Jury is shrinking, not growing

Kayla Epstein in New York

Jury selection is now into its third day, and we have actually lost a juror rather than gaining any.

We are now down to six. Here is how we got here:

As my colleague Madeline Halpert reported earlier, Juror #2 asked to be excused because people in her life had started to figure out her identity based on news reports.

It goes to show the extremely high stakes not just for Donald Trump, his lawyers, and the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, but the 12 regular people who will be swept up in the trial along with them.

The court went back and forth over the most revealing questions – about employers and employment history. Justice Merchan ultimately agreed with Trump’s lawyers that it was important to obtain information about prospective juror’s employers.

But he issued a caveat: those answers will be struck from the court records, and he directed the dozens of reporters watching from an overflow courtroom not to publicly report those answers.

*** A further update posted just now … ***

Madeline Halpert reporting from court

We’ve just been told that juror number four has been excused.

That means we’re now down to five jurors. We don’t know why exactly he was dismissed.