The murder of Seth Rich in Washington DC sparked a slew of conspiracy theories tying the tragedy to the DNC, Wikileaks, and the 2016 election. But behind the scenes, a grieving family was left bereft of answers and vulnerable to bad actors. Andy Kroll, a reporter for Pro Publica, joins us to discuss his latest book on the matter.
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Welcome, listener, to Chapter 201 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Death on W Street episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
In the early morning of July 10, 2016, a young DNC staffer named Seth Rich was gunned down in the streets of Washington, D.C.
The murder remains unsolved.
But for years after his death, conspiracy theorists claim that Rich was murdered for sending DNC emails to WikiLeaks.
There is zero substance to these claims.
Credible analysts and investigations revealed that the DNC was hacked by Russian agents.
But variations of this conspiracy theory were promoted by anonymous internet trolls, grifters who pose as investigative journalists, Alex Jones, Julian Assange himself, the Mooney-owned newspaper The Washington Times, a notorious D.C.
lobbyist, a Texas-based wealth manager, a private investigator, Marjorie Taylor Greene before she was elected to Congress, and Russian propagandists.
The Seth Rich conspiracy theory also became key components of both the Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracy theories.
The full, sprawling, complex story is told in the upcoming book, A Death on W Street, The Murder of Seth Rich in the Age of Conspiracy.
I'm joined now by his author, ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll.
Andy, congrats on the book and thank you for taking time to join us today.
Thanks for having me, guys.
It's a real pleasure.
Now, you wrote some really long, fascinating pieces about the Seth Rich story for Rolling Stone.
What drew you to the story?
And what made you feel compelled to devote the time to give it a book-length treatment?
My interest in this story goes basically all the way back to the days after Seth was murdered in July of 2016, just like you said in the intro.
I live in Washington, D.C.
I was living here at the time.
I had a lot of friends in common with Seth Rich, weirdly enough.
We kind of ran in similar social circles, liked the same bars, went to some of the same parties.
I even Played on a crappy weekend soccer team that he played on as well.
In fact, I still do to this day.
So there was this initial personal connection, really, to this story.
A very simple human reaction of, holy crap, I know this guy.
He was just killed.
It's on the news.
My friends are sending me messages about it.
This is terrible.
And of course, learning more that he'd been walking home from a bar at four o'clock in the morning, a bar that I had gone to myself, you know, there was a little bit of a, that could have been me feeling there as well.
So there was this initial personal connection to that and seeing my friends react, some of them grieving during this process.
And of course, I thought that after a few weeks or a few months, that would be the end of it.
That would be, The story of Seth Rich would end on this really tragic note, but that his family could grieve, could have some peace, some quiet.
They could do what they needed to do to process this horrible thing.
And of course, as we all know, the opposite happens.
It becomes this.
Political phenomenon this online meme this viral sensation and at some point I can't really put my finger on when but at some point, you know my my sort of basic DC guy brain turned off and my investigative reporters brain turned on and I thought well, wait a minute like this is what I do for a living try to figure out why the hell something is happening in the news and And from there, I just, you know, started following this story and writing about it and writing about Fox's coverage, writing about the family's lawsuits, writing about the impact on this family, the impact on the people who knew Seth, worked with Seth, in some cases, people that I knew personally before all this stuff had even happened.
So from there, it was just a natural, you know, progression to just trying to get to the bottom of why this would happen and why this would happen to Seth, of all people.
And the reason this became a book I mean, I kind of knew pretty early on that it would probably become a book.
There are just so many different characters in this thing, and different plot lines, and different, you know, stories within stories.
There's so many people in this book that it just felt like, having written long stories myself, I couldn't fit all of this into even a tediously long magazine story.
That this felt like a TV show or a movie and it just needed that more kind of narrative treatment and you know that's what I try to do with the book is to weave all this stuff together and tell this most kind of complete definitive story that I could.
Yeah, what I really enjoyed about the book is sort of the humane portrait of Seth Rich and the Rich family.
You know, his tragic death, it spawns so much nonsense.
It can sometimes be easy to forget that these events involve a life cut short in a mourning family.
