On her Sunday program, Fox News host Maria Bartiromo pushed a debunked conspiracy theory that a juror's cousin exposed a plot to convict Donald Trump in his hush money trial.
"Judge [Juan] Mechan from the Manhattan so-called hush money trial issuing a letter to all the parties involved, acknowledging that there could be potential juror misconduct on social media," Bartiromo said on
Sunday Morning Futures. "This after a post was found on the New York State Unified Court System Facebook page where someone writes, my cousin is a juror and says Trump is getting convicted."
Bartiromo displayed the social media post but didn't inform the audience that
it was a prank.
"So we're trying to understand the legitimacy of this," she remarked. "Do we know if there's actually a cousin of the juror?"
"And was there, in fact, a foul play here, which would lead to potentially a mistrial of the Trump conviction? And that trial?"
New York Post writer Miranda Devine admitted that "some sort of troll" likely made the post. Instead, she used her time to criticize the judge.
"But I guess the question is, why did it sit there for over a week on the court website without anybody detecting it?" she opined. "Why was it allowed to sit there like that? And why hasn't Judge Merchan done his own investigation into this?"
Attorney Greg Jarrett left open the possibility that the "troll" could legitimately be the cousin of a juror.
"Yes, I said on the day the story broke, if it's true and it's a big if, then yes, it might be grounds for vacating the verdict in a new trial," he explained.
But Jarrett also said that if the post was done "to create malicious mischief, [the prankster] could be criminally charged with a felony statute called obstruction of a judicial proceeding."
