Hey everyone it's Scott Bland welcome to the morning after and a special edition of the nerd cast we are

Taping this special episode to take political stock of the two huge legal developments affecting the president in the last 24 hours.

His former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort's conviction on eight federal counts of financial

crimes, and potentially more importantly, his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen's guilty plea to

eight federal counts including one where he admitted breaking campaign

finance laws at the direction of then candidate Donald Trump.

So here to talk about it, we've got Chris Catalago from our White House team.

Hi Chris.

Good to be here.

And also Josh Gerstein, who has been following very closely the legal side of all this from the courtroom in Alexandria and everywhere in between for the last few weeks for the manifold trial.

Hey guys, it's good to be back at the Politi Palace after life on the road just a few miles away.

Yeah, so Josh, talk us through the events of yesterday.

I mean, you were simultaneously writing

two different stories about about top

former top advisors to the president going down for for major crimes.

Yeah, it was sort of one of those

really mind-splitting moments almost literally around 4 o'clock when we learned

that there would be a guilty plea from Michael Cohen around the same time and

then we heard that verdicts were coming in in the

Manafort case.

It's a little difficult for those of us who were covering it because you're sort of isolated

when you're in the courthouse so we didn't know

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