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Nov. 15, 2021 - Sean Hannity Show
32:53
Guilty Until Proven Innocent - November 15th, Hour 1

Sean shares time after time when the liberal media has convicted someone before the justice system can weigh in... Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Day number 93.
Day 93, 106 days since Joe Biden promised he would not abandon our fellow Americans.
Now we know he's left hundreds of them there, thousands of people with green cards, and even the children and family of soldiers abandoned behind enemy lines.
Then Joe's turned the page and not lifting a finger to do anything.
And the media mob, total, complete blackout on any news out of the Islamic, the new Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan.
Not a word.
There's a few people now beginning to realize, uh-oh, yeah, the old Taliban is back and women and girls, you know, they can't go to school.
They can't go to work.
They're being treated horribly.
There are beatings in the streets.
And on a regular basis, people are being identified as having helped the Americans in the last 20 years.
They're just being routinely assassinated, even in broad daylight.
Sad.
Another sad news, we have closing arguments have begun in the case of Kyle Rittenhouse.
The governor of the great state of Wisconsin has now put 500 National Guard members on standby.
By the way, the right thing to do, and I'm going to explain why in a little bit, as this high-profile trial of Rittenhouse nears its end.
So anyway, the National Guard will stage outside of Kenosha, available if requested by law enforcement.
Governor Tony Evers said, I urge folks who are otherwise not from the area to please respect the community by reconsidering any plans to travel there and encourage those who might choose to assemble and exercise their First Amendment rights to do so safely and peacefully.
Because there's a reason that a lot of times there is a rush to judgment.
And this is the media mob.
This is the Democratic Party.
In this case, Joe Biden, white supremacist, he was saying.
No evidence to ever back up the claim, but it's not any different than Barack Obama inserting himself.
Cambridge police acted stupidly.
Trayvon could be my son, etc.
High-profile cases.
Hands up, don't shoot.
That never happened in Ferguson, Missouri.
You have all of these cases, and time after time after time, people get it wrong and they're never held accountable.
It was pretty remarkable last week that the Washington Post retracted all of their reporting on the steel dossier, the Hillary Clinton bought and paid for, now debunked steel dossier.
Where's the rest of the media?
Where's MSDNC?
Where's Rachel Maddow?
You know, conspiracy theories spread day after day, night after night, hour after hour after hour for years.
Where's the rest of the media?
What does that mean about the Pulitzer Prizes that the New York Times got?
Are they going to give them back for their fake news reporting?
Because they should.
But back to the issue, you know, I've been spending a lot of time pointing out in these high-profile cases, how is it we usually end up getting it right?
Matter of fact, we almost always get it right.
And the media mob and the Democrats almost always get it wrong and how dangerous it is because they're creating a false expectation in a city, a state, a community that a verdict is likely.
And then when people, the verdict that they rush to judgment on without any evidence, any due process, any presumption of innocence, if it doesn't come down the way that they rushed to judgment and said it would come down, then people believe that a great injustice occurred.
And that can happen in this case.
We've seen it happen too many other times before.
We didn't rush to judgment.
We were right in our coverage.
We had a lot of sources.
We knew that there would be an eyewitness that came forward that would identify George Zimmerman on the ground with his head and the ground and pound incident.
We knew in Ferguson, for example, that there were numerous eyewitnesses, African-American eyewitnesses, that I knew from my sources telling me one after another that numerous people would come and corroborate and have corroborated the story of Darren Wilson.
And that being that Michael Brown first reached into the police patrol car of Darren Wilson and attempted to strip him of his firearm.
That's when the first shot went off.
Nobody got hit then.
And then Michael Brown ran away and then turned around and ran back right at Officer Darren Wilson.
And that's when the shooting took place.
It was never hands up, don't shoot.
They got repeated by almost everybody on the left and everybody in the media mob.
We were right.
They were wrong.
Early on, I had sources telling me what really happened in the Freddie Gray case in Baltimore.
We were right.
