Sean Hannity’s lawyer, Lin Wood, is not only representing Kenosha gunman Kyle Rittenhouse but helping to raise money for him as “a mission to protect and defend our Constitution.” That’s right, Hannity’s lawyer thinks a guy charged with murdering Black Lives Matter protesters was defending the Constitution.
As Media Matters noted, Sean Hannity announced on July 28 that he had recently hired Wood and was “honored” to be represented by him.
Presumably, Wood is representing Hannity in the sexual harassment lawsuit against him filed by Cathy Areu on July 20.
To be clear, everybody deserves legal representation, including Hannity and Rittenhouse. But raising funds for a guy charged with vigilante murder and championing him as a defender of the Constitution is a whole ‘nother story.
From The Kansas City Star (with my emphases added):
An attorney for Kyle Rittenhouse, who has been charged in the Kenosha, Wisconsin, shootings, has helped to set up a foundation to accept donations for the teen.
Lawyer L. Lin Wood told the newspaper that he helped start the foundation with “a mission to protect and defend our Constitution on many fronts.”
“Kyle’s defense is one of those fronts,” Wood continued.
Rittenhouse, 17, is accused of shooting three people, two who died, during protests in Kenosha earlier this week, the Journal Sentinel reported. Video of the shooting incident shows a white male believed to be Rittenhouse, media outlets reported. The person was seen carrying an assault rifle and opening fire on protesters.
Oh, and Wood gives a shoutout to QAnon in his Twitter bio. More from Media Matters:
Wood features the QAnon slogan “where we go one, we go all” abbreviated as “#WWG1WGA” in his Twitter biography. He has denied being a supporter of the violent conspiracy cult.
Media Matters also reminds that Hannity has a history of defending vigilantes. He went to bat for Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman in a big way, including plugging his defense fund. Hannity also championed Cliven Bundy’s armed insurrection against the federal government, right up until – shocker! – Bundy was outed as quite the racist.
By the way, Wood is also representing the McCloskys, the white couple charged with waving guns at Black Lives Matter protesters, as was revealed when Hannity had a chummy chat with Mark McClosky on the July 30, 2020 Hannity show.
In 2014, Stephen Colbert said Hannity and Bundy went together like “Ku” and “Klux.” I'll bet he'd say the same about Hannity and Wood.
(Hannity image via screen grab)
They should throw the book at her.
Unfortunately (to me), the shyster will probably (finally) get his hands on some serious money. Many RW groups are reportedly fundraising for the kid.
Regarding Wood’s supposedly “incredible” track record, that actually doesn’t hold up if you look more closely. Wood says he did great for Richard Jewell back in the 90s/2000s over the coverage of that situation. And he did get a couple of settlements – including a larger one from NBC due to Tom Brokaw being stupid enough to say something totally unsupported on a network newscast. But most of the settlements were for peanuts, to make him and Jewell go away. And the key lawsuit was against the Atlanta Journal Consititution, which refused to settle and went to court to defend their principles. And the AJC WON THE CASE, humiliating Wood. The court’s verdict clearly stated that the AJC was not attacking Jewell or stating falsehoods but instead doing their job of reporting the news. Wood slunk out of that courtroom and hoped everyone would forget that moment.
More recently, Wood has gotten publicity for inflicting several nuisance suits on behalf of Nicholas Sandmann against various media companies. Wood has received very small pittance settlements from two organizations at this point, and the others look like they’ll take Wood to court if he doesn’t drop the nonsense. (The fact that the pittances were quite small became a major story about a month ago, when Wood threw a tantrum about being called out for it.)
As for Kyle Rittenhouse, he’s in extremely serious trouble, as is his mother. Rittenhouse was caught in the act of committing a serious felony just for carrying an AR-15 and for crossing state lines to bring it to Kenosha to kill the people he hates. But it gets worse – he’s a minor, and his mother drove him there. So they’re both looking at extremely serious criminal consequences. Wood can try to argue his way out of that, but the reality is that he will likely be filing nuisance suits for clients sitting behind bars for years.
