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
reference too, he cleared the room when he asked jim comey to let the investigation into mike flynn go. how do those two hang together in your mind in terms of what a prosecutor would be looking at right now? when does donald trump actually want to have a private conversation? when does he want. when he s doing something sketchy. when he wants to do something where he doesn t want other people to hear what he s doing. one of the concerns that i have and many national security professionals have about the one-on-one within putin and by the way, we still don t even know if the translators were in there for the entire time or if the american translator was in there for the entire time. one of the problems with that is that there is no record of what was said and i think even to this day the director of national intelligence spoke publicly about this and secretary pompeo was questioned about this. they have not received a full debrief of what was discussed. it harks pa back when dona