New Jersey jury saw through the government’s false narrative.”
So maybe it’s not a surprise that his lawyers and the lawyers for his two co-defendants, two New Jersey businesspeople accused of bribing Menendez, were looking for any sign of sympathy in potential jurors. For example, one juror asked to be excused because she was going to Spain to see Bruce Springsteen perform, and Springsteen is from New Jersey.
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Stein, the judge, told the lawyer for one of the businesses, “You should want her.” The lawyer replied, “I do.” Menendez, who was wearing a dark suit, said as he left the courthouse Monday night, “I appreciate the jury’s sacrifice, their time and commitment.”