WAS SETH RICH MURDERED BECAUSE HE KNEW OF THE DEMOCRATIC SECRET OF HOW AND WHO THEY WERE GOING TO CHEAT THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION FOR HILLARY CLINTON BUT DECIDED TO WAIT TILL 2020 TO TRY?
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| SETH RICH |
Seth Rich: The Murder Washington Doesn't Want to be Solved
On the face of things, the July 2016 murder of Seth Rich had intrigue enough for a full season of House of Cards.
Unknown assailants gun down the young DNC data analyst at 4 A.M. on a Washington, D.C., street and take nothing. Two weeks later, an international man of mystery Julian Assange strongly suggests on Dutch TV that Rich was his source for the purloined DNC emails then roiling the Democratic Party and offering a $20,000 reward to find the killer.
Three days before the November election, Assange reportedly tells liberal media analyst Ellen Ratner that Rich was indeed his source. Days after Trump's inauguration, legendary investigative journalist Sy Hersh cites an FBI report confirming Assange's claim. Later that year, DNC honcho Donna Brazile dedicates her book Hacks to Rich and wonders out loud whether the Russians had "played some part in his unsolved murder."
Despite the stakes — the Trump presidency hinged on the investigation's outcome — there was to be no TV series about Rich's life and death, no movie, no serious books, not even a single episode of Unsolved Mysteries or 48 Hours. Incredibly, no major publication or network save for Fox News has even attempted to resolve the still-unsolved murder, and Fox execs rather wish they hadn't.
To understand how a story this potentially explosive could be suppressed for so long, it is necessary to understand one basic fact of Washington life: Donald Trump received just 4.1 percent of the District's vote in the 2016 election. Trump's election disrupted short-term strategies and long-term expectations in every one of the capital's major institutions, local and federal, public and private, the legal community among them.
According to Hersh, Trump was a "circuit breaker," one who made a whole lot of enemies. Those enemies, as we have seen, would go to great lengths to discredit Trump and anyone associated with him. The pressure they can bring to bear on even those who want to tell the truth remains formidable.
Instead of a serious investigation by either police or reporters, the Seth Rich case generated a dumpster full of frivolous lawsuits. These suits have had the result, likely intended, of silencing those who would dare to investigate Rich's demise. All too predictably, the media have heaped abuse on the investigators and cheered on the litigators.
Prominent among the private citizens who asked questions is Ed Butowsky, a Republican wealth manager from Texas. "It is horrible," he told me. "I had no idea how big the other side is, and they are completely after me." Once he started inquiring into Rich's death, said Butowsky, "everything just turned to crap."
Butowsky stumbled into his role as a sleuth. Through his occasional TV appearances, Butowsky met Ellen Ratner, a friend of Assange. Her late brother Michael Ratner had been one of the American lawyers for the fugitive WikiLeaks founder. On the day after the election, Ratner lobbed a grenade into an otherwise banal panel discussion at Florida's Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
"I spent three hours with Julian Assange on Saturday at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London," Ratner volunteered midway through the event. "One thing he did say was the leaks were not from, they were not from the Russians. They were an internal source from the Hillary campaign or from somebody that knew Hillary, an enemy."
If the grenade had detonated, Ratner would have blown a hole in a collusion plot that centered on the presumed Russian hack of the DNC. Fortunately for the plotters, Ratner's self-involved fellow panelists skipped over her comments, and the video of the event passed into the ether all but unseen.
According to a complex, multi-party defamation suit Butowsky filed in 2019, Butowsky learned of the Assange revelation from Ratner herself. She contacted him after the meeting and added the critical detail that Seth Rich was Assange's source.
On December 17, Butowsky contacted Rich's parents, Joel and Mary Rich. He felt sorry for the Riches, sensing they would get no help from D.C. Police or the FBI. In addition, as Ratner reportedly told him, Assange had requested that the parents be made aware of Seth's role, a material fact in the search for their son's killers.
According to Butowsky, Joel Rich told him he knew that Seth and his older brother Aaron were involved with the DNC email leak. Joel chose not to go public lest people think his sons were "responsible for getting Trump elected." Although the Riches would later deny many of Butowsky's claims, no one disputes his offer to hire a private investigator for the Riches or their acceptance of that offer.
