You've got to realize, jury selection is very limited in Federal Courts. Generally Judges get to ask the questions and the amount of peremptory strikes is quite limited. Who knows what kind of juror was next in line to get stuck with if this guy had been stricken. Given a D.C. jury pool it is literally a situation where you have to decide on the best of the worst. The deck was stacked from the beginning. It was a reverse O.J.
If you are going to base much of your defense on impeaching Russert, then I'd rather have the most liberal of libs on the jury than one of Russert's buddies.
If you've stricken a jury, you have to know that if the defense wanted to get rid of this guy with a personal relationship with prosecution witnesses, they wouldn't have had to use a peremptory strike.