The mob and the media rushed to judgment, and not one of the six cops in that case, as I said, were going to ever be convicted, but there was an expectation they would be convicted.
You know, look at the Duke La Crosse case.
How did I find out that it wasn't going to go the way that almost 100 professors at Duke University were saying publicly that it would go and the media said that it would go?
It's because I went and I spent time.
I met the family and some of the families and some of the kids.
And I knew that the defense was building where they were proving, they brought up their own exculpatory evidence that showed they weren't there at the time the alleged incident had occurred.
Nobody took the time to talk to the families, talk to the kids.
They rushed to judgment.
And all of a sudden, a verdict comes back that's different than what everybody anticipated.
It happens all the time.
You know, look at when is the main, they were wrong on UVA.
They were wrong on Duke LaCrosse.
They were wrong on Ferguson.
They were wrong on Cambridge.
They were wrong on Baltimore.
They were wrong down in Florida.
They were wrong with the Russia collusion lie that they spread for three years.
You know, look how they rushed to judgment and referred to this Nicholas Sandman and these other Covington high school kids as being racist and that they initiated this contact with this Native American.
That never happened.
And even when we knew the truth, they just kept going after this kid.
He's not a public figure.
And by the way, he's already settled with, I think, two media organizations, one being fake news, CNN.
This kid's probably going to be a billionaire, rightly so.
You know, all the other times that they've been wrong.
Oh, the lab leak theory of COVID is a conspiracy theory.
No evidence at all behind it.
I beg to differ.
Now we have a ton of evidence, and Dr. Fauci knew about it, knew that coronavirus gain of function research was being done, and his own NIH helped fund it through this Eco Alliance group.
Oh, I guess we weren't so wrong there.
How about the media being wrong in the case of Justice Smollett?
Remember that case?
Because, you know, oh, it's this white supremacy narrative.
They rush to judgment.
They don't give due process the benefit of the doubt ever.
You know, look at what they did to Justice Kavanaugh.
Look at what they've done to Clarence Thomas.
You know, they told us that this woman was brutally gang raped at UVA.
Turned out not to be true.
They rushed to judgment again.
You know, if you look at, you know, I think it was Glenn Greenwald that put out the New York Times publishing an emotional, gut-wrenching, but complete science fiction fiction rather that never happened with the case of Officer Sicknick Skull being beaten with a fire extinguisher by a Trump mob.
You know, the narrative that Donald Trump, he was the one that led the insurrection.
The words he said are clear.
Many of you will peacefully, patriotically now march over to the Capitol so your voices can be heard.
We'll forget that part.
Didn't the same media mob and the Democrats, they all dismiss this idea that the emails and other things found on Hunter Biden's laptop were Russian disinformation?
You know, didn't they more recently, haven't they been telling us for months that inflation is transitory?
Didn't they say we don't need to test illegal immigrants for COVID because they're not going to be here very long?
Another lie that people being flown into obscure airports at 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. in the dead of night referred to, no, that would be a late night flight or an early morning flight, according to Gen Saki.
And that $3.5 trillion that they're going to spend that we can't afford, yeah, that would cost you zero.
It's going to cost you zero.
Not going to cost you anything.
Unbelievable.
Were we told about the vaccine that that would end the COVID pandemic and we'd be protected?
You can vax or mask.
Now it's vax and mask.
Now it's vax, mask, and booster, booster, booster.
You know, we lost 162 kids to COVID, but between the ages of 5 and 11, according to the CDC.
And they're still going to, what?
Are they going to do the same thing?
They promised, Joe Biden promised, Jen Saki promised.
Nancy Pelosi promised.
Flip-flop Fauci promised.
Walensky promised that we'd never have a vaccine mandate.
These people lie all the time.
Oh, the migrant surge at the border is only seasonal, nothing out of the ordinary.
We're about to hit a 30-year record of illegal immigrants that are being dispersed in these late-night flights, not early morning flights.
You know, we were told that Jacob Blake was unarmed.
