Rachel Maddow takes a look at the days top political news stories. Their way to keep trump out of the trial. Abc news reports that prosecutors have been coaching their witnesses not to mention trumps name or even that manafort lives in trump tower. The judge in the case has warned that bringing up manaforts ties to trump could unduly influence jurors. There is at least one thing about this trial that is important to the relationship between Paul Manafort and donald trump. The first witness today was tad devine, chief strategist for Bernie Sanders an president ial campaign who worked with manafort on political campaigns in ukraine. The prosecution called him as their first witness to have him describe how much work manafort was doing in ukraine and how lucrative it was. Before we came on the air, we got a rush version of the transcript from todays hearing. Im not going to be able to act out a whole conversation but heres one little bit of the prosecutors Opening Statement worth hear. Th
pot at the end of the ray bow for an investigation is a conspiracy. chuck, you first. yeah, sure. i guess collusion just irks me because it s not. you re not easily iraqed. i don t tend irk easily. collusion means agreeing with somebody else to do something. that s what a conspiracy is. there s synonyms. the fact that collusion doesn t appear in the criminal code as mr. giuliani asserts is utter nonsense because conspiracy does. what the mueller team is investigating is whether folks in the united states conspired with the russians to interfere in our election. call it what you want. when they finally charge it, it will be charged as conspiracy. the notion that collusion isn t a crime is to mislead people. for the court of public opinion but not for a court of law. i just want to follow up with
it, talks about how one of the gru officers create a spear phishing e-mail attack. it s clear all the other 11 defendants didn t know or participate in that, yet they were all under the indictment terps conspirators and potentially guilty of the alleged offenses. and so i think you have to understand the way bob mueller and the special counsel s office is approaching the crime of conspiracy in order to analyze whether you think there will be a charge at the end of the day. i love when both of you take me to law school. jeremy, i ll go from law school to spy novels. you heard you say to our friend earlier today preet ba harra, there s a 96% chance the reason donald trump has taken a pro putin position is because of long-standing financial ties between the trump organization and people around the russian government. you talked about one-on-one meetings, about donald trump clearing the room which is what we understand him to have done with putin. we looked up one of the other people and
charges which is clearly bob mueller is looking at in terms of obstruction of justice. chuck, i want your thoughts on that. also, if i give you a two-part question and if you could weigh in on the news tonight that bob mueller has september more cases to the southern district of new york. first on jeremy s point about closed door meetings and donald trump s appetite for them. right. so i think jeremy s spot on. the reason you throw everybody out, the reason you want something, quote unquote, off record is you re going to do something underhanded. and it seems like a number of these conversations are underhanded. i want to echo one thing jeremy said. he did a nice job explaining the lauf conspiracy. he did that well. one thing i would it doesn t require that you succeed. right? you and i could agree to robbie an bank, nicole. we could get jeremy to be part of this. he goes out and buys a getaway car and then we get stopped on the way to the bank. we re still guilty.
you. you said when had he finally charge it. are you seeing enough pieces come to light in just what is public facing in this investigation that you believe there will be enough to charge someone with a conspiracy to coordinate or receive assist, from a hostile foreign power? it s an educated guess. i hope it s a well educated guess. i hope it s a well changed guess, nicole. yes, i am. there are bits and pieces in the public record that suggest that it wasn t just russians. the timing of the hack into the dnc computers, all of that is tied to russian activity that mr. mueller recently charged when he brought a case against the russian intelligence officers. so i think there is enough. i think there are other calculations that are really important here like, for instance, whether mr. mueller believes he has the authority to charge a sitting president.