This footage was recently obtained through a FOIA request to the Kenosha Police Department and it proves that NBC Executive Producer Irene Byon ordered stringer James J Morrison to follow vehicles outside of the courthouse in an effort to “see where people involved in the trial were positioned.”
This was the original statement from NBC News:
“Last night, a freelancer received a traffic citation. While the traffic violation took place near the jury van, the freelancer never contacted or intended to contact the jurors during deliberations, and never photographed or intended to photograph them. We regret the incident and will fully cooperate with the authorities on any investigation.”
In the video, Morrison tells the police he was told to follow the bus by his bosses in New York. The police ask to speak to his boss and he puts them on with Irene Byon, the NBC booking producer. Byon tries to choose her words carefully, but she says they were “respectfully” trying to find out where the players in the trial were positioned. Byon claims that “by no means were they trying to get in contact with any of the jury members or whoever was in the car.” The police hadn’t mentioned the jury — that was information that she volunteered — which made it clear that they were trying to follow the jury bus.
That wasn’t all. As the conversation with the police continued, Byon says that they had “people positioned in different areas of the courthouse” to “see if anyone would be able to…” and then she stops because she doesn’t want to say they were trying to ID the jury to get them to talk to NBC. So that means that they had more people than just Morrison trying to do this. That explains why Judge Schroeder banned them all from the courthouse because it was a coordinated network effort and not just this one guy.
