Body Cam Is out on Rittenhouse Jury Stalking and It Just Nails NBC to the Wall – Opinion

A bodycam video of James Morrison (NBC producer) has been released. This occurred following Rittenhouse’s jury bus incident during jury deliberations.

The judge spoke about the jury stalking incident calling it an “extremely serious matter” and banned anyone from MSNBC from the courthouse.

Judge Rittenhouse bans MSNBC in courthouse while the jury continues its deliberations pic.twitter.com/r4NTRKEqjZ

— Fox News (@FoxNews) November 18, 2021

NBC had released a very carefully-worded statement trying to suggest that the producer had just committed a traffic violation near the van, that they weren’t trying to contact the jurors “during deliberations.”

“Last night, a freelancer received a traffic citation. Although the incident occurred close to the jury van, the freelancer didn’t contact, or even intend to, jurors. He also never took photographs of them. We regret the incident and will fully cooperate with the authorities on any investigation.”

But the bodycam footage makes it very clear that they were staking out the jury and that it wasn’t just Morrison involved. Through a FOIA request by the Kenosha County Eye, the Kenosha Police Department obtained the bodycam footage.

Morrison, in the video tells police that he was ordered to take the New York bus by his New York bosses. When the police want to reach Morrison’s boss, he refers them to Irene Byon who is the NBC booking agent. Byon tries to choose her words carefully, but she says they were “respectfully” trying to find out where the players in the trial were positioned. Byon claims that “by no means were they trying to get in contact with any of the jury members or whoever was in the car.” The police hadn’t mentioned the jury — that was information that she volunteered — which made it clear that they were trying to follow the jury bus.

That wasn’t all. As the conversation with the police continued, Byon says that they had “people positioned in different areas of the courthouse” to “see if anyone would be able to…” and then she stops because she doesn’t want to say they were trying to ID the jury to get them to talk to NBC. This means they were trying to get Morrison and other people involved in this. This explains why Judge Schroeder expelled them from the courthouse. It was not one man’s effort, but a networked effort.

Bodycam footage shows just how misleading NBC’s cockamamie claim is. To be honest, no one believed them. However, the footage from their bodycams shows just how stupid they really are. As we postulated at the time, it hinged on “during deliberations,” they were likely trying to ID the jurors by following the bus so that once the verdict was in they could harass them to get them on NBC. That’s just vile behavior that a jury should never be subjected to and, in particular, a jury like this that could be exposed to danger.

The case is currently being investigated. Hopefully, they will face some consequence. However, this industry must condemn and stop this from happening in future cases.