More thoughts on the Rittenhouse trial

The New Neo Posted on by

Those of us who have followed the story of Kyle Rittenhouse have been well aware for quite some time that the fact situation supports self-defense and that his being charged was a political act.

But in a trial, facts previously unknown can come out, and one’s opinions can change as a result – or become even more firm. And trials are inherently unpredictable. Sometimes the verdict seems to us as though it should be crystal clear, and yet the jury delivers a surprise one way or the other.

In the Rittenhouse trial so far, as I’ve been following it at Legal Insurrection and other sites, my opinion that Rittenhouse is innocent has only become more strong, and it was strong enough already. So far, at least, the trial has been a kind of travesty in which the prosecutor struggles with his own witnesses to get them to say what he wants them to say to implicate Rittenhouse, and they do the opposite because facts are stubborn things.

For an example of what I mean, see yesterday’s post at Legal Insurrection by Andrew Branca, featuring this sort of exchange (Binger is the prosecutor, McGinnis is his own witness, and Rosenbaum is one of the men Rittenhouse killed that night):

Binger had been very unhappy when McGinnis was allowed to suggest during cross-examination that it had been the intent of Rosenbaum to seize Kyle’s rifle. Binger objected at the time, but Judge Schroeder overruled the objection.

Now on re-direct, Binger rather heatedly challenged his own witness: You can’t read Rosenbaum’s mind, right? You can’t know what he was actually thinking, right? Your interpretation of his intent is nothing but complete guesswork, isn’t that right?

McGinnis paused a moment, and replied: “Well, he said “F-you, and then he reached for the weapon.” So, maybe not entirely guesswork.

The trial so far reminds me slightly of some legal dealings I had long ago with much lower stakes of course. I had been stopped at a yield sign at a complex intersection in a large city, and an impatient small truck had clipped me on the side in the driver’s eagerness to go despite heavy traffic coming at us. He sued me for damages to his truck and I had to answer questions for a deposition. The questions all assumed I had been moving, and so when it kept saying some form of “How fast were you moving when you hit so-and-so?” I had to rewrite the whole thing and say something like, “I wasn’t moving when so-and-so hit me.” And on and on like that.

The Rittenhouse prosecution is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. So far it seems that whether the prosecution succeeds or not depends on whether the jury has been prejudiced enough and/or intimidated enough. That’s not how justice should be.

Just a reminder about the Rittenhouse trial

The New Neo Posted on by

Andrew Branca is doing a daily write-up of the proceedings at Legal Insurrection. Well worth reading. Here is yesterday’s, and there will be one every day as long as the trial continues.

And here is something Branca wrote today:

The direct questioning of STATE witness Richard McGinnis by ADA Binger was an absolute trainwreck for the prosecution–and, of course, the jury watched it all happen in real-time.

UPDATE: To provide some context, for more than 12 minutes ADA Binger tried to get McGinnis to testify that Rosenbaum was already falling to the ground when Rittenhouse began shooting him–in other words, that Rittenhouse simply executed Rosenbaum by shooting him in the back when he was helplessly falling…

…[A] reasonable paraphrase would go something like this:

Binger: So Rittenhouse shot Rosenbaum, in the back, as he was falling, correct?

McGinnis: No, Rittenhouse didn’t fire until Rosenbaum charged and lunged at him.

Binger: So he shot him as he was falling?

McGinnis: No, not falling, lunging.

Binger: So you’re saying he shot him while he was falling?

McGinnis: No, that’s not my testimony. Lunging.

Branca usually posts his daily discussions of the day’s events in the trial later in the day, so that’s just a little preview.

Durham marches on: the indictment of Danchenko

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s another development in the snail-like Durham investigation, and – like so much of Russiagate – it’s complicated. That means that most people aren’t following it, but these are some of the allegations:

The 39-page indictment accuses Danchenko of lying about his Russian contacts and travels to the country. The interviews took place between January and November 2017. It also indicates Steele used him as a primary source:

“The March 16, 2017, May 18, 2017, Oct. 24, 2017, and Nov. 16, 2017, counts involve statements made by Danchenko on those dates to FBI agents regarding information he “purportedly had received from an anonymous caller who he believed to be a particular individual, when in truth and in fact he knew that was untrue,” Durham’s office said Thursday.

“The information purportedly conveyed by the anonymous caller included the allegation that there were communications ongoing between the Trump campaign and Russian officials and that the caller had indicated the Kremlin might be of help in getting Trump elected,” Durham’s office said in a statement.”

Russiagate was a pyramid of lies, and some of those lies were fed to the FBI, which makes them a crime. We’re not talking about some tangential statement that was untrue: we’re talking about the entire edifice.

