Newly released bodycam footage of police officers reveals that the NBC producer seen following Rittenhouse’s jury bus shows that he was obeying orders from New York. In the video, another producer acknowledges that multiple employees of the network were stationed around Kenosha to track the direction the juries went.
As NewsBustersPrevious reportsKenosha police pulled James G. Morrison over for running a stop sign while he was following the Rittenhouse jury bus. Bruce Schroeder was the one who banned MSNBC’s presence in courtroom.
In response to the incident, NBC issued the following statement, which as RedState Media’s Nick Arama These are the points, appears to have been “very carefully-worded:”
Yesterday night, a freelancer was given a traffic ticket. Although the violation occurred near the jury van’s vehicle, the freelancer did not contact or intend to contact jurors. He also never took photographs of them. We are sorry for the accident and will be fully cooperating with any authorities investigating it.
The Kenosha County Eye received the bodycam footage via FOIA requests and this lame, non-apologetic explanation ended up looking terrible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2-eoaAEnfw
Morrison admitted in video that he had been instructed by New York network executives to follow the bus. He then puts the officers in touch with NBC producer Irene Byon, who admits without being prompted that she is aware there are jurors aboard the bus: “By no means were they trying to get in contact with any of the jury members – or whoever was in the car.”
The oversharing continues: “We just had our people positioned in different areas of the courthouse to see if anyone would be able to, um…” Byon trails off there, perhaps realizing she’s just volunteered some very incriminating information.
Thanks to the video, it was revealed that NBC had many reporters stationed in the courthouse solely for the purpose of following the bus leaving the premises. Without accusing anyone of anything, let’s ask the obvious question here: what possible reason could a journalist have for chasing after the jury bus, unless they were hoping to learn the jurors’ identities?
Before the video ends, the officer asks that Morrison kindly stop endangering the jury of a nationally-publicized court case: “We’re going to ask you guys to not do that. That’s a concern here. This is huge. We can’t afford anything crazy happening. [You’re] putting people in dangerous positions. This individual violated some traffic laws here doing this, so we’re going to ask you guys to refrain from doing that.”
It’s no wonder MSNBC got banned from the trial. If NBC had actually managed to expose the identity of one of these jurors then those people would have been in serious danger.
About Post Author
