Report: Russians Started Seth Rich Murder Conspiracy, Trumpers Ran With It

Well, we knew all along the Seth Rich murder conspiracy story was pure, malicious bullshit, but now an investigation has exposed where it originated and how it was spread:

In the summer of 2016, Russian intelligence agents secretly planted a fake report claiming that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was gunned down by a squad of assassins working for Hillary Clinton, giving rise to a notorious conspiracy theory that captivated conservative activists and was later promoted from inside President Trump’s White House, a Yahoo News investigation has found.

Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, first circulated a phony “bulletin” — disguised to read as a real intelligence report —about the alleged murder of the former DNC staffer on July 13, 2016, according to the U.S. federal prosecutor who was in charge of the Rich case. That was just three days after Rich, 27, was killed in what police believed was a botched robbery while walking home to his group house in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., about 30 blocks north of the Capitol.  [snip]

The Russian effort to exploit Rich’s tragic death didn’t stop with the fake SVR bulletin. Over the course of the next two and a half years, the Russian government-owned media organizations RT and Sputnik repeatedly played up stories that baselessly alleged that Rich, a relatively junior-level staffer, was the source of Democratic Party emails that had been leaked to WikiLeaks. It was an idea first floated by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who on Aug. 9, 2016, announced a $20,000 reward for information about Rich’s murder, saying — somewhat cryptically — that “our sources take risks.”

At the same time, online trolls working in St. Petersburg, Russia, for the Internet Research Agency (IRA) — the same shadowy outfit that conducted the Russian social media operation during the 2016 election — aggressively boosted the conspiracy theories. IRA-created fake accounts, masquerading as those of American citizens or political groups, tweeted and retweeted more than 2,000 times about Rich, helping to keep the bogus claims about his death in the social media bloodstream, according to an analysis of a database of Russia troll accounts by Yahoo News. [snip]

Along the way, the idea that Rich was murdered in retaliation for leaking DNC emails to WikiLeaks was championed by multiple allies of Trump, including Roger Stone. The same day Assange falsely hinted that Rich may have been his source for DNC emails, Stone tweeted a picture of Rich, calling the late DNC staffer in a tweet “another dead body in the Clinton’s wake.” He then added: “Coincidence? I think not.”

Within months, the Rich conspiracy story was also being quietly promoted inside Trump’s White House. Questions about whether the White House pushed the conspiracy theories about Rich have been raised periodically over the last two and a half years — and were consistently denied by White House officials. But the Yahoo News investigation uncovered new evidence that the false claim that Rich was the victim of a political assassination was advanced by one of the White House’s most senior officials at the time.  (our emphasis)

(Spoiler alert: that senior White (Supremacist) House official was diseased pustule Steve Bannon.)

The report by investigative journalist Michael Isikoff is worth reading in its entirety, so please do so.

What's described above, by the way, represents a daisy chain of ... collusion ... among Russian intelligence operations, Russian cut- out Wikileaks, Fox "News" ratf*ckers, and Trump operatives (a.k.a., ratf*ckers). This is a case study in how that works.

This report, while filling in many of the unknowns in the Rich conspiracy malign operation, also provides a public service in warning us how the Trump campaign, its right- wing media howling monkeys, and hostile foreign intelligence services will conduct what is likely to be the most filthy, desperate campaign in American history over the coming year and a half.  Forewarned is forearmed.

(Photo:  Sean Hannity, Seth Rich, Julian Assange - via Rolling Stone)