We were told that sending illegal immigrants back to their home country is an unconscionable Trump tactic.
And now Joe Biden is, what, looking to pay families that were separated $450,000 when he said it was garbage and it's never going to happen.
He didn't even know what was happening.
Anyway, we've been following the closing arguments today.
The jury instructions extremely confusing, in my humble opinion.
You have the prosecutor begins questioning Rittenhouse's true reason for being in Kenosha.
That's not the issue here.
Was this a situation where he sincerely cared about CarSource, even though he had never heard of it, never bought anything there?
Not even its owners were out there that night protecting it.
That's not the issue here.
Wisconsin law is clear.
If you feel your life is in imminent danger, if you feel you are at risk of great bodily harm, by law, you have the right to defend yourself according to Wisconsin law.
And, you know, in the case of this guy Rosenbaum, you know, the problem that they have in this case, and that's one of the reasons that they're trying to get the bar lowered because they had, what, charged this kid in like 48 hours.
They overcharge him like many aggressive prosecutors do.
And now they're trying to lessen the charges or give the option of lessening the charges to the jury because they know deep down they haven't made their case.
And that's just a fact.
I'm not in the business of predicting jury outcomes.
It's too difficult to do.
You don't know.
You're not in the room.
Hey there.
I'm Mary Catherine Hammond.
And I'm Carol Markowitz.
We've been in political media for a long time.
Long enough to know that it's gotten, well, a little insane.
That's why we started Normally, a podcast for people who are over the hysteria and just want clarity.
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We don't take ourselves too seriously, but we do take the truth seriously.
So if you're into common sense, sanity, and some occasional sass, you're our kind of people.
Catch new episodes of Normally every Tuesday and Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen.
I'm Ben Ferguson, and I'm Ted Cruz.
Three times a week, we do our podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz.
Nationwide, we have millions of listeners.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we break down the news and bring you behind the scenes inside the White House, inside the Senate, inside the United States Supreme Court.
And we cover the stories that you're not getting anywhere else.
We arm you with the facts to be able to know and advocate for the truth with your friends and family.
So down with Verdict with Ted Cruz now, wherever you get your podcasts.
And as we roll along, Sean Hannity Show 800-941, Sean, you want to be a part of the program.
One of the things that was interesting that I saw now, remember, you now have a prosecution that's desperate.
Prosecution now wanting to give the option, other options to the jury, last-minute options, because they know they didn't meet the high standard because they overcharged this young man.
I don't even, I think the case for self-defense is a slam-dunk case.
Juries could see it differently.
I'm not in the business of predicting jury outcomes, but I think I would not be surprised if you have complete acquittal on every count.
And I watched that they also are trying to throw in here: well, if he provoked it, he loses his right legally to self-defense.
Well, okay, but as soon as somebody points a loaded weapon at you, you gain it back.
If you're running away from a situation, even if you buy into the premise of the prosecution that is desperate, so desperate at this point, they're throwing everything and anything up against the wall that would that might stink stick.
Well, you've got Binger defending Rosenbaum.
He was one of the guys shot.
And, you know, but based on video evidence, eyewitness accounts, it's apparent in every case he was defending himself.
Now, the guy that, you know, the prosecutor is defending Rosenbaum.
Well, who's this guy, Rosenbaum?
Well, he's the pedophile convicted of sexually abusing five little boys ages 9 to 11.
Prior to the riot in Kenosha, Rosenbaum was in a psychiatric hospital for attempting suicide.
According to Rittenhouse and other eyewitness accounts, Rosenbaum was the one that charged the Rittenhouse, assaulted him, and then attempted to grab his gun before Rittenhouse ultimately discharged the firearm.
Then we have the case of this other individual, Huber.
And again, you've got videotape evidence.
You've got a guy about to pound his foot into Kyle Rittenhouse's face into the pavement.
That would be a risk to serious bodily harm, if not death.
That meets the definition.
