An Update on the Rittenhouse Trial, Nincompoop Prosecutors

BUCK: I just wanted to revisit for a second some of the dumbest things that were said yesterday, some of the dumbest arguments by prosecutors. This one was particularly insane. Here is Kenosha assistant district attorney James Kraus saying that sometimes you just gotta let a crazy mob of leftist lunatics start punching you on the street.

KRAUS: Clearly if there is provocation, he’s guilty. But even outside a provocation, why do you get to immediately just start shooting? As Mr. Binger said, he brought a gun to a fistfight, and he’s too cowardly to use his own fists to fight his way out. He has to start shooting.

BUCK: So, Clay, you’re supposed to slug it out with a mob that has weapons including firearms that’s attacking you while you have a gun? That’s apparently what the prosecutor’s think in this case.

CLAY: These are the dumbest prosecutors on the planet. I really… Look, one of the things that you have to learn, Buck, when you’re in law school is you have to learn — and then early in your practice of law if you do criminal cases — is sometimes you’re going to be defending people that you don’t necessarily find to be particularly likable or to have been accused of something that is not in any way acceptable.

I’ve represented murderers, convicted murderers — I’ve represented alleged drug dealers, alleged domestic abusers — and what you have to do is the best job of defending them that you can. So, I would not want the job to be a prosecutor in this Kyle Rittenhouse case. I wouldn’t want it at all. I think it’s the wrong side of the argument. But, if you are given this assignment, you have to do it to the best of your ability, and I don’t know…

I’m not an expert in what the Kenosha district attorney’s office talent is, but it feels like to me they were drawing from the back end of the deck when they put these guys up to try to prosecute Kyle Rittenhouse. Because just as someone who sit and has watched enough court proceedings to be able to judge the overall talented of lawyers, ’cause I’m sure you’re on the wrong side of a case.

It doesn’t mean you can’t advocate forcefully for the side that you’re on. These guys are imbeciles, and it’s hard for me to watch them and think anything else other than, one, they’re not very the talented lawyers. Two, they’re not very smart, period. And three, it feels to me like they’re almost attempting to get a mistrial, because everybody has what’s called “a theory of the case.”

And your theory of the case here on Kyle Rittenhouse basically has to be essentially, given the charges, that Kyle Rittenhouse intended to do violent harm to some of the protesters on that night in question. And you have to build everything around that idea. But you have to do it in a way that passes the smell test.

And “Drop your gun and fistfight your way out of a mob” is such an insanely stupid argument that any juror out there is gonna say, “No, the reason why I would have a gun is so I don’t have to fistfight my way through a mob.” And, by the way, there are videos out there that have gone viral of people who tried to fistfight their way out of the mob, and what happens is you end up getting beaten down in a severe way by the mob. That’s why you have a weapon.

BUCK: They double down on it. The prosecutor — this guy, Kraus, the assistant district attorney — went beyond the “brought a gun to a fistfight,” which isn’t even true ’cause there were people waving guns in Rittenhouse’s face, as we’ve seen in evidence on video and from testimony. But beyond that, the assistant DA here, Clay, straight-up says…

I have friends who are federal prosecutors, I have friends who are in the prosecutor’s office here in New York, and some of them have been texting me about this stuff saying, “This is just insane.” The James Kraus guy here says sometimes you just gotta get your butt kicked. That’s what the law requires.

KRAUS: Everybody takes a beating sometimes, right? Sometimes you get in a scuffle and — and maybe you do get hurt a little bit. That doesn’t mean you get to start plugging people with your full metal jacket AR-15 rounds.

BUCK: He is saying that Rittenhouse should have let this mob of leftist, rioting, criminal psychopaths beat the you-know-what out of him while he has a rifle and then trust that they won’t beat him into a coma or to death or shoot him with his gun. It’s as though they’ve never heard of the concept of self-defense, or they reject it outright. This case… Clay, you keep saying they’re going for a mistrial. I feel like what we’re just seeing play out over and over again is they never should have brought this case.

CLAY: Well, yes.

BUCK: It’s so obvious!

CLAY: Well, yes. And that’s why I would love to know where these district attorneys rank on the flowchart of district attorneys in Kenosha, because usually in a case of this magnitude you would put your absolutely most talented prosecutors on the case because you know there’s gonna be a significant amount of people watching everybody’s paying attention.

If this is the best prosecutorial duo that they have in Kenosha, I don’t know how they ever convict anybody. I really don’t, because these guys are a couple of nincompoops. And look, the defense attorneys have clearly slapped them around from a legal perspective, as has the judge, which is why, as we’re waiting now for the jurors — and let me just say, you never know what a jury’s gonna do, right?

Twelve people can be imminently reasonable, and they can reach the result that you anticipate. You will say sometimes have juries that come back and you have no clue how they could have rendered the verdict that they did. The internal dynamics of a jury room deliberation can be really fascinating. One of the things we did in law school, Buck, we did a bunch of mock trials.

And they would bring in jurors, and you would get to watch the jury deliberate and see what you said and what you did and how that translated to the jury. And it was so fascinating because many of the times the things that you thought were incredibly important to the case didn’t register with the jury, and your body language or the body language of a witness may well have become extremely significant.

And remember, this is effectively “all the world’s a stage,” as Shakespeare said. All of a court proceeding is a stage. When Kyle Rittenhouse is sitting at the defense table, the jurors are paying attention to his body language. Prosecution, defense, judge, who’s in the courtroom, all that factors in. But I would be extremely surprised, Buck, if we don’t get a not-guilty verdict within the next 24 hours.

