Thursday | November 18th, 2021

It’s Thursday, November 18th, and this is your Morning Wire. Listen to the full podcast:

1) Defense Files For Mistrial In Kyle Rittenhouse Case

The Topline: On Wednesday, Kyle Rittenhouse’s defense attorneys filed a motion for a mistrial, alleging prosecutorial misconduct.

Quote Of The Day: “We would have done this case in a different manner.”

– Defense Attorney Corey Chirafisi

Mark Hertzberg-Pool/Pool/Getty Images

Mistrial Request

The main issue revolved around key drone footage that captured the shooting of Joseph Rosenbaum — the first man shot by Rittenhouse — which the defense team says they were not given a full resolution copy of. Apparently the defense did not realize they had a reduced resolution copy of this footage until Friday, after all the arguments were given and the footage was played in front of the jury, at which point the observation was made that the prosecution’s version of the video appeared clearer than the defenses. 

What We Know

The footage was shot by a civilian and very early on was in the possession of Rittenhouse’s original legal team. It was somehow lost when Rittenhouse changed counsel. 

The same footage was also purchased and aired by Tucker Carlson. On November 5th of 2021, the civilian turned over the footage to the state, and the state claims they promptly shared it with the defense. 

Defense attorney Natalie Wisco claims her copy, which was shared with her via email from the same detective who shared it with the state, was about 4MB, whereas it was discovered the state’s version was around 11MB, with significantly sharper image quality. 

She noticed her team’s version of the footage was saved under a different file name than the sharper quality version in possession of the state at the state crime lab. 

She also noticed the metadata of the file showed a different creation time — 21 minutes later — than the file at the state crime lab. 

Possible Explanation

The prosecution says they believe the file could have been compressed during the emailing process, and Morning Wire spoke to experts who have confirmed that process could have changed the file name as well. 

At the moment, it’s unclear whether the email server that either the detective or Wisco used compressed the file, but Judge Schroeder said they would need an expert witness to testify about the technological aspect of things.

The state pointed out it was the defense

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