You know, but the prosecutor is saying, I will debunk this idea that Mr. Rosenbaum had made a threat earlier.
That didn't happen.
He has no idea whether that happened or not.
There's no evidence that he's showing that proves that that's true.
He's just making it up.
The Wisconsin governor, as I said, ordered 500 National Guardsmen to be on standby.
The judge dropped the count regarding possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18.
They waived the statue for the right reasons, and I'll tell you about that in a minute.
All right, 25 to the top of the hour.
The defense now is making their closing arguments.
This could go to the jury as early as today.
Whether or not they will begin deliberations is a different issue.
And the defense literally just did a beatdown of the prosecution and what they were characterizing as manipulation and outright lying to the jury on specific instances and making a pretty powerful case just out of the box.
The judge earlier did drop the count facing Rittenhouse.
And this is the one where I thought there was more vulnerability than any other of possession of a dangerous weapon by a person under 18, which is a misdemeanor anyway.
The defense argued Wisconsin statute had an exception that could be read to clear Rittenhouse.
That exception involves whether or not a rifle or shotgun is short-barreled.
And after prosecutors acknowledged in court that Rittenhouse's rifle was not short-barreled, the charge was dismissed.
Another mistake by the prosecution here.
Again, the governor ordered 500 National Guardsmen on standby.
You know, one of the reasons we find ourselves in these situations is the president of the United States of America has already weighed in and declared without any evidence whatsoever that Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist with no evidence that was presented that supports that claim.
And this happens, then you've got, you know, all of these commentators that early on before the trial, as soon as the incident happened, making the same allegations, the same false claims, the same rush to judgment, the same lack of due process, which is predictable, the same, you know, they don't apparently agree with the presumption of innocence before being proven guilty, and they do it every single solitary time.
And then they create an expectation of people, in this case, Kenosha, Wisconsin, that a certain verdict will be forthcoming.
That's why we allow the presumption of innocence.
That's why we believe in the Constitution.
That's why we believe in due process.
That's why we believe trial by jury.
You know, the Wisconsin statute, the defense arguing, had an exception that was read on, for example, the shotgun being short-barreled.
Now, that one charge is out.
It's interesting.
Jonathan Turley, I was watching his remarks earlier, and he was also interviewed by The Hill and the New York Post, And literally, he said how the decision by prosecutors to file these over-the-top homicide charges, meaning they overcharge, as often as the case, many have undermined any chance that they had to get a conviction on lesser charges.
What is most striking about the Rittenhouse trial is that even more than a year later, prosecutors seem to be learning critical details at the same time as the jury is learning them.
Testimony described one of those he killed as threatening Rittenhouse and others and engaging in random violence.
And then prosecutors opened the door to the revelation that he suffered from bipolar disorder.
Their star witness admitted that he was shot only after he pointed his own loaded gun at Rittenhouse's head.
How do you get a guilty verdict when that admission from the star witness in the case for the prosecution?
You know, again, it's hard to read jurors.
I don't know how this is going to come out.
To me, it is the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse, whether you think he should have been there or not been there, it doesn't matter.
He was there, as were other people.
Many of the people there were armed.
We saw what happened in Kenosha.
But the jurors now, if they follow the law that is written, that if you believe you are in serious, your life is in jeopardy, and that you, or you believe you can suffer great bodily harm, then that self-defense law is applicable.
So now they can acquit because the credibility of the prosecution is established by the lead charge.
You know, if the first-degree charge is wildly out of reach, they're more than likely to, they're more than likely they're going to doubt the lesser charges in this case.
And now we have to brace for, once again, you know, potential unrest as recognized by the governor calling up the National Guard.
And by the way, this sometimes often spills over into other cities.
You know, the lesser charges are a sign of desperation.
This final 11th hour, oh, can we make the jury consider these charges?
How about these charges?
We don't think they know they didn't make their case or, you know, how they didn't know early on they weren't going to be able to prove their case is just prosecutorial overcharging and abuse.
