Seth Rich: Inside the Killing of the DNC Staffer
By Jeff Stein
On 8/20/16 at 4:34 PM
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It was closing time at Lou’s City Bar in a trendy neighborhood of northwest Washington, D.C. when Seth Rich drained the last of his Bell’s Two Hearted ales and headed out into the muggy night. At 2:30 am on July 10 , the torrid heat that had gripped the city for weeks had eased slightly, with temperatures slipping into the low 70s. Maybe it was the relative cool that prompted him to walk through several dark, dicey blocks to his apartment in Bloomingdale, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood a mile away. Or maybe he thought the walk would do him some good after venting to his longtime bartender about his unsuccessful efforts to reconcile his love life and 12-hour days at the Democratic National Committee.
Whatever the reason, Rich, 27, a normally upbeat computer-voting specialist at the DNC, would soon leave family and friends grieving. And his decision to walk that night would become part of a wild election year conspiracy theory that once again portrayed Hillary Clinton and the Democrats as murderous criminals.
At 4:19 am, police responded to the sound of gunfire in Bloomingdale and found him lying mortally wounded at a dark intersection a block and a half from a red brick rowhouse he shared with friends. He had multiple gunshot wounds in his back. About an hour and 40 minutes later, he died at a local hospital, possibly after identifying his assailants to the police.
The cops suspected Rich was a victim of an attempted robbery, one of many that had plagued the neighborhood. Except for an apparent anomaly: police found his wallet, credit cards and cellphone on his body. The band of his wristwatch was torn, but not broken. And that was enough to fire up the right-wing Twitterverse with yet another round of Clinton conspiracy theories, this one claiming that Rich was murdered—at dawn—as he was on his way to sing to the FBI about damning internal DNC emails. Such sinister notions might have evaporated from their own weightlessness, had not Julian Assange tossed a conspiracy grenade into the affair a few weeks later. The Wikileaks impresario, still penned up in the Ecuador’s London embassy dodging a Swedish rape allegation, announced he was offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in the Rich case. He hinted darkly that the slain man had been a source in the embarrassing 30,000 internal DNC emails his organization had recently published. The fallout had led to the firing of top Democratic officials. ...
Meanwhile, sources involved with the DNC’s investigation of a foreign hack of its files last year rule out any role of Seth Rich in the affair. “There was no indication that any insider that was involved in this,” said one source, demanding anonymity in exchange for discussing the sensitive, and ongoing, investigation. “Every indication is this was a remote attack from a foreign government—the Russians. There is no indication that...there was any nefarious action taken by any employees in that environment.”
Nor is there any evidence Rich downloaded and printed out the DNC’s internal emails, he said. “This is a very sophisticated actor. This is not some kid coming in and downloading documents and handing them to somebody.”
The Kremlin has denied any involvement in the DNC hack. Assange has declined to discuss who gave him the material. He has threatened to release far more material in the coming weeks and months.
Assange has an agenda, the source added: to damage Hillary Clinton, which tracks with Moscow’s apparent desire to see Donald Trump elected. “This is a match made in heaven,” he said. “Assange has the vehicle to leak it, and the Russians have the vehicle by which to provide him with the data.” ...
