Lionel Nation - The Seth Rich Story: What They Still Don’t Want You to Know

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Aug. 4, 2025 - Lionel Nation

13:41

The Seth Rich Story: What They Still Don’t Want You to Know

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	For those of us in the conspiratorium, one of our favorite subjects, well, not favorite, not in a good way, but in one of the perennial subjects that we love to talk about, that nobody wants to talk about, is Seth Rich.
	It's like, you know, if you mention, like, you know, the liberty, you know, with Israel, you know, moon landings, and mockingbird, and paperclip, and there's these wonderful, they're not even, they're not, They're all declassified.
	But when it comes to the issue of Seth Rich, it's just, I don't know what it is.
	Nobody cares.
	It's the greatest story in the world.
	Now, in the event you've been living, I guess, maybe under a rock, you don't know, Seth Rich was a 27-year-old DNC, Democratic National Committee, whatever, Democrat analyst, a data analyst, whose unsolved murder on July the 10th, 2016, okay, right before a certain interesting election, in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., as they say, sparked one of the most.
	Now officially here's the story officially the Metropolitan Police Department They rule the incident a botched robbery despite the fact that Rich's wallet, phone, watch and other valuables were found on his body.
	I guess that's why what is it's botched because they did such a bad job I don't know.
	Now the absence of theft immediately, immediately among people who have working synapses raised significant questions and within days speculation exploded across alternative media with claims that maybe,
	maybe Sethridge had been the source who leaked tens of thousands of internal DNC emails to WikiLeaks, a theory that gained traction after Julian Assange himself made very cryptic remark suggesting a connection.
	And you had to be dead not to see maybe he was, you know, giving the old Jeremiah Denton history.
	Now this was in the heat of the 2016 elections, just after WikiLeaks published emails that embarrassed the DNC and exposed internal favoritism towards Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.
	Again, showing the perfidy and the corruption of her.
	In any event, the narrative that...
	Well, as you can imagine, that provided the perfect alternative to the official story that blamed Russian intelligence for the breach.
	Remember that one?
	You know all about that.
	Now prominent media figures and online activists seized on the theory.
	Most notably, a private investigator quoted as saying that there was proof of contact between Rich and WikiLeaks, a quote he later walked back, claiming he had been misrepresented.
	Nevertheless, Fox News published an article of that pushed the theory nationwide and pundits, including Sean Hannity, ran with it.
	And the story rapidly metastasized, igniting online forums and political blogs and cable news debates until the rich family demanded a full retraction, calling the speculation cruel and baseless.
	Trying to get to the bottom of a murder, normally family members say, Would somebody please notice?
	Would somebody please care?
	Not this time, all right.
	Fair enough.
	Fox retracted the article, but Hannity refused to let go, claiming he was seeking truth.
	It would not be silenced.
	Good.
	Well, the family eventually sued Fox News, the investigator and other figures connected to the narrative, citing emotional distress and defamation.
	Okay, so Fox ultimately settled for a reported seven figure sum, but never issued a formal apology.
	And many of those, many of those involved in the story's promotion faced no professional repercussions.
	But what made the Sethridge case more than a mere who done it was the intense and often bizarre intersection of media politics and espionage and internet driven speculation.
	While special counsel, remember that guy, Rob Mueller, Robert Mueller, is he what happened to him?
	Is he even alive?
	He's just.
	Anyway, his investigation concluded that Russian intelligence operatives hacked the DNC and passed the emails to WikiLeaks via intermediaries.
	Okay.
	Okay, none of whom were rich.
	And devotees of the theory remained unmoved, pointing to redacted FBI files, cryptic remarks by Assange, and inconsistencies in the police account.
	Now some believe that Rich's laptop had been confiscated by federal agents and that they or the key data had never been released to the public.
	Others alleged that the case had been deliberately buried to prevent exposure of a larger scandal involving voter fraud and party corruption or illegal intel operations, and the conspiracy theory,
	as we say, persisted, in part because it was never given a definitive open and shut answer, only dismissals by institutions that many Americans no longer trust.
