Todd McMurtry, a lawyer who represented former Covington Catholic High School student Nicholas Sandmann said that Kyle Rittenhouse could potentially have a defamation case against President Biden over a tweet suggesting Rittenhouse was a White supremacist.
McMurtry said Biden could be held accountable for the September 30, 2020 social media post weeks before he was elected.
“There’s no other way to put it: the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night,” was the tweet Biden posted back then.
Biden was not president at the time of the tweet, meaning he would not have any presidential or congressional immunity.
A voice-over of Fox News’ Chris Wallace is heard during a video showing White nationalists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, asking then-President Trump during a presidential debate if he was willing to condemn White supremacists and militia groups.
At one point in the video, an image of Rittenhouse shows him holding an AR-style rifle on the night he killed two protesters and wounded a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
“What you take from that tweet is that Kyle Rittenhouse was using his rifle and engaging in White supremacist misconduct so it’s actionable. Not necessarily going to win, but it’s actionable.” McMurtry said.
Rittenhouse was acquitted by a Kenosha County jury on Friday of all the charges against him.
Wendy Rittenhouse, Kyle’s mother, said last week that Biden cast her son as a White supremacist for votes and she was very angry about it, adding: “When I saw that I was shocked, I was angry. President Biden don’t know my son whatsoever, and he’s not a White supremacist. He’s not a racist. And [Biden] did that for the votes. And I was so angry for a while at him and what he did to my son. He defamed him.”
After the verdict, Leo Terrell, a civil rights lawyer and Fox News contributor publically advised Biden to be careful of what he says: “Let me give Joe Biden advice: Be very careful what you say because you’re subject to a possible defamation lawsuit. This was a statement that Joe Biden is going to have to pay for and justify.”
“Lots of media people said he was a murderer, and I think that’s actionable because that suggests that he committed a crime, and we now know that he didn’t,” McMurtry said, adding: “When you just throw this stuff out there, you take risks.”