In the book, Seth Rich comes across as like really gregarious and a sincere guy who is passionate about democracy.
So he says, you know, you had kind of like a, you traveled sort of in the same circles, but what did you learn about the real Seth Rich while researching the book?
The Seth that I came to understand through reporting the book, and that's from talking to his friends, his parents, his brother, former girlfriends, people who went to college with anyone who would talk to me after overcoming that initial bit of skepticism as so many did, as so many people felt when someone approached them to talk about Seth.
What came through was someone whose identity, his personality, his motivations, had been completely lost in all of the conspiratorial
aftermath, the Reddit threads, and the Fox News segments, and all of that nonsense. You
know, it had this effect of sort of flattening who Seth was to a meme or a hashtag or, you
know, this one photo of him that was his DNC headshot where he's wearing this suit and kind of a
colorful tie.
That was the photo that got passed around and he kind of got, you know, reduced to these really simple things.
And that's just not who he was as a guy.
I mean, he was really friendly.
He was the kind of guy who if he was at a party and he saw someone in a corner who was standing by themselves, like Seth was the one who went over there and said, who are you?
I'm Seth.
Who do you know here?
What are you doing here?
You know, making someone feel like they're, they're part of the group.
He just had that, that extrovert gene in a way that like, frankly, I don't.
That's just not who I am.
So I always kind of admired that he had that in him.
And he also had this This love of country and patriotism.
I mean, if you followed this story at all, people might have seen these memes of him getting passed around or photos of him where he's wearing head-to-toe Stars and Stripes outfits.
This was a thing he did.
He would, every 4th of July, buy a new article of Stars and Stripes clothing.
To the point that the 4th of July before he was killed, I think he basically ran out of clothing to actually wear, and so he was buying a beer koozie, I think it was, or a bow tie, something like that, because he had pretty much exhausted all his options.
And you know, I've been that guy who, you know, wears like patriotic whatever, clothes on the 4th of July to go to some friend's party.
I mean, I think for years I had a t-shirt that I remember buying at a vendor outside
the White House that said, "Osama got Obama'd."
It was like this tongue-in-cheek thing about Barack Obama and the Osama bin Laden raid
and all of that.
I kind of wore it as like a ha ha ha, aren't I funny?
But it wasn't funny to Seth.
He truly believed this stuff.
He truly believed that the country was at its best when everyone was voting.
It didn't matter who they voted for, but as long as they were voting, participating in democracy, getting involved, he really had a kind of almost an old-school belief in that stuff that, you know, I feel like has as a result kind of tempered my sort of journalistic cynicism and, you know, irony about these kinds of things, you know.
There was no irony for him in this realm.
He was a total true believer, which was why he went to work at the DNC, which was where he was working when he was killed.
You know, one popular variation of the conspiracy theory around Seth Rich was that he was a Bernie Sanders supporter who uncovered corruption at the DNC, and it shocked him so much that he hacked and leaked internal emails to WikiLeaks.
And then assassins tied to the Clintons or the DNC killed him for this transgression.
Now, it's obviously ludicrous, but what's interesting, what I learned from your book is that people who knew Seth Rich personally thought that This suggestion was preposterous, like on its face, just based upon knowing the kind of person Seth Rich was.
So this passage in particular was interesting to me.
To anyone who knew Seth well or worked closely with him, the idea that he was a criminal mastermind who had hacked the DNC from the inside was laughable.
He sometimes locked himself out of his own email account.
A friend had to teach him how to use Twitter.
Andrew Terrio had given Seth a book on how to learn a coding language known as Python, but it looked like Seth never opened the book.
He wasn't good enough to grab the data that they think he grabbed to uncover a conspiracy that could not have existed without me knowing about it.
Pratt Wiley, his old boss, would later say, I'm glad people are projecting his skills as superhuman, but that's not the Seth that I paid every week.
The supposed motive for his theoretical crime, that Seth was a Sanders supporter who wanted to expose Clinton's corruption, didn't make sense either.
Seth took the DNC's neutrality so seriously, he refused to tell his friends or family members which candidate he preferred.
