Video & Multimedia

Special counsel Jack Smith on Tuesday urged the federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s Washington, D.C. election-subversion case to implement measures aimed at protecting the confidentiality and safety of potential jurors.

Smith’s team encouraged U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan to authorize a questionnaire to begin screening potential jurors in early February, about a month before the case is scheduled to go to trial. That process would help weed out potential jurors who express an inability to participate in the case or judge the matter fairly, but it also would expose their identities to the attorneys in the case. The prosecutors prodded the judge to adopt several measures to prevent jurors’ personal information from being disseminated to the public.

“Given the particular sensitivities of this case, stemming both from heightened public interest and the defendant’s record of using social media to attack others, the Court should impose certain limited restrictions on the ability of the parties to conduct research on potential jurors during jury selection and trial and to use juror research,” prosecutors Molly Gaston and Thomas Windom argued.

The prosecutors took pains to flag an episode that occurred last week in Trump’s ongoing civil fraud trial in New York. Trump, who attended the trial last week, has publicly criticized the state attorneys and judge in the case, and last week he mounted a social media attack on the judge’s top clerk. That attack prompted the judge to issue a limited gag order on Trump, prohibiting him from commenting on court staff.....

Among other measures Smith’s team is proposing: barring any direct contact between the attorneys and potential jurors — including “friending” or following their social media accounts. Open source research would be permitted so long as it doesn’t become “vexatious or harassing.” Any identifying information from this research, prosecutors say, should be barred from public disclosure.