BUCK: Seems like there’s no way that you’ll even get — ’cause it looks like it’s gonna be all or nothing, right? Initially when they had the gun charge in there… They even threw the violation of the basically stay-at-home order, right? They had a curfew, and they got rid of that. They got rid of the curfew, they got rid of the weapons charge. So there’s a very real possibility here that Rittenhouse will be not guilty on all counts.

But if he’s found guilty on even one of these counts — and this is always the concern that I hear defense attorneys and others talking about on TV as they’re analyzing these things even one of these counts –the jury may view that as something of a down-the-middle decision, even though that effectively ruins Kyle Rittenhouse’s life. We’re being honest about this.

He’s gonna spend… You’re a convicted felon for criminal homicide and you’re gonna spend a decade or two in prison, your life is never the same and in some ways is ruined forever. So it’s really important that we get a full not-guilty verdict top to bottom. And with it I think people will view this, though, largely as…

Given the information that’s come forward, the testimony of the eyewitnesses… Thank heavens the video exists because my contention is if he had shot a… If any of these victims… I’m sorry. Pardon me. If any of these assailants that he shot were black, and if he didn’t have video of the incident, Kyle Rittenhouse would be going to prison. The jury would convict.

CLAY: I think that’s true, and also —

BUCK: Just based on the narrative, by the way, not based on the facts.

CLAY: Just based on the narrative. And obviously a big part of this story as well is not only what is the jury gonna do, but how is the community of Kenosha gonna respond? Five hundred National Guard — state guard, I think — have been called out by the governor of Wisconsin.

BUCK: Clay, what betting odds…? ‘Cause you’re a betting man. What betting odds would you give somebody that if Rittenhouse if he were found guilty there would be no riots?

CLAY: I would virtually guarantee it, right, because the riot is a form of violent protest that is threatened, “If you don’t do what I want.” I mean, effectively our cities were terrorized for months during the summer by violent protesters who were taking advantage of leniency from the authorities in the wake of the George Floyd incident.

And the reason why I think so many police were told to stand down was there was a deep fear that there would be an additional violent act that would further propagate riots across the country. And so police were effectively told in many instances to stand down and allow the looting and the pillaging and the violence and the burning that we saw take place all throughout the summer, which still has never been investigated.

It seems strongly organized in some ways. You think about all the attention that has been paid to January 6th and compare it to all the attention… Remember, Buck, as we talked about on this show. Everything is boarded up; there would be monster rights if Trump had been reelected in November. That was a implicit threat from the left wing in this country that “if we don’t get what we want, we’re going to riot.”

So I think in the next 24 hours we will have a verdict in the Rittenhouse case. What will be interesting also Buck is do they hold it in some way to try not to have it happen in the late afternoon as it gets closer to evening. Because it will be better, I think, if this verdict comes out in the morning, in the earlier part of the day, because there’s more hours of daylight and typically that doesn’t become an issue I don’t know the answer.

BUCK: The jury might look at the weather and also decide if it’s gonna be a real —

CLAY: Bad weather.

BUCK: — cold day in November in a couple of days, they might want to hold out because it’s a lot less fun to riot when it’s 35 and windy than when it’s in the fifties. So we’ll have —

CLAY: There’s no doubt. You have to consider all those things. But Kyle Rittenhouse is out right now. So, also, his safety, is there somebody crazy out there to try to do something to him? All of that has to be factored here in terms of the analysis here.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: The Kyle Rittenhouse jury is out. Tempers already flaring if you are pay attention to the gathering of protesters. And, Buck, one thing that I don’t think we discuss enough or media discusses enough, is the perspective of owning a small business. I owned a business that I sold that I spent a decade running, and you pour your heart and soul into any business that you are running — any small business out there, even as it turns into a large business.

The amount of blood, sweat, tears, effort, energy, exertion that is put into running a business is not talked about enough in the context of all of these riots. And, Buck, I’m fortunate because my business, media business is primarily internet based. I don’t have to worry, necessarily, about somebody burning it down in a night of riots.

But I can viscerally tell you how sick to my stomach I get as a small business owner watching all of these companies — and all the hopes and dreams and aspirations associated with these businesses — going up in smoke. And so I hope that when Kyle Rittenhouse, I believe, is gonna be found not guilty — if he is found not guilty — that the police authorities, that the Guard, that the people in Wisconsin do their job to protect the communities and not allow riots to take place, and immediately arrest anyone behaving violently and that we send a message that we’re not going to allow the summer of 2020 to happen elsewhere again.

Because you got the Ahmaud Arbery trial going on. You got the Rittenhouse trial going on. All of it gets televised; it sends messages all over the country about how you respond. Are you optimistic that the authorities are gonna do their job this and that we won’t need the Kyle Rittenhousees of the world to be showing up thinking that they need to provide private security because the public won’t do their job to secure the communities?

BUCK: I do think, Clay, that the pendulum… Remember, the only thing that holds the Democrats back– the only thing that stays their hand, so to speak — is when it’s not in their political interests to do something, when it’s a threat to their power to allow something to happen or to take a certain action. During the 2020 riots of BLM and Antifa, you had a period where there was a moral panic over police racism in America.

Now we’ve gone into a period of 18 months of increased homicides which disproportionately affect young, minority males — more of them being shot now, tragically, as a result of the rise in crime. People are getting pretty fed up with it. So it’s not that Democrats have learned their lesson and are above it and now oppose rioting, but even the governor of Wisconsin and the other authorities involved here may recognize, “Rioting at this moment? Not a good look for the people in charge if they want to stay in charge so it might be a little different.”

CLAY: No doubt, and also they can’t blame Trump for it.

BUCK: That’s right.

CLAY: When riots are taking place and Donald Trump is president and it’s an election year, you can say the country has spiraled out of control because of him. Biden would take the blame now.