Jurors decided to give Donald Trump a pseudonym to get over their personal feelings in the criminal tax fraud case against the Trump Organization.
The jury took two days to come back with guilty verdicts on all nine counts against two affiliates of the Trump Organization following a six-week trial, and one of the jurors told The Daily Beast how they decided to refer to the former president as "Joe Smith" to make sure their judgment wasn't clouded by their personal biases.
“I constantly fought my knee-jerk belief that of course anything with the name Trump on it is crooked,” one juror told the website after the trial. “I shocked myself in mid-November when I realized that I wasn’t sure I could find the Trump Corporation and Trump Payroll Corporation guilty. We talked in the jury room about having to put on blinders and look just at these two companies. One of the guys started calling Trump ‘Joe Smith.’ From there on we referred to ‘Mr. Smith’s company.’”
The jurors said they were offended the two Trump-linked companies had cheated New York taxpayers by avoiding their own responsibilities, and they were annoyed by corporate defense lawyer Michael van der Veen's frequently repeated catchphrase about star witness Allen Weisselberg, the longtime Trump Organization chief financial officer who had already pleaded guilty to tax fraud.
“Everyone hated ‘Weisselberg did it for Weisselberg,'" the juror said. "We found it demeaning. How stupid do you think we are? At least Johnnie Cochran had a viable point.”
READ: Weisselberg: Trump 'authorized' tax fraud scheme at heart of his business' criminal trial
Van der Veen apparently hoped to conjure up something as catchy as "if it doesn't fit you must acquit," Cochran's famous catchphrase in the O.J. Simpson trial, and the juror said the panel also was put off by the defense attorney's ridicule of witness Donald Bender, the soft-spoken accountant for Mazars USA who testified that he knew nothing about the tax fraud scheme.
“Michael van der Veen did nothing to help himself by imitating Donald Bender's voice and speech impediment… impugning his manhood because the guy spoke with a high voice," the juror said. "People really, really didn’t like that."
The juror said the panelists clearly understood Justice Juan Merchan's instructions, and he said all of them agreed at the start of deliberations that the verdict was likely to be guilty, and he expects Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. to eventually indict the former president himself.
“You’ve got to know you’re going to win,” this juror said. “You can’t waste the money. You can’t take Trump to court and lose because then, he’s not ‘not guilty,' he’s ‘innocent.’ That’s how he’d interpret it.”
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