Seth Rich’s family hopes the Mueller report’s release will halt the conspiracy theorists who have brought the family “unimaginable pain.”
The brother of the slain Democratic National Committee staffer issued a statement Friday that said his family hopes people will now stop using his brother’s death to advance political agendas.
“The special counsel has now provided hard facts that demonstrate this conspiracy is false,” Aaron Rich said in a statement Friday. “I hope that people who pushed, fueled, spread, ran headlines, articles, interviews, talk and opinion shows, or in any way used my family’s tragedy to advance their political agendas — despite our pleas that what they were saying was not based on any facts — will take responsibility for the unimaginable pain they have caused us.”
Seth Rich was killed in Washington, D.C., in July 2016 in what police have described as a botched robbery. Authorities have not charged anyone in connection with his death, which has been the focus of conspiracy theories.
“We will continue to pursue justice for Seth’s murderers, as well as those who used his murder to advance their personal or political agendas by advancing false conspiracy theories,” Aaron Rich said in his statement.
In a redacted version of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report, the special counsel said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange made false statements about Rich’s death to cover his source of hacked emails from Democrats.
Mueller accused Assange and WikiLeaks of making public statements about Rich’s death “to obscure the source of the materials that WikiLeaks was releasing.”
“After the U.S. intelligence community publicly announced its assessment that Russia was behind the hacking operation, Assange continued to deny that the Clinton materials released by WikiLeaks had come from Russian hacking,” said the report released Thursday by the Justice Department. “According to media reports, Assange told a U.S. congressman that the DNC hack was an ‘inside job,’ and purported to have ‘physical proof that Russians did not give materials to Assange.”
