ROGER SIMON: Manafort’s Purge Trial.

I was going to call this column The Trial of Tony Podesta to point out the ridiculous disparity that one is on trial but not the other. Judge Ellis couldn’t have been more right. This is selective prosecution to get at the president. The charges are outrageously broad and deliberately so.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t speak well of Trump that he chose to work with a man like Manafort. The president has made some excellent choices (Pompeo) and some doozies (Omarosa). Let’s hope he’s learning from his mistakes. It’s time.

But whatever you think of Manafort, his trial — no matter how it turns out — in its underpinnings resembles nothing so much as a Stalinist purge trial. It is political, self-serving and sadistic. Manafort is being purged — for life, if the prosecution gets its way. Maybe he could write The Mueller Archipelago.

Related: Democrats Frighten Manafort Jurors. “Why do you suppose seven news organizations–all liberal, presumably–wanted to know who the jurors are and where they live? They are worried that the jury, having heard the evidence, may not render the ‘right’ verdict, i.e., the one that helps the Democratic Party. So they want to know who the jurors are so they can apply pressure on them through mob action, newspaper denunciations, online harassment and so on. This is how today’s Democratic Party operates. If the jury fails to render the Democrats’ preferred verdict, what do you suppose Maxine Waters will suggest Democrats should do to the jurors if they venture out in public?”

Once I would have thought this paranoid, but I’ve learned that this is how they operate.