The Lead Prosecutor in the Kyle Rittenhouse Political Prosecution Said That Rittenhouse Chased His Antifa Attackers. Then He Showed Video Of Antifa Chasing Rittenhouse.
Update: It Gets Worse.

Essentially they're hoping the jury is just very pro-antifa and poisoned against Rittenhouse and will ignore the actual evidence and simply convict Rittenhouse against the strength of the evidence.

It's a joke. The judge should have already thrown this out.

Julio Rosas at TownHall:

Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger made it a point to start off his opening argument on Tuesday that the evidence in the trial will show it was actually Kyle Rittenhouse who first chased Joseph Rosenbaum and killed him during the riots in Kenosha last year.

...

In the video recorded by Washington, [the second witness called by the prosecution] captured Rittenhouse being chased by Rosenbaum, not the other way around.

Apparently the prosecution's completely dishonest claim is this: At one point in the video, both men are walking, neither chasing each other, and Rittenhouse is behind Rosenbaum at some distance. They're both walking the same way. No one is chasing anyone.

But because Rittenhouse is behind Rosenbaum, the prosecution wants to claim this constitutes Rittenhouse "chasing Rosenbaum first." Even though the actual video shows only one chase, one sequence where people are rushing and running, and in that sequence, Rosenbaum (the antifa terrorist) is clearly chasing Rittenhouse.

Disgraceful. Maybe it's time to adopt antifa's tactics and just rip this fucking corrupt government down.

Video of calm walking -- which the prosecution calls "chasing" -- followed by actual chasing, below.

This video helps Rittenhouse. Which is probably why the FBI has been playing games with the video.

Daily Caller:

Unseen footage taken by the FBI from the night of the shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, surfaced on Tuesday during day one of Kyle Rittenhouse's trial. According to Jack Posobiec of Human Events, the FBI allegedly had an HD version of the video but never told the Rittenhouse defense it existed.

In footage obtained by Human Events, the FBI appears to have taken aerial footage of Rittenhouse and the other participants involved in the shooting. Some of the footage, which is black-and-white and grainy, was shot from an FBI surveillance drone.

The FBI footage was shown to the jury during the testimony of one of the agents who captured the footage with the drone, FBI agent Brandon Craimin. However, the FBI allegedly testified, in private, that they were in possession of another version of the video in HD that they did not supply the members of the defense, according to Human Events. When asked for a copy of the tape, the FBI allegedly denied the defense's request, saying that the video no longer existed, according to the report.

After prosecutors questioned Craimin about the aerial footage, the defense cross-examined the witness and asked for the tail number of the FBI plane. However, prosecutors objected. Judge Bruce Schroeder then asked to sidebar the issue and discuss the aerial footage, and jurors left the courtroom.

The lead lawyer representing Rittenhouse, Mark Richards, then said he believed that there was other video footage, captured by the FBI, that was no longer available. Richards reportedly said it is "preposterous" that the FBI allegedly lost the footage.

...

"I don't get this," [Judge] Schroeder reportedly went on to say. "This is a criminal prosecution... if there is going to be cloak and dagger stuff. What’s going on?"

The prosecutor is having a bad day. Today, his own witness -- this is supposed to be a friendly prosecutorial witness that helps him build a case against Rittenhouse -- established that Rosenbaum had hostile intent during the confrontation.

I have two versions of this video. Your choice. The first one is just the video itself. The second video is the video, plus some legal commentators (including Nick Riketa of Riketa Law) reacting to it live.

The second video has some chatter you may find annoying. However, their reaction to the key statement makes it worth it.

But, your choice.

If you think that is bad for the prosecution, check out this update.

Rosenbaum explicitly threatened Rittenhouse's life prior to the shooting.

This case should be thrown out.

Nick Rickieta is livestreaming the trial. In the caption description, he says the defense had a "BAD" (all caps) day yesterday. I guess today is going better.

One last bit. Jeffrey Toobin apparently declared it "incomprehensible" that the judge ruled that Kyle Rittenhouse could call the arsonists and looters he shot arsonists and looters, but that the prosecution could not call them "victims."

Well first of all, Toobin's an idiot who was absent the day they taught law in law school, because the protections in criminal court are there to protect the criminal defendant himself from unfair bias -- not to protect third parties who are not on trial, such as the arsonists/looters/pedophiles who were shot.

If Kyle Rittenhouse thinks it's a key part of his defense to establish those men were arsonists/looters/pedophiles, he can do so. The third parties in the case have no right to be protected from unfair bias in the trial, because, get this, they're not on trial.

Beyond that very elemental misunderstanding of who the protections afforded criminal defendants are there to protect (spoiler: it's the criminal defendant), apparently there is a rule for the specific case based on prior federal precedent.

An annoyed judge essentially said that the Sad Fat Public Masturbator Jeffrey Toobin should go back to what he's good at, which is pressuring the much-younger daughter of colleagues whom he's having an illicit extramarital affair with to have an abortion, and stop babbling about law, which he knows very little of.

He plays a fat sad chronic masturbator lawyer on TV, for the very undiscriminating audience of CNN, but he's not really a fat sad chronic masturbator lawyer. Not the "lawyer" part, anyway.

I don't know what they're talking about, but I'm going to guess this is about the (well known) rule that you can admit evidence of someone's prior violent acts to explain a defendant's state of mind in a self-defense case -- "I knew he had been committing violent actions, therefore, it was reasonable to think he intended to commit violence against me, so my use of deadly force to protect myself from a reasonable fear of deadly violence was itself reasonable."

You can bring in a lot of evidence that would otherwise not be relevant for state-of-mind reasons. You can't bring in prior bad acts to say "This guy was an asshole, he just deserves it," but you can say "This asshole was behaving violently, so my state-of-mind was that I had a reasonable fear that he was going to kill me, so I shot him."

That's not first week law school and it's not first month.

But it is first year.

And this very basic rule is "incomprehensible" to Spanky McChickenChoker over here.

posted by Ace at 05:29 PM

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