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
there s some debate on that point. the department of justice weighed in on it in the past. and has opined that you cannot. so there s some unanswered questions but i think the pieces are there. jeremy bash, i have a well attuned ear to everything chuck says and i have never heard him say that before. i want to ask you the same question. do you see enough public facing evidence at this point to make another educated guess for us there is enough evidence now to charge someone with conspiracy to coordinate with a hostile foreign power? i don t think we know all the facts yet. i think the mueller investigation has a ways to go to eliminated those facts. if you want to understand the way bob mueller thinks about conspiracy, all you have to do is take your dog eared and underlined copy of the july 13th indictment of 12 russian intelligence officers on 11 counts because in there bob mueller and his team lay out with spes fis sit exactly what conspiracy looks like.
think bob mueller cares about the editorials, he cares about the facts and the law. and if he found something here let me give you an example, nicolle. let s say he was looking at someone s computer for a crime related to the russia investigation, but found child pornography. not related to the russia investigation. that is nevertheless a crime. it s prosecutable perhaps somewhere else, like the southern district of new york. i m not suggesting that s that that is what was on mr. cohen s computer. right. but you have to do something with it. right? let me respond. and let me just agree with your political point. i think you re making i agree with everything chuck said. i know you do. i was making a political point, which is bob mueller s investigation stands or falls on the willingness of republicans in congress to go along with, with, with rosenstein and say, let this investigation continue. otherwise, there is going to be enormous political pressure among republican
wow. you know what s funny, this relationship between romney and fox is something you know and i know nobody we don t like to talk about it because we re another media outlet. but it s always been an uneasy relationship. john, you probably feel more comfortable talking about it than i will. he s not their guy. he s not their guy, but they don t hate him either. he s not their guy. they ve never embraced him and he s never embraced them. the truth is they haven t embraced anybody. we talked for a long time at the beginning of this race we thought there would be a fox primary that fox would line up behind someone it was chris christie. that s right. but that never happened. and so though it s true, everything chuck said is true, it s ended up being not as bad for romney as it could have been. correct. had there been fox really embracing some alternative. don t forget fox embraced rudy four years ago. they did everything they could for rudy and it didn t work
necessary and we can, if we re good about it, we can regulate it environmentally. we should do it and go home. it s not good legislation to be part of an energy bill. let s do it and go home. it could serve the president a great opportunity. yeah. because what he could really use going in to this christmas recess is a very strong veto demonstration, which he did not do at the end of last year on the tax bracket issue. and this one if they send him up a bill with something he has publicly said he doesn t want on the bill, he could veto it, send it right back. and what choice do they have? everything chuck said about the pressure to extend the payroll tax cut and every other thing that they need to do in this bill, they still need to do as soon as the president vetoes it, they still need to do it.