I said it was complicated, and it’s actually quite a bit more complicated than that. Ace has written at some length about those complications. But here’s a useful summary of a small portion of it:

The Clinton campaign suspected Danchenko was a Russian asset but used him to start the ball rolling AND they promised him a job in the State Department if Hillary was elected.

And here are some more tidbits:

I’m going to assume they thought they’d never be caught. Or they assumed that, if caught, there would be few if any negative consequences.

And I wonder how many people will hear about this, be able to follow it, or care. But I think the term “vast left-wing conspiracy” applies quite well.

Election irregularities, election fraud, past and present

The New Neo Posted on by

First we have a report from Wisconsin about the 2020 election:

Explosive revelations in the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau’s report on the 2020 presidential election confirm what many in the key swing state have long suspected: Those tasked with administering the election willfully ignored and openly violated state law…

Auditors reviewed 14,710 absentee ballots cast in 29 municipalities across the state, including nine of the 10 cities in which the highest numbers of absentee ballots were cast. Stunningly, the City of Madison refused to allow the LAB to physically handle its ballots. Madison, Wisconsin’s capital and the most heavily Democratic city in the state, was the primary reason Joe Biden won Dane County over Donald Trump, as it voted for Biden by a whopping 75.7 to 22.9 percent.

The review of ballot certificates revealed that 1,022 of the ballots reviewed (representing 6.9 percent) “had partial witness addresses because they did not have one or more components of a witness address, such as a street name, municipality, state, and zip code.” Fifteen of them (0.1 percent) “did not have a witness address in its entirety,” while eight (less than 0.1 percent) “did not have a witness signature,” and three (less than 0.1 percent) “did not have a voter’s signature.”…

Using the LAB’s numbers, it may be reasonably estimated that across the state 135,512 absentee ballot certificates only had a partial witness address, 2,002 did not have a witness address at all, 1,068 did not have a witness signature, and 401 did not have a voter signature. Biden defeated Trump in Wisconsin by just 20,682 votes.

Much much more at the link.

There are a lot of ways that elections can be fraudulent and/or can raise a strong suspicion of fraud and/or significant error – which in some ways is just as bad because if faith in the integrity of elections is undermined it hurts the entire country. One way is by passing election rules that give ample opportunity for fraud. Another way is by skirting more stringent and protective rules by not enforcing them. Another way is outright fraud: the manufacture of fake votes or the purposeful counting of fake votes.

The Wisconsin audit illustrates how hard – actually, impossible – it is to know ex post facto whether enough errors and/or fraud existed to change the outcome of an election, especially a close one. And that’s what the fraudsters and those who relax the rules are banking on.

NOTE: To bring us to the present, we have New Jersey and its history of voting fraud.

With Biden, is it door number one, two, or three?

The New Neo Posted on by

Door number one: he’s lying.
Door number two: he forgot.
Door number three: he was never told.

Any of those could be the case with Biden at any point on any subject. But in this case I think it was actually door number three.

Remember that story about the huge settlements being discussed for illegal “migrants” whose families were separated? It stirred up a lot of outrage, and rightly so.

Yesterday Biden said the story was “garbage” and “not true.”

Today the ACLU (which has been in charge of many of the lawsuits involved) issued a statement:

President Biden may not have been fully briefed about the actions of his very own Justice Department as it carefully deliberated and considered the crimes committed against thousands of families separated from their children as an intentional governmental policy.

I love that delicate construction: “may not have been fully briefed.” I wonder how many other things Biden “may not” be “fully briefed” about.

On the Rittenhouse trial opening statements – plus new video footage

The New Neo Posted on by

The Rittenhouse prosecution has a tough fact situation to deal with, but it really all depends on how the jury ultimately sees it:

And a new video of Rittenhouse and others on that night in Kenosha, August 2020, has surfaced (hat tip: commenter Barry Meislin):

About the video:

During pretrial motions, defense attorneys complained that they’d just been notified of the existence of the FBI thermal imaging videos. Prosecutors said they’d given defense attorneys a head’s up in September, about a month before the trial started on November 1.

The video looks like many you may have seen from war zones, as pilots with laser-guided munitions attempt to find terrorists, or the way the Border Patrol looks for those white-on-black images of illegal drug mules making their way over the southern border.

The video demonstrates fairly clearly that the first person shot that night, Joseph Rosenbaum, appeared to lie in wait for Rittenhouse – hiding behind a car – and that when the teen jogged past the car looking for the burning cars he’d come to put out, the 36-year-old man came up from behind, chased, and lunged at Rittenhouse.

It then shows Rittenhouse apparently trapped as Rosenbaum lunges–and that’s when the 17-year-old fired four shots in a span of .76 seconds, killing Rosenbaum. The prosecution claimed in court that the kill shot was fired into Rosenbaum’s back and plans to make this a big point in the state’s case…

Ziminski was positioned and fired the gun into the air behind Rittenhouse as the 17-year-old ran away from Rosenbaum. Just a thought, but if some crazy guy’s chasing you and you hear a gun shot, during a riot you just might be in harm’s way.