He did make his feelings known about Trump, whom he called a, quote, giant orange baby, according to a friend from high school.
He liked some of the policies Sanders had proposed, he told Mary, but he knew there was no realistic way to pay for all of it.
Plus, if he were such a Sanders diehard, why would he have wanted a job on the Clinton campaign?
In the event he did have a grievance with the DNC or the Clintons, his parents believed that Seth's patriotism, his love of country and democracy, meant he would have shared those concerns through the appropriate channels, not by committing a massive crime against his own employer.
I mean, that's especially interesting in terms of, like, I remember reading, like, all of the various nonsense stories about Seth Rich and about, like, what he did and why he did it, and it seems like, I mean, they're just based upon nothing at all.
It was just based upon a projection of, like, these sorts of conspiracy theorists about who they thought Seth Rich ought to be.
One thing I tried to figure out in the process of doing this book was where did all this stuff come from?
Where did the Seth was a Bernie bro who wanted to expose the DNC that he was some kind of whistleblower or disgruntled insider who was going to pull off this audacious hack of his own employer?
Where did this come from?
And why did people believe this?
How did it stay alive?
When, you know, as I write in the book, there's just no evidence whatsoever in support of I mean, so many of these different strains or variations.
Of the theories about Seth.
I mean, another reason the Bernie one, you know, never really checked out or made sense.
I mean, Seth was from Nebraska.
He was from a red state.
He grew up in the political minority of sorts because he was a lifelong Democrat.
In a state that was overwhelmingly Republican, and that made him pretty much a pragmatist, you know, maybe even, you know, someone who I don't think he would call himself a centrist, because I think he did believe he had progressive ideals.
And I think he did appreciate what Bernie was trying to do by putting some of these bigger, more ambitious ideas into the conversation.
But at the end of the day, Seth would tell Mary, as Mary later told me, Mary being his mom, of course, that, you know, Seth just didn't believe in his own mind that that Bernie could get elected.
And so he, you know, right away, he wasn't someone agitating on the inside or secretly tweeting about Bernie, because he just, you know, he didn't think that Bernie was going to make it into the presidency.
Now, of course, we can debate that all day long if we want, but, you know, no one took the time who spread these theories about Seth and Bernie to just think about it for five seconds, that this guy is from this red state, that he's working at the DNC, which is as, you know, as much the establishment as any other institution in democratic politics.
And, you know, all that just kind of got swept aside in these theories about Seth.
And these theories, you know, When I went back and retraced them, I kind of started to think of myself as a social media archaeologist of sorts.
I'm sure you guys have done this too in research for the podcast and other stuff you've done.
You know, it's hard to like go back and find old tweets or old Reddit threads.
I mean, obviously, R. Donald is basically impossible.
Now that they, you know, that they nuked it.
But as I was going back and with my, you know, imaginary little brush trying to find stuff about Seth, what I found incredible was just how quickly this stuff sprung up.
We're talking within hours, maybe even less, of the DNC announcing that he'd been killed on the Monday after it had happened.
You see these tweets, Reddit threads, Facebook posts, you name it, just springing up all over the place with all kinds of different variations on the theory.
Mostly though, The sort of disgruntled Bernie fan who was trying to, I don't know, expose the Clintons or something.
It was always amazing to me how fast it happened and that people just, their first instinct was to kind of jump to something nefarious, something conspiratorial, criminal, you know, right from the get-go.
I mean, Seth hadn't even been buried yet.
He was still, his body was still in the morgue here in D.C.
and these rumors were flying around, which is, to this day, is still incredible to me.
You know, I think that a lot of these conspiracy theorists, they work backwards.
You know, there's a death of a young staffer on the DNC.
Well, they know that it must be something nefarious.
They know that it has to be, you know, that the Clintons had him murdered.
So they work backwards and they go, OK, well, why would the Clintons have had him murdered?
Well, he must have been, you know, a disgruntled Bernie guy or something like that.
