The Patriot Post® · The Rittenhouse Prosecution Is Falling Apart
Let’s start with 40 seconds of good great utterly devastating news for the prosecution in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial:
Rittenhouse trial should be over immediately. pic.twitter.com/PHZnHS5rD9
— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) November 8, 2021
That was Rittenhouse defense attorney Corey Chirafisi cross-examining the prosecution’s star witness, Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, the only surviving attacker of the three who were shot by Rittenhouse. After exposing Grosskreutz as a near-comical liar in a brief back-and-forth, Chirafisi zeroed in on what multiple videos from the night of August 25, 2020, clearly showed, but what the witness and the prosecution were trying mightily to deny or at least obscure: the fact that Grosskreutz had been pointing his Glock 27 at Rittenhouse when he got shot.
Grosskreutz was the guy who’d joined the mob chasing Rittenhouse down the street, saw him fall, saw an unidentified attacker take a flying kick at his head, then saw Andrew Huber swung his skateboard edgewise at his head, then saw Rittenhouse fire one round at Huber as he tried to grab and take his rifle. Grosskreutz, with his pistol drawn, then appeared to put his hands up as if surrendering before suddenly lunging at Rittenhouse with his pistol raised toward him. That’s when Rittenhouse fired another shot and separated Grosskreutz from his right biceps.
Chirafisi succeeded in getting Grosskreutz to confirm that key fact — that he was pointing his weapon at Rittenhouse when he got shot. It was a devastating admission, and a brilliant bit of cross examination.
Late last week, we’d seen another prosecution witness, the Daily Caller’s chief video director, Richie McGinniss, deliver a gut-punch to the state’s case with an earlier salvo of inconvenient truth-telling. Just before midnight, McGinniss was following closely behind Rittenhouse’s first attacker, a crazed Joseph Rosenbaum, who’d threatened to kill him earlier in the night and was now chasing him across a parking lot. Rittenhouse spun toward the onrushing Rosenbaum and fired four shots at him as he reached for the barrel of his weapon. One of those shots was fatal.
“Your interpretation of what [Rosenbaum] was trying to do or what he was intending to do or anything along those lines is complete guesswork, isn’t it?” the state’s lead prosecutor, Thomas Binger, asked McGinniss.
“Well,” McGinniss said, “he said ‘F*** you,’ and then he reached for the weapon.”
McGinniss then reenacted how Rosenbaum went after the gun, crouching and lunging forward with both arms. This, too, was devastating.
Grosskreutz, for his part, seems doubly lucky. First, he’d been shot in the right biceps instead of center mass; and second, he’d come clean on his account of the events before officially perjuring himself. Thomas Binger, the state’s lead prosecutor, had to rescue Grosskreutz from his obvious falsehood about when, exactly, he’d drawn his handgun.
Said Binger: “I want to back up for a second, Mr. Grosskreutz, because we have other video that shows you pulling your gun out before those shots [at Rittenhouse’s other attackers] are fired. Um… So do you remember, specifically, were you intending when you pulled your gun out, were you intending to use it?”
It used to be a crime to lie on the witness stand. But Grosskreutz kept lying and lying. Perhaps he’s been watching too many congressional hearings. In any case, it’d be refreshing to see the soon-to-be disgraced prosecutor, Binger, try his own witness for perjury.
Under the laws of self-defense, Kyle Rittenhouse was permitted to shoot his attackers. That seems clearer now than ever. Put another way, as former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “Exquisite rationality is not to be expected in the presence of an uplifted knife.” Or an uplifted gun.
Nothing is assured, and even if Rittenhouse is acquitted on the two homicide charges and the attempted homicide charge of Grosskreutz, he’s still on the hook for two counts of reckless endangerment and one weapons charge. After that, there’s the little matter of him getting his reputation back. It won’t be easy, given how deeply invested the Left and the mainstream media are in his conviction, and how viciously they’ve smeared him.
One look at the one-sidedness of major media headlines makes clear whose side they’re on. Notice there’s nary a word about the damaging performance of the prosecution’s key witnesses.
Or consider Congresswoman and Squad member Ayanna Pressley. She called Kyle Rittenhouse a “white supremacist domestic terrorist,” and she did so without a shred of evidence. Similarly, President Joe Biden called this young man, this lifeguard and former police cadet, a “white supremacist.” (If Rittenhouse is a white supremacist, shooting three white dudes is an odd way of showing it.)
We wonder: If Joe Biden is comfortable smearing teenage American boys, apparently without knowing a thing about them, what’s to stop others from calling the American president a rapist? Or a child molester? What’s to prevent free people from denouncing him with vulgar chants of “F*** Joe Biden”?
Even if we take the high road and stick with only the facts, we can confidently call this president a cognitively addled pathological liar.
Before the trial began, prominent Colorado attorney and author Andrew Branca said Kyle Rittenhouse should be acquitted based on the facts.
Since that time, given the disastrous truth-telling that kept inserting itself into the prosecution’s case, we think Branca’s argument is stronger now than ever. And the defense hasn’t even called its first witness.
UPDATE If you’re interested in the Rittenhouse trial, don’t trust Facebook to keep you updated. The Left is losing the court case and the argument over self-defense, so the social media giant has decided not to show any search results when the query “Kyle Rittenhouse” is entered into its search bar.