If he were to testify, and these are some prior court determinations that are further evidence of that. joyce, vaughn just ticked through the long list of potential areas of questioning that the d.a. has signaled they want to discuss if trump does take the stand, everything, again, from e. jean carroll to the civil fraud trial to other legal matters. does everything on the list that we know of sound fair game to you? what do you think the judge is likely to do? so the judge will have to balance the evidentiary value of this material to the prosecution against the risk of undue prejudice to the defendant. and the courts in new york have said that they leave those determinations up to the judge s sound discretion. he ll only be reversed on appeal if there is a conviction, if he abuses his discretion. so we can expect to see him go carefully through each of these incidents. ana, it s important to note here, this isn t evidence that
Can see so far there have been four democratic nays, we ll keep an eye on those different columns. these bills are facing significant republican opposition. that s why democrats may end up stepping in. far right members threatening speaker johnson s job over this. let s get right over to nbc s ali vitali who s tracking the very latest on capitol hill for us. walk us through what we expect of this vote this morning and after those unusual dynamics overnight. reporter: we re expecting it to be bipartisan in fashion, ana. a lot of movement around me here because these are the steps that lawmakers take to go up into the chamber to vote. some of them of course are already on the floor now. if you re going to see and you re looking at the vote tally in the house chamber right now, you re likely to see a lot more republican votes happening than you are to see democrats voting. it might look like that because our understanding is that they might be waiting, the democrats to see how many of them they actually need to join with republicans and help them get
Impartial. they re currently going through that 42-question questionnaire with all of those potential jurors looking to fill those five alternate seats, ana, so that leaves just 20 jurors in that potential jury pool now, the former president seated in the courtroom as well. he started the day off with his eyes closed. however, when he heard one of the potential jurors saying they had read the art of the deal he popped his eyes wide open. before heading into the courtroom, he did speak to reporters about that gag order. here s what he had to say. the gag order has to come off. people are allowed to speak about me and i have a gag order just to show you how much more unfair it is. reporter: seven potential violations they re talking about when it comes to this gag order. they re going to have a hearing on the gag order tuesday afternoon.
Fox news viewer, he turned his said when he s keenly aware of some potentially favorable jurors. this is this process here, again, we are at number 13 at this point and we expect over the hours ahead to try to find those five alternates, ana. and i m looking here at the google doc too as you re speaking. they re questioning a woman in seat 17, who says her father is good friends with former new jersey governor chris christie. so, it is always interesting to hear answers from the potential jurors and then see what happens and whether they end up seated and we look at what their answers were. are we on track to begin opening statements on monday and what could that look like? reporter: at this point in time, actually one of the anecdotes was late yesterday afternoon there was a juror who was dismissed after it was revealed she, 15 years ago, along with her husband, stayed the night at one donald trump s attorney s homes, one of the
Welcome back. we have the break news out of manhattan this morning, day four of donald trump s hush money trial with a jury now seated, and they re still working to pick alternates. lawyers are questioning the tenth potential juror out of 22 just brought in this morning. nbc s vaughn hillyard is joining us outside the courthouse, and back with us carol lam and joyce vance. it seems like they re moving pretty quickly here. reporter: yeah, good morning, ana. look, we ve got a starting lineup. mow it s a matter of filling in the bench at this point. there are 118 potential jurors currently inside of that courtroom, all who could be one of those last five alternates. the idea that judge merchan would like to fill all of those slots by today s end, and currently they have asked the 42-question questionnaire to ten
Iranians an off-ramp, trying to give them the space to make sure that they can choose not to retaliate without losing face. it s important to remember, ana, this strike did not happen in a vacuum. april 1st there is that alleged israeli attack on the iranian embassy compound in damascus, and then last saturday, iran responding with that massive barrage of 350 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, drones, most of which were shot down by israel and its allies. in terms of the strike itself, it happened at around 4:00 a.m. the main target appears to have been a military base near the city of is ta han, a couple of hours south of tehran. a source familiar with the situation tells me it was a limited strike. the israelis spent the hours afterwards assessing the damage, assessing the effectiveness. it is not clear at this point whether israel carried out this
From all the reporting i m seeing, israel responded with less than ten, so that s a very significant moderation, and it kind of puts this on a path toward deescalation, ana, and secondly, listen to the statements coming out of both tehran and out of jerusalem. both sides are effectively saying, okay, we ve had enough of this kind of vert exchange of combat ordinance, now maybe we go back to the shadow war that we were in. but bottom line, i think there s an 80 to 90% chance we ve seen the worst of the overt combat, probably we re going to see tensions deescalate between israel and iran, and at that point, of course, we ll have to go back to dealing with the challenges in gaza. deescalating, that sounds very encouraging.
That is when judge juan merchan is going to issue his decision when it comes to that gag order. one more thing to note, a possibility of a sandoval hearing happening later on this afternoon. that s essentially presenting the evidence from the prosecution if donald trump were to decide to, in fact, testify, he could be informed and educated, his attorneys as well, to what he would be presented with in cross. yasmin, stay with us. so carol, we ve had essentially three days of jury selection. the first day was really short, so maybe like two and a half days. we already have a jury seated, just need the alternates. are you surprised at all how quickly this is going? i think most people are surprised at how quickly it s moved, ana. jury selection varies widely, even among state courts. the judge has a lot of discretion. that discretion includes how much time to give each party to what we call voir dire the jury or ask questions of the prospective jurors. and in this case, judge merchan really moved pretty fast. he had the questionnaire.
The prosecution can introduce to claim that trump is a bad character. because he did bad things on other occasions, he did something wrong here. instead, this is the sort of evidence that the prosecution can use to impeach donald trump if he testifies during the trial to suggest to the jury that he s not an honest witness and they shouldn t believe him. quickly, if you will, if you were on the defense team and you re looking at the list of what the d.a. is saying, i want to talk to your client about this if he takes the stand, is there any world in which you say, yes, trump, take the stand? it s pretty difficult, ana, and for this reason. joyce is absolutely correct that ordinarily prior bad acts and prior conduct don t come into a criminal trial, and you are tried on the facts of this case alone. but if a defendant takes the stand, then the judge has to decide whether his prior conduct is relevant enough to the issues here and the credibility of the defendant if he testifies is a
The jurors were instructed to answer the questions on the questionnaires, and he really only gave the parties a half hour. some judges give the parties hours or even days to ask questions of the jurors. so he s moved quickly, but i think the one of the consequences of that is that they don t have time to delve as deeply into issues and so now we see where there s a break in the trial, we see the parties coming up with some issues once they ve had an opportunity to research these jurors a little bit more deeply. and so joyce, do you see any red flags on this jury for either side? well, i think one of the important things we re seeing, ana, is that we don t know as much about these jurors as we might in a typical case because the judge is using an anonymous jury procedure, and we can all understand the need for that. so if to carol s point, there s not only a lack of public information that s afternoonly amplified, i think