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)

Morning Reading

Sarah Posner on Republicans shielding un-indicted co-conspirator Donald "Rump" Trump:

In his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee hearing Tuesday morning, former CIA director John Brennan bluntly told lawmakers that during the 2016 election, he reviewed intelligence that showed “contacts and interactions” between Russian actors and people associated with the Trump campaign. By the summer of 2016, Brennan said, he was “convinced” that Russia was engaged in an “aggressive” and “multifaceted” effort to interfere in our election — and as a result, he believed “there was a sufficient basis of information and intelligence that required further investigation” by the FBI. 

With this testimony, Brennan just made it a whole lot harder — politically, at least — for the GOP to continue in its efforts to protect Trump, even as scrutiny of his campaign intensifies on the part of the FBI, and now, special counsel Robert Mueller. Yet if Tuesday’s hearing is any guide, congressional Republicans are still intent on shielding Trump by undermining the investigation in the mind of the public.

This is a party- before- country collection of nihilists; we need to turn as many of them out of office as possible.  Here's a start on the state level:

On Tuesday night, Democrats flipped not one but two state legislative seats in special elections—and both came in deep red territory. In New Hampshire, Democrat Edie DesMarais defeated Republican Matthew Plache by a 52-48 margin in the state House’s 6th Carroll District, a seat Donald Trump won 51-44 last fall. Meanwhile, in the New York Assembly’s 9th District, Democrat Christine Pellegrino beat Republican Thomas Gargiulo 58-42, even though Trump romped to a 60-37 victory there in November. 

Democrats winning at the State and local level over the next 2 - 4 years is extremely important to re-building the party, especially with the 2020 census looming. We've got the special Congressional election in Montana (Rob Quist!) on Thursday and the one in Georgia (Jon Ossoff!) in June, which could be bellweathers for the 2018 mid- term elections.

Margaret Sullivan on the despicable Sean "Heil" Hannity, Newt Gingrich and Fox "News" in their politicizing the death of DNC staffer Seth Rich last summer:

To hear Fox’s Sean Hannity tell it, this was an inside job by the Democratic National Committee, where Rich worked: retribution by the Hillary Clinton camp for his sharing insider emails with WikiLeaks. 

The theory has been thoroughly debunked by Oliver Darcy at CNN, among others, and Rich’s family has demanded that Fox retract and apologize. To the reported embarrassment of its own staff, it took Fox days to do the right thing. (Fox finally retracted the story Tuesday afternoon , and Tuesday night Hannity claimed that “out of respect for the family’s wishes, for now, I am not discussing the matter at this time.”) 

But the damage has been done. On Sunday, former House speaker and Trump insider Newt Gingrich used Fox’s national platform to spread the lies, squandering what remains of his own credibility to make respectable people think it might be so. (Police think it may have been a robbery gone wrong.) 

Decent people should shun both Hannity and Gingrich. 

There's word this morning that Hannity will stop his conspiracy mongering about Seth Rich, ostensibly in response to this direct, heart- wrenching appeal from Seth Rich's parents:

Imagine living in a nightmare that you can never wake up from. Imagine having to face every single day knowing that your son was murdered. Imagine you have no answers — that no one has been brought to justice and there are few clues leading to the killer or killers. Imagine that every single day, with every phone call you hope that it’s the police, calling to tell you that there has been a break in the case. 

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. That nightmare is what our family goes through every day.  [snip]

... Seth’s death has been turned into a political football. Every day we wake up to new headlines, new lies, new factual errors, new people approaching us to take advantage of us and Seth’s legacy. It just won’t stop. The amount of pain and anguish this has caused us is unbearable. With every conspiratorial flare-up, we are forced to relive Seth’s murder and a small piece of us dies as more of Seth’s memory is torn away from us. [snip]

There are people who are using our beloved Seth’s memory and legacy for their own political goals, and they are using your outrage to perpetuate our nightmare. We ask those purveying falsehoods to give us peace, and to give law enforcement the time and space to do the investigation they need to solve our son’s murder. 

Reptilians like Hannity and Gingrich are sociopaths who have political agendas that take precedence over facts and human decency. They're wired that way, so it's only a matter of time before they plump another destructive lie into a full- fledged nightmare for another family. Also, let's not forget the collusion of many in the "mainstream media," who delight in "reporting on the controversy," hoping to attract clicks and eyeballs without getting their hands dirty in the process. The sooner this fever dream fades, the better.