Chelsea Handler, star of the Uganda Be Kidding Me comedy special in 2014, referred to 18-year-old defendant Kyle Rittenhouse as a “white supremacist” as she criticized the judge in his murder trial over jury selection procedures.
There is no evidence whatsoever that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist, though then-candidate Joe Biden made that claim, without evidence, last September. The false accusation was then repeated by media outlets. Rittenhouse’s mother has since said the claim was defamatory, and the prosecution did not produce any evidence at trial that Rittenhouse had any “white supremacist” associations or motives. The White House referred to him this week as a “vigilante” but would not defend Biden’s “white supremacist” claim when asked about it by Fox News, presumably for lack of any evidentiary basis.
Handler also mischaracterized the process of jury selection in the trial. On Wednesday, Judge Bruce Schroeder explained that he had allowed Rittenhouse to draw the numbers of six alternate jurors at random from a tumbler because of the desire to avoid the appearance of racial prejudice in a trial several years before, when a clerk had weeded out the only black juror in a trial of a black defendant. Since then, he said, he had always had defendants in his courtroom select the numbers of the alternate jurors, who were to be separated from the twelve members of the jury immediately prior to jury deliberations.
Judge Schroeder blasted the media for “misinformation” about his jury selection process, among other events during the trial, and said the experience had led him to reconsider allowing television cameras inside his courtroom in the future.
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). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. 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.