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
emotions somewhat. today he was very involved during jury selection when they were trying to figure out which jurors to strike, which jurors who keep. he was flipping flu pads and notes at the defense table. he was chatting with several of his lawyers rather animatedly and seemed to be making notes sort of maybe striking people out or having lengthy discussions with his counsel about which of these jurors might be most advantageous to him. ultimately they ended up with six men and six women on this jury who will decide his fate at least in this first trial. i read this and i wonder this if i read this correctly. he was wearing a suit today. we ve seen other photos where he s wearing a jumpsuit. the jurors will not be informed or see any images of him wearing that jumpsuit. why would that be? they typically would not. usually the prison jumpsuits are only used for arraignments and pretrial hearings. whenever someone is exposed to