Now, the judge may be waiting to see what the jury does, but if the defendant, and Greg Jarrett has been making this point, and he'll join us coming up later in the program, if the defendant is acquitted, there's no need for judicial intervention.
But there is this possibility that he's rightly been pointing out here.
If the jury convicts, the judge could set aside the entire verdict.
And that's what's happened in the famous nanny murder trial of Louise Woodward.
You might remember, convicted of murder.
The judge tossed out the conviction as a miscarriage of justice.
Attacks on the integrity of the judge by people in the media.
Those are the people that rushed to judgment in the first place.
Now they're just mad at the judge and lashing out at the judge.
You know, it's an ignorant statement on their part.
The judge in this case was appointed to the bench by a Democrat.
He's the longest serving judge in the state of Wisconsin.
The liberal, but the problem is we got to the same point where we often go.
The same predictable cast of characters, the same predictable activist politicians, the same predictable media mob.
They rush to judgment.
They do it all the time.
And sadly, there are often consequences to their actions Because they create a perception that an outcome is all but certain when it's anything but certain.
By doing what we do and not rushing to judgment, by allowing due process, by allowing the presumption of innocence, by following the belief that you're innocent until proven guilty, we end up being right and they end up being wrong.
That happened in Ferguson.
That happened in Florida.
That happened with the Cambridge police.
That happened in Baltimore.
That happened with UVA.
That happened with Duke La Crosse.
It started in my life, my career, with Richard Jewell, just like we were right on the Trump-Russia collusion lie.
You know, and watching the defense go all in to defend this 36-year-old Joseph Rosenbaum, pedophile, convicted of sexually abusing five kids aged 9 to 11, a guy in a psychiatric hospital just prior to the riot in Kenosha.
According to Rittenhouse and other eyewitnesses, Rosenbaum charged Rittenhouse, assaulted him, and attempted to grab his gun before Rittenhouse ultimately discharged his firearm.
You can see the video of Rittenhouse racing to get away from the crowd that was chasing him.
It's all there on videotape.
You got eyewitness testimony.
You got video testimony.
You got it all.
Anyway, so we'll see what the judge does in this case.
It's going to be very interesting to see what happens because there's a lot of ways the judge can go, starting with dropping the count of possession of a dangerous weapon.
There wasn't even any pushback from the prosecution.
A good part of the morning was spent on jury instructions, very complicated from my perspective, disagreements between the prosecution and defense.
The judge was reading the instructions when he excused the jury to discuss an issue with prosecutors and the defense whether or not jurors should be instructed to consider the lesser charge of first-degree reckless homicide if they find that Rittenhouse is not guilty of first-degree intentional homicide.
The prosecution arguing that jurors should be instructed to consider the lesser charge, even if they find Rittenhouse not guilty of the greater charge because of self-defense.
He said that was language both parties and, in fact, the judge had agreed with.
Then the prosecutor said he was leery of the instructions, deviating from what was agreed upon, but the judge argued the instructions were already too complicated.
Then he ruled that the jurors should not consider the lesser charge if they find Rittenhouse acted in self-defense.
That was the right call by the judge.
The judge announced that Rittenhouse's team had officially filed for a mistrial with prejudice.
Quote, the state has reportedly repeatedly violated it.
That's what he said.
The state, meaning the prosecution, has repeatedly violated instructions from the court.
They acted in bad faith.
They intentionally provided technological evidence which was different from theirs.
The motion reads, for those reasons, the defendant respectfully requests that the court find prosecutorial overreaching existed.
That overreaching was intentional.
It was in bad faith and thereby grant the defendant's motion for a mistrial with prejudice.
Still open.
That could very well happen.
So we're going to see what happens.
I hope, you know, it's just, you look at all of the cases.
The media does this all the time.
And they never get held accountable.
It was remarkable last week that the Washington Post admitted, yeah, our reporting was wrong on the Steele dossier.
Where's the rest of the media?
By the way, Miranda Devine took on Joy Reed over at MSDNC.
