Megyn Kelly said that she has no doubt that a Manhattan jury will convict Donald Trump in the “hush money” trial involving alleged payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.
“Oh, he’s getting convicted. I don’t really think there’s a lot of mystery about that,” Kelly told NewsNation host Dan Abrams on Tuesday.
“He shouldn’t, but he’s going to get convicted,” the former Fox and NBC anchor added, as earlier reported by Mediaite.
“The jury’s going to hate him. Manhattan went 92%, between 87 and 92% for Joe Biden. That’s where this is going to be tried. These are not Trump lovers.”
Abrams then asked, “You don’t actually believe Trump didn’t have an affair with Stormy Daniels as he says, right?”
“No, I believe there was an interlude. I don’t know, ‘affair’ may be too strong,” replied Kelly, who hosts a podcast on SiriusXM.
The first-ever criminal trial of a former US president alleges that Trump covered up his former lawyer Michael Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Daniels in exchange for her silence before the 2016 presidential election about a sexual encounter she said she had with him a decade earlier.
Trump has denied any such encounter with Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, and has worked to delay the April 15 trial to give him a chance to challenge a gag order in the case.
On Tuesday, however, Associate Justice Cynthia Kern swiftly denied Trump’s second last-ditch delay request, but a full panel of appeals judges will later consider the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s underlying challenge to the gag order.
Separately, it was revealed this week that potential jurors at the Manhattan trial won’t be asked outright about their political leanings — but will be asked if they’re part of QAnon, the Proud Boys, or Antifa.
Would-be jurors are expected to say out loud if they belong to the extremist groups — one of 42 questions during jury selection, which is slated to begin Monday.
Prospective jurors will also be asked to say under oath whether they have attended a Trump campaign event or rally and whether they follow Trump or any “anti-Trump group” on social media, according to an order late Monday from Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan.
“Look, I think the jury’s going to believe that he paid off a porn star before the election to make her go away and that he didn’t write down in his books, ‘Hush money to Stormy Daniels,’ because no one in the history of hush money payments has ever written that in any book anywhere,” Kelly said during the NewsNation segment. “It defeats the whole purpose of a hush money payment.”
She concluded: “So I grant you, yeah, they’re probably going to convict him. They’re going to convict him pretty easily, I think.”
Trump’s lawyers said a survey of Manhattan residents they conducted showed 61% of respondents thought the 45th President was guilty and 70% had a negative opinion of him.
Trump has been charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal the alleged payments involving Daniels.
The case is one of four criminal indictments Trump faces as he prepares to challenge Democratic President Joe Biden in November. He has sought to delay proceedings in all cases until after the election, and the hush money case is the only one with a firm trial date.
The other cases stem from his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Biden and his handling of sensitive government documents after leaving the White House in 2021. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
With Post wires.
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