The bonkers Seth Rich conspiracy theory, explainedThe life of Seth Rich, a 27-year-old Democratic National Committee staffer, ended nearly a year ago when he was shot to death near his house in Washington, DC. Then came the tragic and bizarre afterlife: Since July, Rich has been the focus of intense right-wing conspiracy theories that have only escalated as the Trump administration’s scandals have deepened.
As the police have repeatedly stated, there is no evidence that Rich’s death was anything other than the consequence of a botched robbery. But some people, especially on the right, believe Rich was murdered by the Clintons for knowing too much about something. The most recent theories claim that Rich, not the Russians, was responsible for leaking the emails, published in WikiLeaks, that revealed Democratic party leaders had talked disparagingly about Bernie Sanders.
Thanks to an erroneous Fox News story last week, which was finally retracted on Tuesday, Rich recently became the focus of an intense media blitz from conservative outlets — many of which were eager for something to talk about besides the scandals swirling around Donald Trump.
Fox News’s Sean Hannity was one of the most enthusiastic rumormongers, devoting segments on three separate occasions last week to Rich. Even after Fox News retracted its story, Hannity promised he would continue to investigate. “I retracted nothing,” he said defiantly on his radio show Tuesday.
Rich’s family has been begging right-wing news outlets to stop spreading unfounded rumors about him, but by now the situation seems to have gotten out of control.
In death, Rich has become a martyr to the right, buoyed by a host of characters each with their own ulterior motives: There is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who wants to downplay the connections between WikiLeaks and the Russians; there are the Clinton haters, who want to spread the idea that the Clintons are murderers; there are the Trump supporters, who want to minimize the idea that Russian hackers helped deliver the election to their candidate; and there are the talking heads on Fox News, who last week needed something other than negative Trump stories to make conversation about.
We might not know who killed Seth Rich, but we do know who turned his legacy into a textbook study of where fake news comes from, how it spreads, and the victims it creates.
Seth Rich was murdered in a senseless act of violence
Seth Rich worked in Democratic politics for most of his career. He grew up and went to college in Omaha, Nebraska, whereas a student he volunteered on two Democratic Senate campaigns. After graduating, he moved to Washington, DC, for a job at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a progressive opinion research and consulting firm. He was later hired by the Democratic National Committee, where he worked on a project to help people find where to vote.
On Sunday, July 10, Rich was shot to death about a block from where he lived in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of DC. Gunshot detection microphones place the time of the shooting at around 4:20 am. Rich had last been seen at around 1:30 am leaving Lou’s City Bar in Columbia Heights, about a 40-minute walk from where he lived.
It is unclear exactly what happened during those three intervening hours. The Washington Post reported that, according to his parents, cellphone records show that Rich called his girlfriend at 2:05 am and talked to her for more than two hours. He hung up just minutes before he was shot.
The police found Rich on the sidewalk with multiple gunshot wounds, at least two in the back. He still had his watch, his cellphone, and his wallet. There were signs of a struggle: bruises on his hands, knees, and face, and a torn wristwatch strap. According to the police report, he was still “conscious and breathing.” Family members say they were told that Rich was “very talkative,” though it is not publicly known if he was able to describe his assailant or assailants. Rich died a few hours later in the hospital.
The police suspected Rich had been the victim of an attempted robbery. Bloomingdale is a gentrifying part of Washington that still suffers from violent crime. In 2016, there were 24 reported robberies with a gun that occurred within a quarter-mile of the street corner where Rich was shot.
The first conspiracy theories grew out of the “Clinton body count” rumor
Almost immediately after news of Rich’s death, conspiracy theories began circulating on social media. A few factors helped make Rich a target of speculation:
- The murderers left behind Rich’s valuables. (Though, by that same paranoid logic, wouldn’t a professional hitman have taken Rich’s wallet and phone in order to make it look like a regular mugging?)