You know, it's They're looking for an explanation for a story that they've already made true in their minds, and it's just a matter of figuring out, okay, well, what could possibly have been the reason for the DNC to murder him, as opposed to what's the possible reason for him to be murdered, you know?
Yeah, I mean, it seems like he believed in the DNC's neutrality maybe more than the upper ranks of the DNC itself.
You know, this man seemed to have a kind of idealistic vision of the DNC as an institution.
So, you know, and he sounds like he had a profound kind of love for electoralism, that he thought the vote was the solution, and all this stuff.
So, it just doesn't I mean, obviously, like you said, we could debate all day that kind of stuff, but if we're looking at him and his own motivations, it just doesn't fit.
If you want to know, too, another little detail about how Seth thought about politics and the kind of cultural influences that he was stewing in, the guy loved The West Wing, the Aaron Sorkin Show.
Right.
And obviously, today, you watch The West Wing and you think, this is the most anachronistic, you know, Soft focus, naive Hollywood portrayal of politics that could possibly exist.
And you watch it and you think, like, no way could this be made in these times that we're in.
And it just feels like a relic.
From another time.
Seth loved West Wing.
He had watched the entire show, all seasons, whatever it is, eight seasons, and there's like, what, 20 episodes, 25 episodes a season?
It's unbelievable.
He had watched this entire, the entire West Wing catalog multiple times.
He would play the West Wing on a spare monitor at the DNC, his boss Pratt Wiley told me.
It's like background noise.
You know, Jed Bartlett in the back, you know, in his big headphones as he's like cleaning up, you know, some state's voter file or as he's like feeding data to the lawyers on the voter integrity team.
And that, to me, always just kind of helped explain some of the love of patriotism, the love of country, the sense of patriotism, You know, the almost kind of old school nature of it is like, this guy loved West Wing and this was like a touchstone for him.
Whereas like today I would say, yeah, Veep feels more like my political cultural touchstone than anything else.
But that was huge for him.
And I think it does help explain some of this and just to kind of explain who he was and how he fit into this bigger political world, the DNC, you know, this whole mess of 2016.
You know, as you write in the book, it's been sometimes difficult for reporters to speak to Seth Rich's parents, Mary and Joel Rich, because of ongoing litigation.
They, along with Seth Rich's brother, Aaron Rich, have been through hell, really, because of all these false accusations.
They pleaded with people to stop spreading falsehoods in 2017 in the Washington Post article, but those pleas obviously were not heeded.
But you did get an opportunity to sit down and get to know the Riches.
So what'd you learn about, like, the Rich family while writing the book?
Well, this was one of the reasons I wanted to do this as a book in the first place.
I knew that this story was going to go on for a while.
I knew that the parents, Joel and Mary, and Aaron, Seth's brother, his only brother, were involved in this litigation, and that it was going to be some time before they could really open up about this experience, and I wanted to be there when they could.
wanted to be there when they could finally sit down across from me and really tell me
in as much detail as they could stomach what it was like to go through all of this.
And they did. And I have spent an enormous amount of time with Joel, Mary, and Aaron.
They've been, they were really generous for the book and just so willing to revisit every
chapter of this nightmare of the last five or six years for them in a way that honestly,
I was kind of amazed and was thankful for the moment, You know, Joel and Mary are salt-of-the-earth Midwestern people.
I'm obviously partial to that because I'm from Michigan, so I'm a Midwest guy myself, but they are, you know, you won't find nicer, more generous people than the two of them.
I mean, I mentioned in the book that at one point, I mean, Mary loves to send people gifts to say thank you, or if you've got a, you know, you just got married, or you have some big life event, just a kid or something, She will immediately send you a box of Omaha steaks, or she'll send you these chocolate-covered cherry things that I don't even know what they're called.
And she just wants you to know that she's thinking of you.
She tried to send a box of steaks to the federal prosecutor who was, for a time, investigating the murder, and Joel had to tell her, like, actually, Mary, we can't.
Send gifts to the Assistant U.S.
Attorneys who are investigating homicides.
But, you know, we appreciate the gesture.
And, you know, don't worry.
Prosecutor Deb Sines knows that you're thankful for the work that she's doing.