In the ensuing days, Ratner's public silence frustrated Butowsky. On December 29, 2016, he sent an email to Ratner saying, "If the person you met with truly said what he did, is their [sic] a reason you we aren't reporting it ?" That same day, Ratner responded, "because--- it was a family meeting---- I would have to get his permission--will ask his new lawyer, my sister-in-law."
Butowsky had one other lively source of information. In January 2017, he recorded a phone conversation with the profane and refreshingly candid Pulitzer Prize–winner Sy Hersh. As Hersh related, the D.C. Police called in the FBI when its cyber unit failed to open Rich's computer. The FBI's "hot s---" cyber team succeeded and filed a report. According to that report, Rich "submitted a series of juicy emails from the DNC" to the WikiLeaks drop box and asked Assange for money in exchange for more emails
Eager for confirmation, Butowsky asked Hersh if he had seen the FBI report himself. Hersh admitted he had not. He explained that he had someone on the inside who had seen it, and that person, over the years, had proved "unbelievably accurate" in providing Hersh information.
Although not an ardent Trump fan — he donated to Obama in 2007 and initially supported Carly Fiorina in 2016 — Butowsky thought the media were screwing the new president over. The apolitical Hersh agreed. "Trump's not wrong to think they all lied about him," he said. "I have a narrative of how that whole f------ [Russia collusion] thing began. It's a [CIA director John] Brennan operation. American disinformation."
For the next several months, Butowsky worked behind the scenes helping Fox News try to shed light on Rich's death. On May 16, 2017, a report by Malia Zimmerman was published on the Fox News website headlined "Slain DNC staffer had contact with WikiLeaks, investigator says."
A book could be written about the unraveling of the Fox story, but, in brief, Butowsky went wrong by hiring the investigator in question, former D.C. homicide detective Rod Wheeler. Wheeler's quickly proven deceptions forced Fox to retract the story.
New York attorney Douglas Wigdor was the one person to sense Wheeler's real potential. "Wigdor is the central point of all this," Butowsky told me. Although his name seems to have been lifted from a Harry Potter novel, Wigdor was all business.
On August 1, 2017, his law firm filed a suit on behalf of Wheeler against Butowsky, Fox News, and Zimmerman. In the suit, Wheeler claimed that Zimmerman had misquoted him to "establish that Seth Rich provided WikiLeaks with the DNC emails to shift blame away from Russia."
The news of the lawsuit cheered the hearts of reporters everywhere except Fox. Most in the media failed to notice that a week after suing on behalf of Wheeler, Wigdor sent a letter to British regulatory agency Ofcom, citing the Wheeler suit as a reason to block the purchase of Britain's Sky Television by Fox News's parent company, 21st Century Fox.
If no one else in the media noticed, the smear artists at Media Matters certainly did. Its president, Angela Carusone, sent a lengthy letter to Ofcom confirming that Fox "exhibited tacit support for politically motivated misinformation." Butowsky argues that the Wheeler suit was a setup for Wigdor "to extort money from Fox."
As I document in my book, Unmasking Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency, the media routinely defamed citizens — from Joe the Plumber to James O'Keefe — who attempted to thwart their narrative. NPR's lengthy hit piece on Butowsky is a classic in the genre.
In the report produced on August 17, 2017, NPR's David Folkenflik does not so much as mention Wigdor, let alone his maneuvering against Fox News. Instead, he does a dumpster dive into Butowsky's past. His not-so-subtle point in this disgraceful bit of pseudo-journalism is that a man who would fudge his academic credentials, however trivially, could not be trusted to tell the truth about Seth Rich.
Folkenflik adds not a whit of new information about the death of Seth Rich. He assures his audience a year after the murder that the D.C. Police "believed [Rich's] shooting was the result of a botched armed robbery." Believed? That's it? Folkenflik also fails to mention Ellen Ratner. At the expense of his own credibility, Butowsky kept his promise not to reveal her role.
Ratner repaid him. In March 2018, two weeks after Joel and Mary Rich sued Butowsky, et al. for "emotional distress," Ratner wrote an article for WorldNetDaily titled "I love my conservative friends!" She specifically cites Butowsky, "the man involved in the Seth Rich controversy." Ratner adds coyly, "Some say he had the secrets of the Democratic National Committee, and some think he was just murdered."
