NEW YORK -- Donald Trump will be allowed to know the names of jurors at his upcoming New York hush-money criminal trial. The public will not.
Manhattan Judge Juan Manuel Merchan ruled Thursday to keep the yet-to-be-picked jury anonymous, with limited exceptions for the former president, his defense lawyers, prosecutors, jury consultants and legal staffs.
Only Trump's lawyers and prosecutors will be allowed to know the addresses of the jurors' homes and workplaces, Merchan said. Trump could risk forfeiting access to the names if he were to disclose them publicly.
Jury selection is scheduled to begin March 25.
The ruling, in response to a request from prosecutors, applies not only to jurors seated for the trial, but also prospective jurors who may be summoned to court but don't make the cut, the judge said.
It stops short of having a fully anonymous jury, as was the case in both of Trump's recent federal civil trials involving writer E. Jean Carroll. In those trials, not even Trump nor his lawyers knew the jurors' names.
Jurors' names are typically public record, but courts sometimes allow exceptions to protect the jury, most notably in cases involving terrorism, organized crime or when there's been prior jury tampering.
Despite the restrictions, Merchan said he has no plans to close the courtroom for jury selection or at any other time in the trial.
Trump is accused in the hush-money case of falsifying internal records kept by his company to hide the nature of payments to his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who paid porn actor Stormy Daniels $130,000 as part of an effort during Trump's 2016 campaign to bury claims that he'd had extramarital sexual encounters.
Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner, is charged in New York with 34 counts of falsifying business records, a felony punishable by up to four years in prison, though there is no guarantee that a conviction would result in jail time. Barring a last-minute delay, it will be the first of his four criminal cases to go to trial.
Last week, amid a slew of pretrial requests, the Manhattan district attorney's office asked Merchan to restrict access to juror names and keep them from the public, citing what it said was Trump's "extensive history of attacking jurors in other proceedings."
Among other things, prosecutors noted that Trump had made social media posts saying the jury that convicted his former adviser Roger Stone of obstructing a congressional investigation and other charges in 2020 was "totally biased," "tainted" and "DISGRACEFUL!"
They also noted that he'd posted about the grand jury that indicted him in New York and referred to the special grand jury in Georgia that investigated his efforts to subvert his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden as "an illegal Kangaroo Court" and "a 'Special' get Trump Grand Jury."
Putting guardrails up around access to juror names in the hush-money case and barring Trump from disseminating them were necessary steps to "minimize obstacles to jury selection and protect juror safety," prosecutors said.
Trump's lawyers said they agreed with keeping jurors' names from the public, but for different reasons. They cited what they called "extremely prejudicial pretrial media attention associated with this case" and disputed the prosecution's characterization of his previous comments about jurors.
Prosecutors "do not identify a single example where President Trump mentioned -- let alone attacked or harassed -- any juror by name," Trump's lawyers wrote in a response Monday. The only examples they cited were instances where those jurors identified themselves publicly and discussed their work as jurors with the media, Trump's lawyers said.
HEARING ORDERED
U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon ordered a hearing next week for legal arguments in the looming trial over Trump's handling of classified documents -- while both sides await her decision on when the trial will be.
Cannon, who held a hearing last week in which lawyers sparred over when to start the trial, told Trump's lawyers and special counsel Jack Smith's team to be prepared to spend the whole day in court.
Cannon said she wants to hear arguments Thursday about Trump's claims that he is protected from prosecution by the Presidential Records Act and that criminal law involving the mishandling of national security secrets can't be applied to him as a former president.
The 1978 Presidential Records Act specifies that presidential records belong to the public and are to be turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration at the end of a presidency.
Trump has argued that the case should be dismissed because he designated the materials he took to Mar-a-Lago while he was still president as personal -- and thus was allowed to keep them.
Prosecutors said the materials he took from the White House are "indisputably presidential, not personal" and even if Trump did designate them as personal, prosecutors said, the Presidential Records Act would still not apply to classified information.
"Nothing in the PRA leaves it to a president to make unilateral, unreviewable and perpetually binding decisions to remove presidential records from the White House in a manner that thwarts the operation of the PRA -- a statute designed to ensure that presidential records are the property of the United States and that they are preserved for the people," Smith's Thursday filing said.
That was just one of 11 different court filings Smith filed Thursday pushing back against various legal claims made by Trump and his co-defendants Walt "Waltine" Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira.
In one of those responses, Smith also rejected Trump's claims that the prosecution was politically motivated.
Trump's legal team has argued that he should not be charged because other American leaders -- including Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Vice President Mike Pence -- also wrongly handled sensitive government information but were not charged with crimes.
Prosecutors said Trump was charged, and the others were not, because his conduct was far worse than theirs.
Trump is charged with stashing highly sensitive classified papers at his Mar-a-Lago home after his presidency and then scheming to keep some of them even after receiving a grand jury subpoena for their return. Prosecutors charge that Nauta, a longtime Trump aide, helped the former president try to hide the documents from investigators and that De Oliveira tried to persuade another Trump employee to erase security camera footage that showed what they did. All three men have pleaded innocent.
Information for this article was contributed by Michael R. Sisak of The Associated Press and by Devlin Barrett and Perry Stein of The Washington Post.