And Joel is, you know, he is much more sort of laid back and, you know, a man of few words.
Whereas Mary's a big talker.
She'll talk your ear off.
Uh, also a night owl, Mary, like Seth, but you know, they're really sweet people who had no experience or really even understanding at all of all of the sort of corners of the internet.
Where their son became this kind of folk hero, MAGA martyr, brave whistleblower.
All of that in air quotes, obviously.
Like, they didn't know what Reddit was.
They didn't use Twitter.
They certainly didn't know how to use Twitter to go searching for stuff about Seth.
They certainly didn't know what rthedonald was or...
Any of these other subreddits where people were debating Seth and using rallying cries like, you know, his name was Seth Rich.
So all of this was sort of a double whammy for them because they're just coming to grips with these sort of online spaces even existing in the first place.
And at the same time, they are reading them to see what people are saying about Seth.
And of course, they're reading them and then they're thinking, well, what the hell is all this?
Seth wasn't any of these things.
Here are hundreds of thousands of people claiming that he was so it was a really It was a really confusing chaotic mindfuck of a experience for them To have to go through all this Aaron Seth's brother is much more technically savvy.
I mean he works for a A federal contractor, he's a computer guy.
He, you know, likes to say that, you know, he prefers the language of coding to the English language.
And, you know, long interviews with reporters like me aren't his specialty.
But he was the one who, in a lot of cases, was the first person to see that Seth was going viral on some social media platform.
Or to see that these email notifications were somehow popping up on Seth's old Gmail or on old devices, phone numbers of Seth's, when people were at one point trying to figure out how they could get access to Seth's social media accounts or potentially even his email after he had been killed.
And Aaron is the one who's sort of the frontline defender of this sort of stuff.
So it was a whole different experience for him as well.
So it's been, you know, it was a harrowing six years for them and just plunging them into this world that they didn't really know about or understand or ever want to know existed.
But they had to, because they felt they had to defend Seth.
Even though he wasn't alive, there was a name and a memory, a reputation that they thought they needed to step up and protect.
And that's what they did for many years.
Now, Seth Rich conspiracy theories started as idle speculation from online conspiracists.
They're usually based upon previous sort of like Clinton body count conspiracy theories, but they got a lot of help thanks to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.
And what really helped kick it off was a really extraordinary interview that Assange did with a Dutch television program.
Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks.
There's a 27 year old that works for the DNC who was shot in the back, murdered just two weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington.
That was just a robbery I believe, wasn't it?
No, there's no finding.
What are you suggesting?
I'm suggesting that our sources take risks and they become concerned to see things occurring like that.
But was he one of your sources then?
I mean...
We don't comment on who our sources are.
But why make the suggestion about a young guy being shot in the streets of Washington?
Because we have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States
and that our sources are...
You know, our sources face serious risks.
That's why they come to us, so we can protect their anonymity.
But it's quite something to suggest a murder.
That's basically what you're doing.
Well, others have suggested that we are investigating to understand what happened in that situation with Seth Rich.
We've talked about this clip before and it was really, I mean, kind of wild.
WikiLeaks later continued to sort of fan the flames of Seth Rich conspiracy theories by offering a $20,000 reward for the investigation.
So what's your take on that particular interview and sort of WikiLeaks' later involvement in this conspiracy theory?
It's really a masterclass in obfuscation and dangling the possibility of something that Assange knew would create news cycles, knew would get attention, without really ever coming out and saying it exactly, and without any kind of regard for How this statement would affect the parents of Seth Rich, the brother of Seth Rich, friends, family, anyone who knew him.
The context of when Nassanj makes this comment is really critical.
It's early August 2016.
Seth had been shot and killed about a month earlier.
And as I found when I again went back and was looking through all the old social media data, Looking at the tweets, kind of tracking how often people were talking about Seth after he'd been killed.
The conspiracy theories, the little different versions of them online, had actually quieted down quite a bit by that point.
There wasn't the same kind of chatter on August 8th or August 9th.
The two days before the Assange interview that there was, say, on July 11th, 12th, 13th, the days after Seth had been killed.
