Rachel Maddow takes a look at the days top political news stories. Whether a person is too close to the subject of the probe, whether Jeff Sessions would beak be more of a Trump Campaign surrogate who happened to be Attorney General rather than acting as an independent Law Enforcement officer. If sessions didnt recuse after that statement, it would have made him look even more like he was doing trumps bidding. And trump apparently didnt know that making that statement would also as just a general matter of embarrassment, make him look weak and out of the loop about a decision that was already done. Because there were reports that show the Internal Doj Process had already resulted in sessions accepting that nonpartisan Recusal Recommendation from the career staff earlier that week and that Jeff Sessions was already working with doj officials op writing the very rationale they would soon release to the public. In fact, it was barely an hour after trump put that public pressure on session
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
18usc1505 obstruction of a congress al investigation and 18usc371, conspiracy. the two of them working together. there we go, perhaps with others. the there might be even more. this is just the very beginning of what we re seeing here. i think it s really the important that senator grassley does this, john, because otherwise any nominee who they want to stop, it will just be, oh, i heard this h. no, no, no, i remember this 25 years ago. oh, yeah and it s the worst more horrible accusations, unsubstantiated, why not? there s no price to be paid. i would go after the feinstein leak, too. they should do a full and thorough investigation of final stein and maybe some of the other accusers in this case. did christine ford tell the truth? i don t know. a lot of friends of kavanaugh are upset and when you think about it there was a lot of lying going on. i couldn t agree more.
investigation move along one of those three tracks. i expect we ll be seeing more indictments in in the near future. to paraphrase it, sounds like they were right to say collusion is not a crime because it is like four crimes. that s right. what we are commonly referring to as collusion is a complex series of violation afsz federal election law, of truthfulness to investigators and the commonly known crime of conspiracy which is i think 18usc371. that s just working with more than one other foreign break federal law. that s simple conspiracy. senator chris coons, a member of the senate judiciary committee, i really do appreciate your time tonight. thank you, ari. still ahead there could be a big development in paul manafort s trial. we have that former federal prosecutor who was in the courtroom today in just a moment.
if people want to use the google machine to research it, it s 18usc371. it s conspiracy to defraud the united states. a couple of interesting things about that statute. first of all, it states that if two or more people agree to do something to commit an offense against the united states, and one of those people actually goes ahead and does it, then both people are guilty of conspiracy and shall not be imprisoned more than five years. it s a class e felony. so the important part is that if there were people inside trump tower at the trump tower meeting or inside the trump campaign or even donald trump himself who knew what at russian government officers were doing and if the russian government officers went off and did it, even if they didn t report it back to the trump campaign, the trump campaign knew about it, mere knowledge establishes a conspiracy. and there are other places in the mueller indictment, if you look at paragraph 21d in here