Menendez trial doesn’t have a full jury yet, but he’s not the main reason why

Sen. Bob Menendez looked on Monday as scores of prospective jurors entered a federal courtroom in Manhattan to select a dozen New Yorkers who will have more say over the Democrat’s legacy in the next two months than millions of New Jersey voters have had over the past five decades.

But unlike the trial of Donald Trump, happening just down the street, few of the people in the courtroom seem to have strong feelings about the man himself.

During the opening days of the Trump trial, dozens of prospective jurors were dismissed after they told a state court judge that they could not be impartial. About a third of the 150 prospective jurors in Menendez’s trial are expected to be dismissed after the first day — but the jury pool seemed more concerned about the toll a seven-week trial may take on their vacation plans, jobs and family responsibilities.

Jury selection will continue Tuesday.

A few would-be jurors — like a few self-described news and political junkies, an NYU film instructor, a local government official who handles contracts and a housing attorney — said they’d read enough about the case and didn’t feel they could be partial.

“I get very worked up,” the housing attorney said, during a meeting with Judge Sidney Stein about whether she could serve on the jury. She said the allegations in the case were “triggering.”

The NYU instructor said he knew Menendez had been tried once before and so it was “hard to see him sitting back in court again with taxpayer dollars having gone through this once and being back.”

But those kinds of would-be jurors were few and far between.

Part of that has to do with Trump’s omnipresent polarization of the American political scene, while Menendez, for all his power in New Jersey and in Washington, is not a household name like even other senators who frequent the Sunday show circuit.

Another part is a simple function of the Hudson River that divides much of New York and New Jersey’s political lives from each other, even if they share a media market.

The corruption trial is Menendez’s second in a decade. In 2017, he walked out of a New Jersey federal courthouse after a mistrial in a separate case when jurors deadlocked.

That followed careful attention to the jury by Menendez’s defense team in that case. At the time, Menendez said he’d not taken in the stand, in part, because they’d calculated that any more time would increase the chances of losing a juror who was going to be excused for vacation. Menendez said the defense thought “she believed in our innocence” based on her reactions to both sides’ presentations.

Earlier this year, his attorneys tried to get the current case moved to New Jersey, arguing the “overwhelming bulk” of the actions described in the indictment by federal prosecutors happened in New Jersey. “Surely,” his attorneys wrote, “it has nothing to do” with the previous case where a “New Jersey jury” “saw through the government’s false narrative.”

So perhaps it’s no wonder that his attorneys and attorneys for his two co-codefendants — a pair of New Jersey businesspeople accused of bribing Menendez — were looking for any hint of sympathy in prospective jurors, like one juror who asked to be excused because she was traveling to Spain to attend a concert by New Jersey native son Bruce Springsteen.

“You should want her,” Stein, the judge, told an attorney for one of the businesspeople.

“I do,” the attorney replied.

As he left the courthouse Monday evening, Menendez, dressed in a dark suit, said, “I appreciate the jury’s sacrifice, their time and commitment.”