And I know from talking to Aaron Rich that there was a feeling in the family that, okay, there had been a brief spike in online craziness, but we're through the worst of it.
We should be able to kind of have that privacy, that time to kind of process and grieve that we didn't get A month earlier in July and then Assange comes along and makes this comment dangling Seth's name in such a way that it just stokes the speculation.
I mean, I sort of charted all the mentions of Seth's name on Twitter and the day of the Assange interview and the day after, it's like an earthquake.
On social media, it just spikes off the chart, the amount of people talking about Seth, the amount of people putting his name in hashtags, spreading these theories.
Assange is really the first spike and really the first big name in politics, culture, media, technology, you name it, to send these mentions of Seth and to send the speculation just off the charts.
And really from there, you see these theories about Seth kind of change from what I guess you could call organic, you know, people who were thinking about the Clinton body count or thinking about some other, you know, theory or pre-existing concept of democratic politics, Those were the folks right after Seth had been killed.
But after Assange, that's when Roger Stone tweets about Seth.
That's when Fox News first talks about Seth on air.
Eric Bolling, host at Fox at the time, later that night after the Assange interview, You know, he says, this was a hit.
There's no way this was a robbery.
This was a hit.
And so, in a lot of ways, Assange is a real driver of all these conspiracy theories.
And I tried like hell to talk to him for the book.
Spent a lot of time going back and forth with one of his lawyers in London, a woman named Jennifer Robinson.
And a lawyer for Aaron Rich, actually, flew over to London to talk with the same lawyer for Assange.
And just to try to Get the smallest statement out of Assange that, you know, Seth was not the source.
Aaron was not the source.
You know, I might have said that stuff then, but it was never meant to be taken as that Seth and or Aaron, as some people will later claim, were the sources for WikiLeaks.
And they wouldn't do it.
Assange wouldn't do it, I think, from what Assange's lawyer said.
They kind of sympathize with the riches but would never set the record straight despite playing such a pivotal role early on with that interview that you just showed in a couple after in sort of stoking this conspiracy theory really early on.
Yeah, there are a lot of colorful characters who turn the murder of Seth Rich into the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, and one of them is the DC lobbyist Jack Berkman.
And I love the way you describe Berkman in the book, because he comes across as someone who is simultaneously clownish and ridiculous, but also very savvy and perceptive.
Once he started his lobbying business, he launched a radio show called Behind the Curtain and bought airtime on a Spanish-language AM station.
In 2014, when University of Missouri linebacker Michael Sam became the first openly gay football player drafted by an NFL team, Berkman called a press conference and unveiled a bill he said he was preparing to ban gay NFL players.
It was a cruel ploy and a farce.
Private citizens can't introduce legislation any more than a turkey sandwich can run for president.
But the press conference had the intended effect, leading to dozens of news stories and mentions on TV, most of them negative.
Berkman's brother, who is gay, called it, quote, an attention grab and a media grab to pander to those folks who pay him to lobby on their behalf.
But any attention, it seemed, was better than obscurity.
No spotlight was too small for Jack Berkman.
He also seemed to grasp that a fundamental change had taken place in how the news media operated.
Gone were the days when reporters fought over scarce column inches in a print newspaper that came out once a day.
Now, in the internet age, reporters had an endless news hole to fill and were forever in search of something to write about.
At the same time, the social media platforms directed increasing numbers of readers to news outlets whose stories generated buzz, usually by stoking outrage or fear.
Berkman may not have been the most impressive lobbyist, but he understood what it took to get attention in the era of endless news.
So, how did Berkman first get involved with the Rich Family and the Seth Rich conspiracy theories?
Berkman comes along in September of 2016, a couple of months after Seth had been killed.
In the most Berkman-esque way possible, a publicity stunt.
He comes out of nowhere and announces via a press release.
He was always sending out press releases, still is.
And then a brief appearance on the local morning news show, offering a reward for information about who'd killed Seth.
I think it was more than $100,000 at that point.
And if you listen to the things he said early on, You can kind of understand how the Rich family might see him as at least a semi-honest operator.