And, you know, apparently, they, you know, going after some of the comments, white crocodile tears.
Wow.
Unbelievable.
And other things that have been said both on MSDNC and, of course, fake news CNN.
Anyway, we're bracing for verdicts, actually for two high-profile cases.
I think Jonathan Turley is probably right in all of this.
But we'll see, you know, again, I don't like to make predictions with juries.
I believe that the defense efficiently made a great defense for their clients.
I really do.
I thought they did a great job.
And we'll see what happens.
On other issues, and there's a lot of issues in the news today.
Top Biden economic advisor applauds the news that 4 million Americans have quit their jobs.
Can you believe this?
Okay, we have a nationwide labor shortage, continues to cripple economic growth, and a Biden official, literally a guy by the name of the White House Council of Economic Advisors member Jared Bernstein, framed the labor crunch as, quote, a good sign, saying that employees now have more leverage to negotiate better paying roles.
We have more than 4.4 million employees that left their jobs last month alone, the highest in two decades.
There's nothing good about this.
Democrats laugh when Lawrence Summers predicted in February that Joe Biden's inflation is not transitory.
They're not laughing anymore.
Summers now says the country's too high inflation could lead to Donald Trump being reelected to the presidency.
This is what Lawrence Summers, he worked for Obama.
Excessive inflation, a sense that it is not being controlled, helped elect Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and risk bringing Donald Trump back to power.
He cautioned Democrats.
Well, maybe that'll get their attention.
You know, Joe Biden lecturing people that we need to get the prices of energy down.
His only answer is to keep begging OPEC and keep getting rejected because that's the only thing that he does.
Now even Joe Biden saying, in his own words, did you ever think you'd be paying this much for a gallon of gasoline?
It's your policies that caused it, Joe.
Tom Cotton on high gas prices, intended effect of Joe Biden's energy policy.
It is not some accident.
He's right in as much as Democrats, including Joe, have said, he even wants to put some of the CEOs of energy companies in jail.
They think higher gas prices is good for the planet.
That's their top priority.
They bow at the altar of all things, new Green Deal, socialists, climate change, anything.
One top Biden economic advisor is saying, if we spend $1.75 trillion, that will reduce inflation.
I have no idea.
There's nobody in this White House that seems to understand how the economy works.
It's unbelievable.
We now have the worst crisis in terms of supply chain than we've ever had.
You have people in the media mob shaming the trucking industry for employing, quote, too many aggressive Trump voters.
What the hell does that mean?
How about they're the people that put every single item in every single store that we purchase an item from?
Why are you going after truck drivers?
As if, you know, and then inflation has emerged as an economic challenge, and their answer is to reach out and blame we the people and lower our expectations.
Biden's top economic aide promising Biden will unveil a plan to tackle soaring prices in the medium term.
What about the short term?
What about for Christmas?
Consumer confidence now is plunged to a 10-year low, 31-year high inflation.
None of this is good news.
$150 more a gallon for gas, $1,000 more to heat your home.
And don't expect Christmas presents that your kids actually want because they're not going to be there because you didn't follow Pete Buddha judge's advice and buy them before Halloween.
Gee, that's great advice.
Anyway.
You want smart political talk without the meltdowns?
We got you.
I'm Carol Markowitz.
And I'm Mary Catherine Hamm.
We've been around the block in media and we're doing things differently.
Normally is about real conversations.
Thoughtful, try to be funny, grounded, and no panic.
We'll keep you informed and entertained without ruining your day.
Join us every Tuesday and Thursday, normally, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Ben Ferguson.
And I'm Ted Cruz.
Three times a week, we do our podcast, Verdict with Ted Cruz.
Nationwide, we have millions of listeners.
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, we break down the news and bring you behind the scenes inside the White House, inside the Senate, inside the United States Supreme Court.
And we cover the stories that you're not getting anywhere else.
We arm you with the facts to be able to know and advocate for the truth with your friends and family.
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