The Patriot Post® · Rittenhouse Case Should Never Have Been Brought

The fate of 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse is now in the hands of a 12-person jury — a jury that spent all day Tuesday in deliberations and will pick up today where it left off. Ultimately, we believe it’ll do the right thing, the legal thing, and acquit him.

As Rittenhouse’s onetime lawyer, John Pierce, made clear: “He was legally entitled to have that firearm with him. And it’s just clear as day from the evidence, most powerfully from the hundreds of angles of video evidence, that it was absolute perfect self-defense.”

Absolute perfect self-defense.

Pierce, who heads the National Constitutional Law Union — which he calls “the ACLU for the rest of us” — says: “This case should have never been brought. In my view, this is blatant prosecutorial misconduct. It’s malicious prosecution.”

The man responsible for this travesty, Kenosha County Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger, saw his case fall apart all around him, as one state’s witness after another wound up helping the defense during cross-examination. Binger, perhaps seeing his career dissipation light begin to flicker, decided to bring lesser charges at the last moment, and to claim that Rittenhouse provoked his attackers. Here’s hoping the jury sees through it.

During closing arguments, Binger kept calling Kyle Rittenhouse an “active shooter.” We don’t think that word means what Binger thinks it means. If so, then Rittenhouse was the first “active shooter” in history to bypass dozens of human targets as he defended himself against a relatively small and very specific group of attackers.

Binger, though, isn’t just a menace in the courtroom; he’s a menace with a firearm as well. As everyone who watched Monday’s closing arguments saw, the state’s smarmy, out-of-control prosecutor violated the most basic rules of gun safety when he grabbed Rittenhouse’s AR-15 and pointed it into the crowded courtroom gallery with his finger on the trigger.

Those on the Left who’ve rushed to Binger’s defense by claiming that he knew it wasn’t loaded should remember Alec Baldwin’s infamous utterance: “Why was I handed a hot gun?”

As Power Line’s John Hinderaker rightly noted, “The world is a safer place with a gun in Kyle Rittenhouse’s hands than in Thomas Binger’s.”

Suffice it to say: This hack prosecutor belongs neither in a courtroom nor anywhere near a deadly weapon.

And so, after he wins an acquittal, we hope young Mr. Rittenhouse finds a good attorney and sues the hell out of Joe Biden for defamation. Because not even a cognitively challenged president should be allowed to call a young man a “white supremacist” without so much as a shred of evidence. Not even his paid liar, Jen Psaki, can defend him on this front.

And then, after suing the president for his clearly defamatory tweet, we hope Rittenhouse goes after the media, Covington Catholic style. Because these agenda-driven leftists clearly haven’t learned their lesson regarding willful defamation.

What willful lies are we talking about? Rittenhouse wasn’t a militia member, as the media regularly reported. Nor did he fire “60 rounds,” as MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said — not even close. Even the “fact-checkers” at PolitiFact lied about Rittenhouse, writing, “It is against the law in Wisconsin for someone younger than 18 to possess a dangerous weapon.” Wrong. Wisconsin state law says 17-year-olds are allowed to carry rifles as long as their barrels meet a minimum length requirement, which Rittenhouse’s AR-15 did. That’s why the state had to drop its gun charge against him on Monday, just before closing arguments began.

Nor did Rittenhouse “drive across state lines with a deadly weapon.” The weapon was always in Wisconsin. (For the record, the leftists wailing about the sanctity of state borders are the same ones who support Joe Biden’s disastrous open-borders policy with Mexico.)

As for where Rittenhouse lives, it’s true that he resides in Antioch, Illinois, just across the border from Kenosha. But his dad, his grandmother, and other relatives live in Kenosha, and that’s also where Rittenhouse worked as a lifeguard, as his defense attorney pointed out. He wasn’t an outsider or a “chaos tourist” or a “vigilante,” as mainstream media organizations kept telling us. Kenosha was Kyle Rittenhouse’s community, and he was trying to protect it from the mob when it became clear during two prior nights of rioting that the adults weren’t willing to do so.

Remember: Kyle Rittenhouse was attacked by the mob — specifically, by three men with criminal records and histories of violent behavior — and he was rightly in fear for his life or of great bodily harm. The shameless Binger called them “a crowd full of heroes.”

Indeed, we were told repeatedly by the state that Gaige Grosskreutz, its star witness, was a paramedic. But what we weren’t told, as The Daily Mail points out, is that Grosskreutz is also a violent career criminal with a laundry list of priors stretching back more than a decade. “These include domestic abuse, prowling, trespass, two DUIs, felony burglary and two charges of carrying a firearm while intoxicated — one of which took place when he was banned as a felon from carrying a firearm.”

Too bad, said the state. Kyle Rittenhouse should’ve just taken his medicine. “Everybody takes a beating sometimes, right?” said Kenosha County’s disgraceful assistant DA, James Kraus, who managed to stoop even lower than Binger. “He brought a gun to a fistfight, and he was too cowardly to use his own fists to fight his way out.” If only Kraus had been there that night. If only Kraus had been set upon by that mob. Perhaps then we’d have seen what real cowardice looks like.

What Kyle Rittenhouse did in Kenosha that night was many things, but it wasn’t cowardice. It was self-defense. His acquittal can’t come soon enough.