BREAKING: The judge is shielding the Manafort jury!

THURSDAY, AUGUST 2, 2018

No one can is there to shield you: What hasn't Paul Manafort agreed to cop a plea?

The experts have been speculating about that question this week. Some have said that he may be hoping for a pardon. We've seen no one suggest that he may realize that it only takes one Trump supporter on a jury to kill a guilty verdict.

According to reports, Manafort was unusually active and animated during jury selection. Is he hoping that opponents of the "witch hunt" and the Deep State might make a conviction impossible?

Since cable news is round-the-clock speculation, we're amazed that we still haven't seen anyone speculate that.

Last night, Jill Wine-Banks was complaining that Trump was trying to poison the jury with yesterday's tweets. Please! He's been poisoning potential jurors for well over a year. The children are so busy laughing and playing that no one has thought about that.

In the courtroom, the judge is apparently shielding the jury from presentations that would be "more prejudicial than probative." He isn't letting the prosecutors use the loaded term "oligarchs." He isn't letting the prosecutors show the jurors all those photos of Manafort's fancy clothes. That includes the famous ostrich jacket!

In such ways, judges shield jurors from the occasional baser instincts of prosecutors, who are human like everyone else. But who will shield the "cable news" viewers from manifest bullshit like this?

MELBER (8/1/18): Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade and politico's Josh Gerstein, thank you both.

We have one more note as we've been talking all about this. Manafort has those expensive tastes and that includes, we're going to show you, a $15,000 ostrich coat. Josh just mentioned it.

[PHOTO OF OSTRICH JACKET APPEARS]

We want you to see it because you're not a juror. So, you have every right to the information out there. Here is, we submit to you, the ostrich coat in question, and we submit it to you without comment.

We'll be right back.

Sad!

Melber was guest hosting for Rachel Maddow, in whose world prosecutors are never out over their skis, let alone wrong in some way. Although she's very good at hiding it, Rachel is all about throwing The Others in jail.

In fairness to Melber, he was almost surely reading text prepared by Maddow's staffers. But when he showed you the ostrich "coat" "because you have every right to the information," you were being treated like children, also like fools.

You were being talked down to. It's a way of life on cable.

The judge is shielding the jurors, as judges should. No one is there to shield or protect the lowly cable viewer.