Hi, this is Josh Marshall, and this is the Josh Marshall podcast. I'm here with my

colleague David Tainter. Hey there Josh. We're back after a week off and we're, yeah,

we're doing this episode in the midst of,

you know, you make, you will probably know more

by the time that you hear this because as I speak it is 235 on on Tuesday afternoon we have the initial reports

that Michael Cohen has made a plea deal with prosecutors southern district in New York.

It's sort of been in the background swirling for a little bit but it seems today's the day.

Yeah and what is odd is that it at least seems that they're saying that there's no cooperation deal, just a plea which on its face is really hard to figure.

So there must be more to the story that we're going to learn. We also have, there are signs, although you

never know, that the Manafort jury is getting close to finalizing its work.

We're in the fourth week of the trial.

It's sort of hard to remember life before this case.

And the jury is on their fourth day of deliberations.

It sounds like they are pretty much in agreements on, I don't know, 17 of deliberations. It sounds like they are pretty much in

agreements on, I don't know, 17 of the 18 counts, but they're stuck on one

thing. And just to give our listeners a sense of this, when David says it's hard to know what it was like before

we have you know we're a very small organization we have just over 20 people in the

total you know the total company and we have two reporters, one who is technically an editor, but in this case operating

as a reporter, who are working the trial, who are down there each day doing some trading off.

We have a rotation of our editors to kind of if anything happens at a given moment one

goes right to them.

So it's, it has in a sense, like almost kind of 50% of our workforce has been on this trial.

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