- Rich worked at the DNC, where in December there had been a minor scandal involving a software glitch that allowed the Bernie Sanders campaign to access private voter data collected by the Clinton campaign.
- Hillary Clinton had just clinched the nomination after a surprisingly bruising primary, and there were still sore feelings in the air.
- There’s a long-running conspiracy theory that the Clintons have assassinated dozens of their political enemies.
If those facts don’t seem to add up to a coherent story, well, you’re thinking too hard. Conspiracy theories don’t operate logically. They start from an assumption — for instance, “the Clintons are shady” — and spiral outward in search of corroboration.
On Reddit, for instance, one user wrote a 1,400-word post listing things that he found “suspicious.” Here were some of the stray facts the redditor claimed were evidence of a hit job by the DNC or the Clintons:
- Rich’s former employer, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, once did some consulting work for British Petroleum. (“Is it possible that Mr. Rich was aware of the public's disdain for the oil industry/fracking?”)
- Rich once worked on Ben Nelson’s campaign for senator. (“[Nelson] contributed a crucial vote to help pass Obamacare back in 2009.”)
- The political conventions were coming up. (“The TIMING of this tragedy seems too 'coincidental’”)
It’s unclear what any of these facts have to do with the Clintons, but somehow the Reddit user concluded: “given his position & timing in politics, I believe Seth Rich was murdered by corrupt politicians for knowing too much information on election fraud.”
Others on Twitter and the trolling website 4chan also speculated that Rich might have crossed the Clintons in some way. Rich’s death seemed to fit in with the “Clinton body count” theory, which dates to the 1990s and claims that the Clintons are so vindictive that they hire hitmen to murder people they don’t like.
People who believe the Clintons are murderers often point to deputy White House counsel Vince Foster, who suffered from clinical depression and died of a gunshot wound to the mouth in 1993. Several investigations all ruled Foster’s death a suicide, but some conservatives insisted there must have been foul play. They claimed that Foster, who was looking into the Clintons’ taxes, may have uncovered evidence of corruption in connection to the Whitewater controversy, a guilt-by-association scandal involving friends of the Clintons’.
The “Clinton body count” theory has endured over the years simply because people don’t live forever. Any time someone dies who was connected to the Clintons — and since Bill Clinton was the president of the United States, literally thousands of people were in his orbit — this theory is dredged up again by the tinfoil hat crowd. And then it slowly fades.
At first, it seemed the speculation about Seth Rich would die down quickly as well. But then 12 days later, on July 22, WikiLeaks published thousands of private emails from the DNC, and Rich became a politically useful distraction.
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks supercharged the Seth Rich rumors
A month before Rich was murdered, the DNC admitted that Russian hackers had broken into its computer network, gaining access to all of the DNC’s emails. The thought of Russian interference in American politics was infuriating to Rich, according to one person “who was very close” to him, the Washington Post reported: “It was crazy. Especially for Seth. He said, ‘Oh, my God. We have a foreign entity trying to get involved in our elections?’ That made him so angry.”
When WikiLeaks released its dump of DNC emails on July 22, the obvious explanation was that it had obtained those emails from the Russian hackers. This connection was later confirmed by top US intelligence agencies, who concluded: “with high confidence” that DNC servers were hacked by top Russian government hackers, who had then given the emails to WikiLeaks. “Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity,” the US intelligence report explained, as well as for its connection to the Russian propaganda outlet Russia Today.
But WikiLeaks has repeatedly denied its ties to Russia, and ever since last summer it has used Seth Rich as a way to distract from claims that it abetted Russian interference in the US election. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had his own reasons to fear a Clinton presidency — as secretary of state, Clinton wanted to indict Assange for his involvement in releasing the millions of US diplomatic cables leaked by Chelsea Manning.
On Dutch television in August 2016, Assange hinted that Rich, not Russia, may have been the source for the WikiLeaks emails. "Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material, and often very significant risks,” he said. “As a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington."