More at the link.

So, what about the whole election cheating thing?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “MBunge” writes:

The all-around execrable Erick Erickson has a tweet out saying “See, all you stupid Trumpers! Elections aren’t rigged so shut up about 2020!”

Youngkin won while all the questioning of 2020 is going on. It didn’t hurt him. It didn’t cost him the election. Who knows? Trump continuing to make a stink about 2020 may have scared the Democrats off trying to steal Virginia.

My take on it is – as I’ve said many many times – that the basic issue is the changing of the election rules that had several effects. The first was the pre-election undermining of trust in the integrity of elections, and the second was the strong possibility of resultant cheating that by its very nature almost certainly could never be proven even if true. That’s a recipe for disaster.

The Virginia election can tell us nothing about what happened regarding cheating in the 2020 election. Heck, it can’t even tell us all that much about cheating in yesterday’s election, except that if cheating did occur on the part of Democrats it wasn’t enough to change the winner.

Election rules and their enforcement are the keys, and each state is different in that regard (HR1, if passed, would have changed that, but thankfully we’ve dodged that bullet for now). Some states are very lax and some are still pretty strict. In order for cheating to be effective in a statewide or national election (except in the closest of races), a couple of things would ordinarily have to be present: somewhat of a swing state with lax voting rules and rural red areas but deep blue cities in which the voting apparatus can be rather easily controlled by the Democrat machine.

I’m not at all sure that Virginia ever met those characteristics – at least, during the 2020 election I don’t recall the state being on the list of those with alleged cheating by Democrats. I’d have to do an in-depth study of Virginia’s voting laws and how they are administered to know whether there was much of a possibility of cheating there, and I certainly haven’t researched that. If anyone has any light to shed, feel free. But again, what happened in one state tells us little about what happened in another state at another time.

I’ve also said (but it bears repeating) that I don’t think we’ll ever know whether cheating made a difference in 2020. I don’t think it’s possible to know, and that’s part of the problem because it’s certainly plausible. We do know, however, about many of the influential and far-reaching lies that were told by the left about the right, with the aid of the MSM, and how social media cooperated in the blocking of the voices of the right. That undoubtedly had a huge influence, and it is almost certain it will continue.

Reflections on yesterday’s elections

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, well, well.

Can we relax now? Certainly not.

But we can breathe a sigh of relief. Virginia has decided that what the left was dishing out was just too poisonous a meal to digest, New Jersey is thinking about it, and Minneapolis doesn’t really want to descend into a state of anarchy just yet.

I hadn’t followed the candidates for Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor, but here’s the winner and the Democrats might consider her a dangerous harbinger of demographic changes in the Republican Party:

Instead, though, they seem to be arguing from the old “Republicans are irredeemably racist” playbook. Perhaps it’s habit. Perhaps they correctly figure they have no other arguments left. Perhaps some of them even believe what they say; I certainly know plenty of their viewers who believe it.

Here’s a good rejoinder:

So, why have the Democrats gone so far to the left the last couple of years? Didn’t they think there would be a backlash? Or did they think the public really would come right along with them? Or did they think they could always cheat their way to power despite offending and alarming and insulting such a large swatch of people? Or did they think the MSM pulling for them and lying for them would be enough to ensure victory?

And going forward, will they pretend to be more moderate in hopes of winning in 2022, and then plan to pull a hard left switcheroo after the win? Is the public finally onto their game and cannot be fooled, or will they fall for it again?

Open thread 11/3/21

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t like this sort of music at all, although I’m aware it takes enormous skill. But this is an absolutely astounding human story, and I hope to watch the documentary Beato talks about here:

RIP.

It’s Election Day [BUMPED UP]

The New Neo Posted on by

Especially in Virginia. But also elsewhere.

Here’s a thread to discuss it.

UPDATE 10:30 PM:

I realized something today that I hadn’t fully appreciated till now, which is that I have some sort of PTSD about elections in general as a result of 2020. It wasn’t just the November count and the roller coaster experience as state after state faded away in the wee hours of the morning and for the next couple of days. It also included what happened in the Georgia runoffs later on. The entire thing felt like some sort of Greek tragedy in which you know the ending but have to watch the whole awful thing unfold – only this time, minus the poetry.

Somewhere along the line – even before that election – I had lost trust in election integrity as the rules kept changing and the opportunities for cheating multiplied. After that election, no lead seemed safe. I hate to be this way, but that’s where I’m at, and that’s what I bring to the Virginia election.

However, with all those caveats, the news so far is encouraging, and that is good. But I’ll only believe it if it holds to the end.