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
some of it may well leak into his time with trump. but it will clearly set the stage for i think a later section of this story, and we ve seen mueller stage other cases that way. first indicting russians who were involved in social media manipulation. then indicting russians who were involved in hacking. and in both of those cases, we see the possibility that there may be a americans who were involved. now we re learning a little bit more about mueller s history with russian-backed dictator in ukraine. and it seems that this too is headed in that same direction. and could you take this case, i mean, would it be a building block if you re trying to put together some broader picture or some broader conspiracy case? because the information coming out of michael cohen s camp is putting donald trump as someone who may have had knowledge of that trump tower meeting, paul plfrt just happens to be one of the other people in that trump tower meeting. there are a lot of connections and our col
government officials as well as crimes arising out of payments he received from the ukrainian government. they re looking at collusion and working on manafort but not just about his role in probable collusion but going after his business affairs generally which means he is really vulnerable. this is very significant, chris. some critics of the manafort prosecution argued look, money laundering, tax evasion what does that have to do with collusion with russia. now we have in black and white from the justice department there are serious allegations that paul manafort colluded. obviously, the special counsel has not confirmed that to his satisfaction. otherwise we would see charges filed. that is what he s investigating. we ve talked about this a long time. i ve long said you can t make the collusion case till you have paul plfrt s testimony arguably. that s why they re going so hard after him. they re wanting him to flip and putting all the pressure in the
he had actually basically proved donald trump s lie about being spied on as true. i m sure that when the movie is made, brat pit going to play him, but i have no clue where he could possibly have gone. but do i have a suspicion. the on thing that i can account for here is someone was going through our classified internet. we have several different variations of classified internet, let say intel link, which is the biggest and oldest one and typed in donald trump s name and typed in paul plfrt s name and these report came up showing either and foreign agencies or he justice saw inand