He doesn't talk about a disgruntled insider who maybe hacked the DNC.
He doesn't parrot what Julian Assange had said a couple of weeks earlier in his different interviews dangling Seth's name.
Berkman basically comes forward and says, it's really tragic what's happened to Seth Rich and what his family are going through.
I'm a good Samaritan.
I'm going to put this money out there.
We're going to get this police investigation ramped up, and we're going to solve this case.
He really does put himself forward as a good Samaritan who just wants to help this family go through the worst possible tragedy that any family could go through.
He quickly reveals himself to be this publicity-seeking, you know, only-in-DC, stranger-than-fiction kind of character who, any chance he gets to be behind a microphone with a set of reporters in front of him, he jumps at.
And eventually, the Rich family realizes that, you know, it seems like this Berkman guy is More motivated by getting clips in the news, getting, you know, TV appearances, seeing his name in print than he is like actually trying to help us solve this case.
And then, you know, the final straw really was Berkman, in search again of attention, starts giving interviews to like InfoWars.
About the rich case and about his involvement and how commerce needs to step in and investigate.
And of course, at that point, you know, Berkman had gone through the looking glass and the riches had to cut ties with him.
You know, one thing that people have asked me is, why did Joel and Mary ever associate themselves with this guy?
Why would they have ever gotten within a mile of Jack Berkman, let alone stood next to him at a press conference, which they did after the election in 2016.
And what I always tell people is, again, Joel and Mary are not DC people.
They're not Beltway insiders.
Their son may have been pretty entrenched in politics, but that's not who they were.
And they didn't know Jack Berkman from Adam.
They had no clue what to expect from this guy.
All they knew was that.
At a time when the police investigation seemed to have stalled out, there hadn't been any arrests announced, there hadn't been any persons of interest put out into the world.
Here was someone coming forward and saying, I want to help and I'll put up money to do it.
And that's the thing that mattered to them.
That is what got them connected with Berkman and why they trusted him for five or six months there.
And it was hard for them to cut ties with him in the end, even though he had gone off and done all these clownish things, because they still believe that, oh, maybe he is looking out for our interests.
Maybe he does want to find who killed Seth.
And it was hard for them to come to grips with the fact that Berkman, like so many of these other supposed good Samaritans, had ulterior motives for reaching out to them.
Right, it's like your son was murdered.
If a salamander came forward and said, I'm going to get to the bottom of this, I'm going to put up my money, you're going to go with it because you're hoping maybe that anybody spending time, effort, and finances on this is going to bring you more information or bring you some closure.
In a lot of ways, it's so slimy, you know, looking back on it, what Berkman did, taking advantage of that and maybe taking advantage of the fact that Seth's parents, you know, weren't really DC insiders and, you know, had any kind of frame of reference to sort of judge his character.
and use it for his own, you know, use it for his own sort of political, you know, media
sort of image.
I mean, it's, ah, this whole thing is just, it's so slimy.
Yeah, and if they had been around for what came next with Berkman, I mean, it's like,
yeah, I think his stuff with wool and all that, it's just like a series of dropping
your pants in public and stumbling over.
Very literally, actually, one time he had his fly open, so.
I think anybody in DC could have told them, do not trust this clown.
Um, you know, even if he did mean well, he's insanely incompetent.
Um, but yeah, I mean, this is just, you know, this kind of, um, absolutely nihilistic and opportunistic DC mindset, uh, of exploitation, you know, where it's like, oh, well, I've found an angle.
Um, and yeah, Berkman unfortunately was, I mean, somehow sub Roger Stone, uh, type of human being.
The other thing about Berkman to understand for people who have followed parts of his story, especially the Jacob Wohl era and all of the completely laughable, ridiculous, insane 2020 election stunts like Elizabeth Warren's, you know, Secret lover, or Mayor Pete's, I think, also secret lover, or some other disgruntled something or whatever.
It's hard to keep track.
You know, a friend of mine put it well when I was talking about Berkman not too long ago, which was, you know, Jack Berkman, at the time he reached out to Joel and Mary Rich, was not capital J, capital B, Jack Berkman.
