False right-wing reports about Trump trial jury instructions fuel threats against judge

WASHINGTON — False reports about the jury instructions in former President Donald Trump's hush money trial have been spreading across right-wing media, leading to threats against the judge overseeing the case.

Several conservative news personalities, including some affiliated with Fox News, falsely claimed that New York state Judge Juan Merchan, as one Fox News anchor put it in a viral post on X, "told the jury that they do not need unanimity to convict" Trump.

That's not true. Merchan instructed the jurors Wednesday that they "must conclude unanimously that a defendant conspired to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means," adding that they "need not be unanimous as to what those unlawful means were."

That means that jurors have to agree unanimously that Trump committed a crime by engaging in a criminal conspiracy to falsify records with the intent to commit one or more other crimes to convict him. But jurors can choose from three options about what those other crimes were: violations of the Federal Election Campaign Act, falsification of other business records or violation of tax laws. Those "unlawful means" aren't charges themselves, and they wouldn't result in separate convictions, so jurors don't have to unanimously agree on them.

The jury instruction was complex and “nuanced” — as that Fox anchor, John Roberts, tried to clarify an hour later in another post on X with fewer views — but some right-wing accounts ran with false reports.

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In response to inaccurate reporting that Trump could be convicted without unanimous agreement that he committed a crime, a user on Gab, a site popular with far-right extremists, said Wednesday