On August 2, 2018, a federal judge in Manhattan dismissed the suits brought both by the Riches and by Wheeler. Judge George Daniels was particularly cool to Wheeler, ruling that he failed to prove he had been misquoted and "had also given his tacit consent to the article's publication." Aaron Rich has sued Butowsky as well. Fed up with the harassment, Butowsky fired back with his own suit in March 2019.
In July 2019, Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News released a six-part podcast called "Conspiracyland," in which the former claimed that "Russian intelligence agents" planted the story that Rich was the source of the leaked emails. This laughably lopsided podcast deserves a deconstruction of its own. Isikoff, it should be remembered, was the reporter first designated to spread the Christopher Steele nonsense. Yet three years after that embarrassment, Isikoff was still treating Intelligence Community reports about Russian mischief as though they were gospel.
The critical revelation in the Isikoff story is that Ratner denies telling Butowsky about Seth Rich. In what sounds like a staged phone call, Ms. Ratner did protest too much. "I had never heard of this character," she tells Isikoff about Rich. This was an extraordinary claim for any journalist to have made, let alone a friend of Assange. Ratner spoke to Butowsky four months after Rich's well-publicized murder.
Once he learned of Ratner's denial, Butowsky amended his suit to include her involvement in the affair. He also shared publicly the post–Election Day video of Ratner's panel discussion as well as audio evidence confirming Ratner as his source. The major media wanted to know none of this. A Google search of "Ratner Butowsky" leads to no publication higher on the media food chain than Rolling Stone.
Andy Kroll's August 2020 article, "Killing the Truth," takes up where Isikoff left off. In this exhaustive waste of time and energy, Kroll cherry-picks his way through the available evidence and essentially accuses Butowsky of concocting everything he ever said about Ratner or Joel Rich, an accusation that shocked anew the long-since jaded Texan.
As to Seth Rich himself, all that Kroll can tell his readers is that his murder was "just an attempted robbery gone wrong," the lone fatality among "the rash of armed muggings" in his neighborhood that summer.
A botched robbery it may have been, but four years after Rich's death, the skeptic has to ask: couldn't Kroll or Isikoff or any major media reporter interview at least one of the other mugging victims? Couldn't they at least look for fresh forensic evidence? Couldn't they put aside their Fox-phobia for a moment and at least fake an interest in finding the killers of the unfortunate Seth Rich?
Or, better still, couldn't someone in the Intelligence Community — anyone — ask Julian Assange what he really knows?
*****
RON HOWARD
“It should have been an open and closed case of a tragic robbing,” writes Gretchen Small in Bustle.com of the 2016 Seth Rich murder, “but what ensued was an alt-right conspiracy theory movement designed to take attention off of Donald Trump and put pressure on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”
Small accurately summarized the thesis of “A Murder in D.C.,” an episode in the Netflix series, “Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies and the Internet.” I suppose she could be forgiven for her failure to know that Rich wasn’t robbed. The producers failed to share that rather critical detail, one detail out of many that allowed them to keep airheads like Small ignorant of the real scandal -- the media scandal. In this case, the cover-up may well have been worse than the crime.
Although I do not know who killed Seth Rich, I do know that the media did everything in its power to discourage anyone from finding out. Ron Howard, a loyal Democrat, served as executive producer of this visually well-crafted series. Not surprisingly, the episode in question does little but showcase the media’s ongoing role as protector of Democratic secrets.
The Alt-Right -- whatever that is -- had almost nothing to with the case save for a little internet gossip. Julian Assange, the darling of the media before he started releasing DNC emails, was the man who moved the curious beyond the “botched robbery” scenario trotted out by the D.C. Police.
Interviewed on Dutch TV four weeks after the shooting, Assange said, unprompted, “Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. There’s a twenty-seven-year-old, who works for the DNC, who was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington.” The Netflix producers showed this interview, then spent the rest of the episode trying to dismiss its relevance.
The Dutch TV show host, as compromised as his American peers, tried to head off Assange’s line of thought. He said, “That was just a robbery, I believe. Wasn’t it?” Assange would not be reined in. Said he, accurately, “No. There’s no finding.” Although Assange evaded the question of whether Rich was a source, his offer of a $20,000 reward to find Rich’s killer raised the possibility that Rich was one.