“Was he one of your sources then?” the anchor asked.
“We don’t comment on who our sources are,” Assange replied.
“Then why make the suggestion about a young guy being shot in the streets of Washington?” the anchor replied.
Pressed repeatedly for clarification, Assange concluded that “others, others have suggested that. We’re investigating to understand what happened in that situation with Seth Rich. I think it’s a concerning situation; there’s not a conclusion yet.”
As part of its “investigation,” WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 prize in August for information about Rich’s murder.
This is the point where Seth Rich became a prop in a game of international espionage.
Trump supporters and the alt-right amplified the theory that Rich was some kind of Democratic whistleblower or leaker, even though the facts didn’t really fit this pattern. He didn’t have access to the DNC emails, and he had never shown any prowess at hacking — being a data analyst involves a very different set of skills. Besides, the DNC wasn’t the only organization that was hacked: Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s personal emails, for instance, were stolen separately, as were the emails at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Nevertheless, many on the right were inspired by the WikiLeaks insinuations and started to concoct their own conspiracy theories about Rich’s murder. In August, former House speaker and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich told a conservative talk show host that Rich’s death was suspicious. “First of all, of course it’s worth talking about,” he said. “And if Assange says he is the source, Assange may know. That’s not complicated.”
That same month, Trump adviser Roger Stone claimed, without evidence, that Rich was murdered “on his way to meet with the FBI to discuss election fraud.”
To Trump supporters, the claim that Rich had been murdered by the Clintons had twofold appeal: It reinforced the rumor that the Clintons were shady operatives, and it distracted from the mounting evidence that Russia had interfered with the US election — possibly in collusion with the Trump campaign.
In the presidential debate on September 26, Trump famously suggested that it could have been alone hacker who was responsible for the stolen DNC emails. "It could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people. It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds," he said.
Thanks to a weird miscommunication, the conspiracy theory comes back in May
After the election, the conspiracy theories about Seth Rich faded from public consciousness, as the focus turned instead to the FBI’s investigation of connections between Trump staffers and Russian agents. Suspicions still bubbled in right-wing corners of Reddit and on alt-right websites like Gateway Pundit, and Assange continued to claim that it wasn’t the Russians who provided the hacked emails — but most of America had moved on.
But Rich returned to the news last week when the local TV station FOX 5 DC aired an interview with private investigator Rod Wheeler, who claimed that sources in the FBI told him there was evidence of a connection between Rich and WikiLeaks:
Conservative media outlets jumped on the story, which aired the night of Monday, May 15. By Tuesday morning, conservative outlets like Breitbart, the Blaze, and the Daily Caller all had their own pieces relaying Wheeler’s claims.
On Tuesday, Fox News added its own revelation: It claimed that an unnamed “federal investigator” had confirmed that Rich had been in contact with WikiLeaks. “I have seen and read the emails between Seth Rich and Wikileaks,” the source said, according to Fox News. Fox News additionally claimed this source had evidence that Rich had given thousands of DNC emails to WikiLeaks.
This was a two-source story: The report also said that Wheeler had independently corroborated what the anonymous “federal investigator” had told Fox News.
But here’s where it gets confusing. By Tuesday afternoon, Wheeler told CNN that he had misspoken. It turns out he didn’t have any evidence of his own.
What had happened, apparently, was that earlier in the week, Fox News had contacted Wheeler for its own story on Rich. That was when Wheeler learned that Fox News had a source alleging there was contact between Rich and WikiLeaks. When Wheeler went on local TV on Monday night to talk about Rich, he believed he was giving viewers a “preview” of the Fox News story set to run on Tuesday.
That, at least, is how Wheeler explained the situation to CNN last Tuesday. Somehow, through miscommunication or sloppy reporting, the Fox News report used Wheeler to back up its claims about the Rich-WikiLeaks connection. This was incorrect, Wheeler said. He had no independent knowledge.
