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
from manafort s defense where they brought up gates and they said look, it s not really all about witnesses. there s a lot of paper here. you ll see it in manafort s own happened and his own e-mails. the prosecutors said we have the burden of proof here and we re happy to bear it, which i took to mean they think there s ample proof that manafort s guilty. yeah, arm chair lawyering is very dangerous but one thing that arm chair lawyers like myself heard when the indictments were first unsealed was that this was a paper case that all the evidence was in the charging documents. was there a sense in the courtroom today that this was an airtight case or was there the anticipation that this could go anywhere? i think a lot of observers still there it s a pretty strong case with gates testimony you get not only the financial machinations surrounding the offshore bank accounts but the questions of bank fraud that arose in some part during the trump campaign, these applications for large l