NEW YORK (AP) — A lawyer for a Colorado man accused of cheating donors to a $25 million fund to build a wall along the southern U.S. border told jurors on Tuesday that they should question why his client’s fraud trial is being held in New York, tapping into a theme that may have contributed to an earlier trial ending with a deadlocked jury.
During his opening statement, attorney John Meringolo, defending Timothy Shea, also spoke dismissively of Steve Bannon, the former top adviser to then-President Donald Trump who was charged in the case before Trump pardoned him as he left office last year.
“Is there a venue in this case?” Meringolo asked Manhattan federal court jurors as he told them to pay attention to where trial witnesses are from and where events described in the indictment occurred. He suggested that an adverse determination on venue might be enough to acquit his client.
Meringolo hit notes that were likely to appeal to any jurors who might think along the lines of a juror at Shea’s first trial in the spring who so upset his fellow jurors that they wrote a note to the judge saying he had branded them all as liberals and complained that the trial should have occurred in a southern state.
Days later, the hopelessly deadlocked jury caused a mistrial.
Last month, Judge Analisa Torres rejected Shea’s request to move the trial to Colorado because of “political polarization” in New York and pretrial publicity. The judge wrote that the Castle Rock, Colorado,…