"I only got that [information] from the reporter at Fox News," he told CNN.
Yesterday, after leaving it up for a week, Fox News finally retracted its Seth Rich story, which was down to one anonymous source. “The article was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting,” an editor’s note explained. “Upon appropriate review, the article was found not to meet those standards and has since been removed.”
Conservative media has a field day
It’s unlikely that any of this would have been a big deal had there not been a stunning series of damaging reports about Donald Trump last week.
Among other things, it was revealed that Trump had shared state secrets with the Russians, that he had pressured FBI Director James Comey to drop his investigation into ties between Trump affiliates and Russia, and that the Russia probe had reached a current high-level White House official, who many suspect is Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
One way the conservative media minimized all the bad news was to focus on other stories. The latest Seth Rich allegations became a welcome distraction from the constant revelations coming out of the Washington Post and the New York Times.
For instance, while most outlets were covering the revelation that Trump had volunteered classified information to Russians, the alt-right website Breitbart devoted its front page to the Seth Rich conspiracy. Breitbart even slammed the mainstream media for ignoring the rumors about Rich: “Silence from Establishment Media over Seth Rich WikiLeaks Report” was the title of one story.
Fox News in particular devoted outsize attention to the Rich story, repeatedly rehashing the conspiracy theory. On his 10 pm show, Fox pundit Sean Hannity devoted segments to Rich on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday last week. “I'm not backing off asking questions even though there is an effort that nobody talks about Seth Rich,” he said on Friday night.
On Tuesday, even after Fox News retracted the story that ignited the latest round of speculation, Hannity remained convinced that the Seth Rich conspiracy theory had legs. “I am not Fox.com or FoxNews.com,” he said on his radio show. “I retracted nothing.”
Later that evening, on his television show, Hannity said that for now, he would stop talking about Rich “out of respect for the family's wishes.” On Twitter, though, he was defiant, claiming that “liberal fascism” was trying to silence his voice.
“Ok TO BE CLEAR, I am closer “Not only am I not stopping, but I am also working harder.”
“Please retweet,” he added.
Rich was an unlucky victim of the conservative media
The recent attention has reignited the old Seth Rich conspiracy theories, bringing forth even more unsubstantiated claims.
On Fox News’s Sunday morning talk show, Newt Gingrich repeated his belief that Rich, not Russia, was responsible for the DNC hack. “It turns out, it wasn’t the Russians,” he said. “It was this young guy who, I suspect, was disgusted by the corruption of the Democratic National Committee.”
On Monday, Assange issued a cryptic tweet using the hashtag “#SethRich” which fanned the flames even further: “WikiLeaks has never disclosed a source. Sources sometimes talk to other parties but identities never emerge from WikiLeaks. #SethRich.”
And on Tuesday, New Zealand file-sharing entrepreneur Kim Dotcom, who is wanted by the US government for copyright infringement and racketeering, claimed that Rich had personally contacted him in 2014 and that the two had talked about “a number of topics including corruption and the influence of corporate money in politics.”
“I know that Seth Rich was involved in the DNC leak,” Dotcom wrote in a statement.
Rich’s family has repeatedly asked news outlets to stop publicizing these rumors. “Those theories, which some reporters have since retracted, are baseless, and they are unspeakably cruel,” Mary and Joel Rich wrote in a Washington Post op-ed on Tuesday evening.
“Imagine that instead, every call that comes in is a reporter asking what you think of a series of lies or conspiracies about the death,” they wrote. “That nightmare is what our family goes through every day.”
The Riches also pushed back on some of the rumors themselves, stating that the FBI had found no evidence of communication between their son and WikiLeaks and that Seth had no access to any of the DNC emails that were leaked:
But to conspiracy theorists, the facts have never mattered. Fake news always has ulterior motives, and everybody who amplified the Seth Rich conspiracy theories had their own stake in keeping the lies alive.
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