At 4:20 a.m. on July 10, 2016, gunshots rang out in Washington, D.C. When Metropolitan Police Department officers arrived at the scene, about two miles north of the U.S. Capitol, they found Seth Rich, a 27-year-old employee of the Democratic National Committee, lying down but “conscious and breathing with apparent gunshot wound(s) to the back,” according to the brief police report available to the public. Rich was transported to a local hospital where he died shortly before 6:00 a.m.
The murder has never been solved. Police have not revealed what, if anything, Rich may have said about his attackers during the final hundred minutes of his life. Rich’s brother told the Washington Post in January that emergency responders said “they were very surprised he didn’t make it. He was very aware, very talkative.” Police have suggested it may have been a robbery gone wrong. None of Rich’s possessions was taken, but there were signs of a struggle—Rich had bruises and his watchband was torn, according to his family.
It remains a heartbreaking mystery, but the reason Seth Rich’s murder became a national story this month is because of the conspiracy theories surrounding it—namely the claim that Seth Rich was involved in the hacking of DNC emails, a batch of which were published by WikiLeaks 12 days after Rich’s death. The conspiracy was stoked by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks and by Donald Trump ally Roger Stone in 2016, but it wasn’t until the middle of May that a textbook case of media malpractice resulted in the conspiracy theory being widely promoted outside the fever swamps.
On May 15, a private investigator named Rod Wheeler said in an interview with the Washington, D.C., Fox TV affiliate that he “absolutely” had sources in the FBI who had seen “tangible evidence on Rich’s laptop that confirms he was communicating with WikiLeaks prior to his death.” Wheeler’s investigation was funded by wealthy Dallas businessman (and Breitbart News contributor) Ed Butowsky, but Wheeler had signed a contract with the Rich family that he would speak about his investigation only with the family’s permission, which he did not receive for any of his recent interviews. A spokesman for the family says when they agreed to the arrangement they weren’t aware of Wheeler’s dubious reputation. (Wheeler has claimed in the past that gangs of lesbians carrying pink pistols are roaming the country and raping young girls.) Despite Wheeler’s penchant for spreading wild stories, his claim, once elevated by the local Fox TV interview, quickly zipped around the Internet: “Dead DNC Staffer ‘Had Contact’ with WikiLeaks,” read the Drudge Report banner headline. “Not Russia, but an Inside Job?” asked Breitbart News.
And then Wheeler’s story quickly fell apart. On the afternoon of May 16, Wheeler told CNN’s Oliver Darcy that he was relying solely on information from a FoxNews.com reporter named Malia Zimmerman. “I only got that [information] from the reporter at Fox News,” Wheeler told CNN. Zimmerman had published a story on May 16 at FoxNews.com in which she claimed a single anonymous federal source told her Rich had sent over 40,000 emails to WikiLeaks. “I have seen and read the emails between Seth Rich and Wikileaks,” Zimmerman’s alleged source supposedly told her.
The FoxNews.com story also quickly fell apart. “[A] current FBI official and a former one completely discount the Fox News claim that an FBI analysis of a computer belonging to Rich contained thousands of e-mails to and from WikiLeaks,” NBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald reported. “Local police in Washington, D.C., never even gave the FBI Rich’s laptop to analyze after his murder, according to the current FBI official.”
“I am confident that the FBI never played any role in the investigation of Seth Rich’s murder,” Rich family spokesman Brad Bauman tells me. According to Bauman, “local law enforcement did examine the laptop.” D.C. police told the family that “there was no evidence on the laptop in any way, shape, or form tying anybody with WikiLeaks or anybody associated with WikiLeaks” to Seth Rich. Since that time, “the family has [had] the laptop, the family has always had the laptop,” Bauman adds. NBC disputed the Fox report on May 17, but FoxNews.com didn’t retract its report until May 23. A vague statement from FoxNews.com said that the story was “not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting. Upon appropriate review, the article was found not to meet those standards and has since been removed.” Zimmerman and Fox News spokesmen declined further comment.
By then the damage was done. The baseless stories had wounded the family of Seth Rich, subjecting them to the unwanted attention of conspiracy theorists and the scurrilous claims that their son and brother was a thief who had betrayed his colleagues and employer. Moreover, they had spread far and wide the insane claim that agents acting on behalf of a major political party or presidential candidate assassinated a young man as retribution for leaking emails. Like conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the Iraq war, this bizarre theory fuels the belief that America is no better than some despotic country like Russia.
D.C.’s local Fox affiliate and FoxNews.com bear responsibility for publishing such thinly sourced and damaging stories, and Fox owes a better explanation of why it retracted its story. But the news sites and media personalities who regurgitated the story also bear responsibility for promoting it. That includes former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who uncritically repeated it on Fox & Friends on May 21. But perhaps the worst actor of all in this twisted game of telephone is Fox News host Sean Hannity.
Hannity repeatedly used his primetime show to promote the conspiracy theory to millions of viewers. On May 16, Hannity touted “explosive developments in the mysterious murder of former DNC staffer Seth Rich that could completely shatter the narrative that, in fact, WikiLeaks was working with the Russians, or that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.”
Hannity let Wheeler spout off on air and never reported later that Wheeler had backtracked. Hannity never reported on his TV show that FoxNews.com retracted its own story, only saying on May 23 that he would “out of respect for the family’s wishes, for now, [not discuss] this matter at this time.” The family had immediately objected to coverage, but Hannity went silent only after pressure had been put on his advertisers. As the story disintegrated, Hannity grasped at straws, going so far as to promote on Twitter unsubstantiated and bizarre assertions from an Internet troll and convicted hacker from New Zealand who goes by the name “Kim Dotcom.”
Devotees of this wild, anti-American conspiracy theory dwell on the fact that Rich’s belongings were not taken—proof, they say, that it wasn’t an attempted robbery. They don’t ask why assassins wouldn’t be smart enough to take the wallet to make it look like a robbery, why they’d get into a physical altercation with Rich, or why they would leave him breathing and conscious. They pretend Rich was killed in a safe neighborhood, when dozens of murders and hundreds of armed robberies have occurred in the area in recent years. They ignore the fact that the FBI had detected the DNC computer breach long before July 2016, that U.S. intelligence agencies agreed Russian hackers were to blame, and that Republican officials who have seen the intelligence accept the claim that Russian hackers were responsible. Even Donald Trump, who initially cast doubt on Russian responsibility, said after an intelligence briefing: “I think it was Russia.”
But the thing about conspiracy theorists is that their beliefs tend to be non-falsifiable. Flip any fact or set of facts, and they will come up with an argument why the opposite set of facts still proves their theory. You might be tempted to laugh them off if not for the very real damage they cause.
“Imagine living in a nightmare that you can never wake up from,” Rich’s parents wrote in the Washington Post. “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,” they continued, “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.”
John McCormack is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