Assange’s theorizing was given legs by B-grade media personality Ellen Ratner. The producers knew about Ratner, a Democrat, and Hillary supporter. They showed her on camera and mentioned her in passing as someone who worked with Ed Butowsky, the villain of the piece. They then seem to have forgotten about her. My guess is they chose to edit Ratner’s real contribution out and overlooked the initial intro.
Butowsky, a financial guy with Republican leanings, met Ratner through their occasional TV appearances. Ratner was a friend of Assange. Her late brother Michael Ratner, a hard-core leftist, had been one of Assange’s American lawyers.
On the day after the 2016 election, Ratner boasted during an otherwise banal panel discussion at a Florida university, "I spent three hours with Julian Assange on Saturday at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London." She then added without prompting, "One thing he did say was the leaks were not from, they were not from the Russians. They were an internal source from the Hillary campaign or from somebody that knew Hillary, an enemy."
Fortunately for the media, Ratner's self-involved fellow panelists ignored her comments and returned to their banalities. The video did not surface until much later. It did not interest the media when it did surface.
According to a complex, multi-party defamation suit Butowsky filed in 2019, Butowsky learned of the Assange revelation from Ratner herself. She contacted him after the meeting and added the critical detail that Seth Rich was Assange's source.
Ratner reportedly told Butowsky that Assange had requested that the parents be made aware of Seth's role, a material fact in the search for their son's killers. Butowsky followed through with the request.
According to Butowsky, Seth’s father, Joel Rich, told him he knew that Seth and his older brother Aaron were involved with the DNC email leak. Joel chose not to go public lest people think his sons were "responsible for getting Trump elected." Although the Riches would later deny many of Butowsky's claims, no one disputes his offer to hire a private investigator for the Riches or their acceptance of that offer.
In order to make Butowsky and all other investigators look like right-wing conspiracy nuts, Netflix mentioned nothing about Ratner’s revelations. Nor did its producers mention the most prominent conspiracy nut of all, former DNC head Donna Brazile.
Brazile knew from experience how Assange could shape history, starting with her own employment history. On July 22, WikiLeaks began releasing the purloined DNC emails. These showed how the DNC stacked the Democratic primaries in Clinton’s favor. The Netflix show admits as much.
The revelation embarrassed then DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz into resigning, and Brazile got the job. Assange’s leak of the John Podesta emails in October showed Brazile feeding CNN debate questions to Hillary Clinton and cost Brazile her job with CNN. Brazile is not interviewed, nor even mentioned in the Netflix piece. That would interfere with its twisted narrative.
In her 2017 book Hacks, Brazile talks at some length about Assange’s interview. Rich’s murder obsessed her. “All I could think about was Seth Rich,” she acknowledges. Brazile muses at one point whether Rich had been killed by “someone who had it out for Democrats” and at another whether the Russians had “played some part in his unsolved murder.” She refers to Rich on a dozen different occasions and dedicates the book to him, despite barely knowing the young programmer.
The major media had as little interest in this information as the Netflix producers. The media refused to investigate because no likely outcome had useful political value. “What seems painfully obvious to his family is that Seth Rich was, instead, the victim of a botched holdup,” the Washington Post reported lamely in a lengthy January 2017 article, six months after the murder.
The fact remained, however, that the would-be robbers took nothing: not Rich’s wallet, not his phone, not his watch, not an expensive pendant that he wore. In the three months between June 1 and September 1, 2016, he was the only person murdered within five hundred yards of his home. That he was murdered “about 300 steps from his front door” at about 4 a.m. suggests someone was waiting for him.
Six months after the shooting, the Metropolitan Police were refusing to answer questions on the case, to show a grainy video of his two assailants, to share Rich’s comments in the hour or so he lived after the shooting, or to explain why it took nearly three hours for him to walk the thirty or so minutes from a local bar to his home.
The D.C. police attributed their silence to fear of compromising “an ongoing investigation.” Six years later, the investigation is dead, but the silence continues. The only people who made any effort at all to break the case served as the bad guys in this disgraceful Netflix saga.
In a wildly contorted effort, the producers showed their own ability to spread conspiracy theories by gratuitously pulling even President Trump into the mix. Opie, you should never have left Mayberry.
MORE ON SETH RICH...HERE
STILL MORE ON SETH RICH...HERE
The truth eventually emerges in another cover-up
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