Ten months after his death, reports continue to circulate concerning the murder of Seth Rich, a 27-year-old data analyst for the Democratic National Committee. Seth Conrad Rich died hours after what police investigators (who are still working on the case) have long said was likely an attempted robbery. Online conspiracy theorists and cable news commentators, on the other hand, claim that Rich was a WikiLeaks informant and insinuate that he was killed for political reasons.
These theories began with insinuations from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who offered a $20,000 reward for information about Rich’s murder last August and suggested that Rich may have been a martyr to WikiLeaks’ mission and the source of leaked DNC emails. But the theories were fueled by other parties, too. Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman—who’s worked with the Rich family, canvassing their Northwest D.C. neighborhood for leads, and is offering a $105,000 reward—has said that he believes the Russian government may be to blame.
There is a large body of conspiracy-theorizing concerning Rich’s death from internet sites such as Gateway Pundit. But let’s concentrate on how the story metastasized in the mainstream media last week.
On May 15, a private investigator named Rod Wheeler told a local news channel in Washington, Fox 5 DC, (1) that sources at the FBI had in their possession “tangible evidence” linking Rich to WikiLeaks and (2) that the Metropolitan Police Department had received orders to “stand down.” (This second detail was later disputed by D.C. Police according to an addendum to Fox’s report.)
In the interview, which the local Fox station aired Monday evening (after promoting it as a “bombshell”), Wheeler appeared to claim that “sources in the FBI” had evidence to support these long-running theories. The following morning, Fox 5 reported details of Rich’s alleged exchange with WikiLeaks and attributed them to Wheeler’s investigative work and to a report from the Fox News Channel. (We can’t link to this report, because Fox News Channel has now retracted it and disappeared the story entirely from its archive.)
According to a May 16 Fox 5 report that makes reference to it, the May 16 Fox News Channel story quoted an unnamed federal investigator claiming to have seen tens of thousands of emails between Rich and WikiLeaks director Gavin MacFadyen on “an FBI forensic report of Rich’s computer generated within 96 hours after his murder.”
In addition, Wheeler claimed:
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That there may exist “tangible evidence” in the form of emails between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks.
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That Rich’s computer “is either at the police department or either at the FBI.”
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That there has been a coordinated effort by the mayor’s office and the DNC to chill the police investigation into Rich’s death.
But Wheeler’s story started changing very quickly. In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel on the evening of May 16, Wheeler contradicted the bulk of the Fox 5 story. He said:
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That he had not seen Rich’s alleged emails.
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That neither the police nor the FBI is known to be in possession of Rich’s computer.
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That he has seen no evidence to suggest a motive on Rich’s part to send DNC emails to WikiLeaks.
“I don’t know as a matter of fact if the emails went out to the WikiLeaks or anybody else,” Wheeler now said, “but it sure appears that way.”
And then Wheeler suddenly allowed that “It could have been a botched robbery” after all. Yet even with Wheeler’s sudden qualifications, Hannity would continue to promote Rich-related rumors for the next week on Fox News Channel.
Then, in an interview with CNN published the following afternoon, Wheeler—a repeat Fox contributor—said he’d first heard that there might have been “tangible evidence” from a Fox reporter before his interview. “He explained that the comments he made to [Fox 5] were intended to simply preview Fox News’ Tuesday story,” CNN reported.
Fox 5 finally updated its initial story on Wednesday, after multiple outlets picked it up. A clarification of Wheeler’s connection to the Rich family explains that he was not, in fact, an investigator in their employ, but rather had been contracted to look into Rich’s murder by a third party. The family’s spokesman, Brad Bauman, told NBCNews that the “third party” responsible for Wheeler was financier Ed Butowsky, who encouraged the family to hire a private eye and offered to foot the bill.
To understand how hard it is to correct the record once bad information has been released, go look at the initial Fox 5 story: The headline still reads “Family’s Private Investigator: There is evidence Seth Rich had contact with WikiLeaks prior to death.” And, beneath the incomplete retraction, the original text remains: “Just two months shy of the one-year anniversary of Rich’s death, FOX 5 has learned there is new information that could prove these theorists right. Rod Wheeler, a private investigator hired by the Rich family, suggests there is tangible evidence on Rich’s laptop that confirms he was communicating with WikiLeaks prior to his death.”
And once bad information makes it out into the world, it can move with a life of its own. In an appearance on the Fox News Channel show Fox and Friends on May 21, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich repeated the false report, saying:
On Tuesday March 23, Fox News published a full retraction of their reporting, and removed the story from their site with the following statement:
The retraction as written does not transparently convey what elements of Fox News’s reporting on Rich, which quoted Wheeler and an anonymous source, failed to meet the network’s standards. The May 16 story removed from their site reported details known to an unnamed “federal investigator”—whom Rod Wheeler later told Hannity and CNN was his source as well.
And as for Fox 5, which was patient zero in the current Seth Rich outbreak, as of Wednesday morning they had yet to follow suit with a full retraction of their own. The story, with its May 17 update—in which Wheeler calls his contradictory comments the result of “miscommunication”—remains.
If you have questions about this fact check, or would like to submit a request for another fact check, email Alice Lloyd at [email protected] or The Weekly Standard at [email protected].
