President Trump attacked the federal prosecutors in the Roger Stone case, calling them “these corrupt people.” He went after the judge who oversaw Stone’s prosecution. But these assaults, unwarranted as they are, pale by comparison to Trump’s unprecedented and unceasing assault on the jury forewoman.
Even as U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson was holding a hearing Tuesday on Stone’s allegations of jury bias, Trump was tweeting — again, this time from India — about the juror. “There has rarely been a juror so tainted as the forewoman in the Roger Stone case,” Trump asserted. “Look at her background. She never revealed her hatred of ‘Trump’ and Stone. She was totally biased, as is the judge. Roger wasn’t even working on my campaign. Miscarriage of justice. Sad to watch!“ 
Yes, sad to watch a president so out of control. As Jackson noted at Tuesday’s hearing, “Any attempt to harass or intimidate jurors is completely antithetical to our system of justice.” Not that Trump has any understanding of, or respect for, our system of justice.
Jury service is a solemn, onerous and sometimes scary obligation. The identity of the Stone jurors was kept secret — not from prosecutors or defense lawyers but from the public, a reflection of how ordinary people summoned for jury duty can find themselves in the crosshairs of social media fury, or worse.
The reason we now know the identity of the forewoman, previously identified only as Juror 1261, is that she outed herself with a Facebook post defending the Stone prosecutors after Trump said the case “was totally out of control” and, referring to the prosecutors, asserting that “people were hurt viciously and badly by these corrupt people.” 
The forewoman — and I see no reason to further intrude on her privacy by naming her here — wrote on her Facebook account that she had “kept my silence for months” about the Stone case, initially “for my safety,” then “out of fear of politicizing the matter.”
But, she said, “I can’t keep quiet any longer” after the four prosecutors withdrew from the case when their sentencing recommendation was overturned by officials in the Justice Department. “It pains me to see the DOJ now interfere with the hard work of the prosecutors,” she wrote. “They acted with the utmost intelligence, integrity, and respect for our system of justice.”
And with that, precisely what she had feared occurred. Stone’s defenders went after her record, scoured her social media accounts — and flayed her as an anti-Trump, partisan Democratic lawyer who had no doubt bullied her fellow jurors into unfairly convicting Stone. The case against the juror was that she had run as a Democrat for political office, was a Democratic activist and contributor and had posted comments highly critical of Trump, including referring to him with the hashtag #KlanPresident and exclaiming, “Gotta love it!” when a profanity was projected onto the front of Trump’s D.C. hotel.
It didn’t take long for Trump to get in on the act. “Now it looks like the fore person in the jury, in the Roger Stone case, had significant bias,” he tweeted the day after the Facebook post. “Add that to everything else, and this is not looking good for the ‘Justice’ Department.”
A week later, after Stone was sentenced to 40 months in prison, the president returned to the attack. “It’s my strong opinion that the forewoman of the jury, the woman who was in charge of the jury, is totally tainted,” he said in Las Vegas. “When you take a look, how can you have a person like this? She was an anti-Trump activist. Can you imagine this?” 
In fact, the juror’s identity and background were known to defense lawyers, who could have asked the judge to disqualify her; they didn’t. In fact, the judge did question the juror about whether she could put aside her partisan leaning to give Stone a fair trial; she said she could. In fact, the forewoman had just one, equal vote out of 12. As another juror in the case, Seth Cousins, described the deliberations, “Our foreperson oversaw a rigorous process, slowing us down on several occasions and advocating for the rights of the defendant.”
Whether the juror engaged in misconduct is not relevant to my argument, which is that there are right ways and wrong ways of dealing with such claims. The right way is to leave it to the judicial system. The wrong way is to make her the target — yet another target — of presidential bullying.