	And those pushing the theory, those pushing the theory claim the official narrative was protected by a complicit media loyal to the Democratic Party, and hostile to anything that might vindicate Donald Trump's claim.
	that the Russian narrative was a hoax.
	And they also point to the speed with which fact checkers shut down the rich wiki leaks link.
	I mean it was incredible and the immediate retraction by Fox News and the media's coordinated efforts to paint the story as baseless, even though figures like Donna Brazil later admitted in her book that she feared for her own safety after Rich's death.
	On the other hand, on the other hand, critics of the conspiracy note that much of the initial reporting was built on hearsay and retracted statements or second hand accounts.
	And no hard evidence has ever emerged to prove Rich had any contact with WikiLeaks.
	Now further, this is a court.
	Court documents and investigations confirmed that Russian GRU hackers using aliases like Guccifer two point zero were the true source of the email dump.
	So why does the theory endure?
	Because it represents for many, a symbol of everything wrong with institutional America.
	A young insider possibly trying to do the right thing, gunned down in suspicious circumstances while the media and law enforcement and political elites rush to declare the case shut, closed, that's it.
	The fact that the case remains unsolved, that the surveillance footage was never made public, that the FBI initially claimed that it had no records and later admitted to having documents only deepens, only deepens and makes more obvious the public skepticism.
	Then there's the Hannity angle, when the story began to attract serious heat, The rich family's pushback became a line in the sand for Fox.
	Hannity was told by executives, look, stop this, stop discussing the case.
	Okay.
	Some claim advertisers threatened to pull support.
	Why?
	He complied briefly, but the damage was done.
	The suggestion, the suggestion that a major news organization could be pressured into silence over a murder case involving potential political corruption only fueled suspicions.
	While Hannity later shifted focus those weeks of coverage permanently embedded and seared the name of Seth Rich in the pantheon of unsolved political mysteries.
	Even today now, independent journalists and digital sleuths continue to comb through FOIA documents and forensic timelines and email metadata, trying to square the official account with what they say as deliberate obfuscation.
	The rich family, for their part, has remained consistent.
	They reject all conspiracy theories, that word again.
	And they've pleaded with the public to let their son rest in peace.
	And their grief is undeniable and understandable.
	And their resistance to having Seth's name politicized is understandable.
	We get that.
	Yet this too raises questions.
	Why block?
	Why block attempts to investigate the murder of your son?
	Why not demand answers more aggressively?
	Some say it's trauma.
	Others say it's fear.
	Others whisper that, you know, behind the scenes someone wanted this story silenced permanently.
	What we know now is still troubling.
	No arrests have been made, no solid suspects have been identified, and no surveillance footage ever released.
	The public has not seen Rich's laptop.
	WikiLeaks never confirmed or denied whether Rich was a source.
	The FBI's partial records.
	Good luck with the FBI records.
	See how that Epstein thing went.
	But anyway, their partial records are now declassified in part.
	and they show internal discussions about the case, but little else.
	The one thing that is certain is that Seth Rich died in a manner that defies easy explanation.
	And his name became a battlefield in a much larger war over truth and power and media and accountability in the twenty first century.
	Now whether he was a whistleblower or a random victim or something else entirely, the fact that we still don't know is itself a scandal.
	And here's what's happening.
	As you know, when America gets bored with something because we have the attention span of a gnat, that's it.
	And then the sheer persistence of the issue lends credence, lends a note to the belief or the suggestion that it's lunacy to even be suggesting it, that it's crazy talk to be suggesting it, that it's nuts.
	That it's lunacy.
	What are you doing?
	Let it go.
	You're crazy.
	And once that word, again, conspiracy theory, which is, as I've been telling you for years, it's the wrong word.
	A conspiracy merely is the organization between two or more guilty people.
	It doesn't mean that a story is crazy.
	But it's still used.
	And we become allergic to it.
	And it's like a it's like a dog whistle or something.
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