RUSH: The Drive-By Media does not know what to think. The Drive-By Media is in a state of panic over what’s just happened at the Manafort trial.

Greetings, my friends, and welcome back. It’s great to have you once again here at the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.

Now, see, this is what happened. I had the whole show prepared, laid out, ready to go, and then this happens. I mean, this happened just two, three minutes ago. What happened is this. The jury sent a note to the judge, T. S. Ellis, asking what they should do if they cannot reach a consensus, a unanimous conclusion. The jury asked in a note, “If we can’t come to a consensus for a single count, how can we fill in the verdict sheet?”

Now, I’m not at all clear what this means. There are 18 counts. And do they mean they can’t come to an agreement on any when they say “a single count,” or are they in agreement on 17, but can’t come to an agreement on the 18th? Now, the Drive-By Media, for some reason, is taking this as horrible news.

The Drive-By Media is totally invested in Manafort, as I said, being lined up at dawn within minutes of the verdict and being shot by somebody wearing a Trump mask, wearing a Make America Great hat. That’s what they want to happen because this will validate whatever Mueller is doing, which, you know, I’m sorry, I’m gonna need another rant on Mueller today.

I’m gonna wait awhile to do it, but I got a text message from a friend of mine late yesterday afternoon. “Do people not realize what’s going on?” He had a great point that I’ve made once before, and I need to reiterate it, which we will do in due course.

So the judge told the jury, “Well, you can do a partial verdict, but I don’t want to go there yet.” So he sent ’em back, he sent ’em back to the jury room and told ’em to keep deliberating until they can reach consensus. The jury said they needed a new verdict sheet, and they asked what not coming to a conclusion would mean for the final verdict. What would not coming to a conclusion mean for the final verdict? Well, what does it mean when you don’t have a decision on a charge? Well, mistrial, hung jury, or what have you.

But remember, there are 18 counts. And as I read everything about it, everybody’s assuming they’ve agreed on 17 and there are just one that they haven’t agreed on. Now, if that’s how everybody’s interpreting it, and then the Drive-Bys are gloomy, I mean, CNN is gloomy about this. CNN, I think they were expecting this jury to be gone in less time than the OJ jury was. Do you remember how long the OJ jury was out? Just a little history here. I mean, the OJ trial, how many years did that go on? (interruption) Well, no, the actual trial. I mean, the case. No, the trial was months.

Remember all of that detailed DNA evidence that Barry Scheck presented, with all of that stuff the jury is gone less than three hours and they actually had their decision in five minutes. They just waited two and a half hours to make it look like they had deliberated. And that contained some really technical stuff in it.

I think the Drive-Bys expected Manafort to be slam dunk guilty inside of the first day and then have the execution that night with everybody gathering at the Old Ebbitt Grill for a party, which is right next to the White House. But that hasn’t happened so they’re a little gloomy out there. We’ll just have to wait and see what it all means because it really is unclear.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

The Manafort jury and the situation there. Let me give you a little bit more data on this. It’s not factual data. We don’t really know any more. These are probabilities, I guess you’d say. And it looks like there might be a partial verdict coming. And the judge did what most experts would suggest the right thing to do is. When the jury came back and said, “Look, we’re having trouble coming to consensus or agreement on a single count.”

Now, again, you know, I am Mr. Precision. I am Mr. Reality. And the way that’s written, it’s impossible to know what they’re talking about. There are 18 counts. And they could have said, “Judge, we can’t come to agreement on a single count!” Or it could mean, “Judge, there is just one count we can’t come to an agreement on.” We don’t know. I mean, I don’t know. It seems to me that everybody’s assuming that there are 17 counts the jury has come to a consensus, unanimity on, only one count that they haven’t. But I’m not sure.

Anyway, the judge sent them back and told them to keep deliberating. He did tell them that a partial verdict is possible, but he doesn’t want that. Now, if sending the jury back to finish the job does not succeed — and it probably won’t, otherwise the jury would not have sent this note in the first place. The foreman is probably exasperated. He or she is very frustrated that they can’t come to unanimity here. And so when it looks bleak, that’s when you go tell the judge, that’s when you send the note to dad. “Dad, we can’t agree on where to go on vacation,” or whatever the thing is.

But that means they’re frustrated, which means that even after the judge sends them back, it’s highly unlikely that they’re going to magically come to agreement on whatever it is they cannot agree to. So when it is determined by the judge that sending them back to try to finish doesn’t work, that’s when the judge can take a partial verdict. And that is where they would return a verdict on any of the counts that they have resolved unanimously.

Now, the key with that is that once the verdict on those counts is announced in court, it is final. There is nothing that can be done to change it. So let’s just play games. Let’s assume that they’ve agreed on 17 but there’s one count they can’t agree on. So the judge sends ’em back. And then they still can’t agree, and the judge — you know what, it makes me think that it’s all 18 that they can’t agree on, but let’s stick with whatever — they’ve got agreement on 17, one of them is hung. If they come back and the judge announces a partial verdict and they announce the verdict on the 17 counts they’re unanimously agreed to, those 17 verdicts cannot be revisited when the jury is sent back again to try to resolve the one remaining count.

Once a verdict is announced in court, it is final. And if the judge then persuades them to go back and keep deliberating on the unresolved count or counts, the jury cannot reconsider the counts they resolved in the partial verdict or verdicts which were announced in court. And that’s why the judge first encourages ’em to try to reach a verdict on all the charges. It gets risky to send them back to deliberate on anything unresolved.

If you let them return a verdict on some counts and then after that they may try to change their minds on the resolved counts, and if that happens then you’ve got an appellate problem. You’ve got a big can of worms if on previously announced verdicts the jury starts rethinking those. That’s why judges don’t like to send ’em back after partial verdicts are announced. So that’s pretty much where we are. And again, I don’t think anybody knows, unless I’ve missed and here, whether there’s one count they’re hung up on or all of them.

And since I learned of this I’ve not had time to devote myself to figuring that out myself. So until we know differently, we’ll go with that presumption. This is why it ticks me off that people can’t be precise. But in this case it’s the jury that’s imprecise, so we gotta go with the flow. “Judge, we can’t agree on a single count.” “Okay. Go back and keep chatting.” We don’t know if it’s all 18 or just one.

But as I say, looking at the faces of the anchors on CNN, they were very, very gloomy out there. That execution at dawn looks like it’s getting more and more problematic.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, I had a chance to read some things. It appears that most of the Drive-Bys think the Manafort jury has agreed on 17 counts and that there’s only one count that they can’t agree on. So if that’s the case, I don’t know why they’re gloomy.