Lin Wood, an attorney for 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, threatened to sue former Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday on behalf of his client for defamation after Biden tweeted a video that identified Rittenhouse as a white supremacist.
There is no evidence that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist. He currently faces murder charges in Kenosha, Wisconsin, for shooting three rioters last month, two of whom died. Rittenhouse has argued, citing video, that he acted in self-defense.
Biden’s video played audio from Tuesday night’s first presidential debate — in which, ironically, President Donald Trump said that he would denounce white supremacists — and claimed in the accompanying text that Trump had refused to do so.
At one point, the video showed a photo of Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin armed with an AR-15 during ongoing riots. Other images in the video included white supremacists marching in a torchlight procession in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Wood, who also represented teenager Nick Sandmann in lawsuits against CNN and the Washington Post for falsely portraying him as a white supremacist in a viral video in 2019, tweeted on Wednesday morning:
John Pierce, who is also representing Rittenhouse, told Breitbart News Sunday: “Kyle is not a racist or a white supremacist. He is a brave, patriotic, compassionate law-abiding American who loves his country and his community.”
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.