Like, he became the Jack Berkman that we know and that has become this Kind of laughing stock and perennial ham-handed stunt person through the course of this book, through the events in this book.
I mean, he had done the Michael Sam, you know, homophobic thing back in 2014, but there wasn't really that much out there on him before that.
All of this stuff came afterward.
And that is what I think I had to remind people.
He wasn't Jack Bruckman back then.
He was just a guy.
He was a lobbyist.
There's tons of lobbyists in D.C.
More colorful than most?
But the obvious are a wild bunch anyway.
It's only through the course of this story that by 2020, you know, he and Jacob Wohl are like wandering around the Capitol with a bullhorn on January 6th looking for the action, which wasn't really that hard to find, but leave it to Jack and Jacob to try to, you know, get lost on the day of the insurrection.
It happens in the course of the story.
And Joel and Mary were at the very, very start of this.
And so it's another reason why I don't think anyone can begrudge them or question, like, why would you have allowed this guy anywhere near you?
Well, he was just a guy that clearly had some money to spare and wanted to put it up.
And so they thought if anything would help find who killed Seth, we want to do it because we want answers.
Another big player who helped the Seth Rich conspiracy theories get traction was Ed Butowsky.
So he is a Texas wealth manager who has been a vocal supporter of President Trump.
He's been on Fox and conservative talk radio, Breitbart News and other outlets.
He reached out to help the rich family with the investigation into the murder, but in a recorded phone call conversation, he seems to reveal that his true motives were something different.
Butowski had a conversation with the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in which Hersh claims that he heard from an FBI source The most important thing is this.
made contact with WikiLeaks.
Hirsch later walked back these comments claiming that he was just fishing for information from
Butowsky.
But during this conversation, Butowsky sounds excited because he thinks that the Seth Rich
story could help prevent the Trump presidency from being delegitimized.
"The most important thing is this.
Everyone, there's so many people throughout Trump's four years and maybe eight years
are always going to fall back on."
on the idea that he's not legitimate and the Russians got him elected.
This changes all of that.
I think it's kind of a handy summary of why Seth Rich conspiracy theories got so much traction.
But what was Ed Butowsky's role and interest in the Seth Rich conspiracy theory?
Butowsky comes along at an interesting point in the story.
It's the end of 2016.
The rich family is starting to realize that the first Good Samaritan, who came out of nowhere offering to help them, Jack Barkman, is not exactly who he has claimed to be.
And he's not only not helping them with the police investigation,
but is actually adding to the conspiracy theories, going on Infowars and pulling all kinds
of different Seth Rich related stunts.
So the family is coming to the realization that they've got to cut ties with this guy, Berkman.
It's not a good look for them.
It's probably setting back the cause of trying to get some closure for the murder.
And at the same time that they are doing this, this fellow Ed Butowski, he's a financier in Texas.
He's on Fox News, Fox Business.
He's kind of a talking head type, sort of a business influencer, if you will.
He comes out of nowhere and he says, I want to help you.
I think I know some things or know some people who know some things and, you know, I, you know, we should talk.
And the family's kind of like, oh, you know, we just had this bad experience with Jack Berkman.
Don't really know this guy.
He's, you know, a fixture on Fox Business Network and sometimes on Fox News.
Like, do we really want to do this again?
And they kind of brush him off and they kind of think, you know, let's just keep this guy at arm's length.
We don't necessarily need to engage with him.
But Patowski is persistent and right around the same time that The family is telling Jack Berkman, hey, stop talking about us.
Stop talking about Seth.
We want nothing to do with you.
We're going our separate ways.
Goodbye.
Butowski comes to Joel and Mary and Aaron with an idea.
He says, I want to help you get closure here.
I want to help you find who killed Seth.
And I know a private investigator who's in D.C.
who used to work for the Metropolitan Police Department in D.C.
I will hire him.
He will help you.
I know you're frustrated, Joel and Mary, that the police haven't found the killer yet.
This guy, this PI, his name is Rod Wheeler, he is going to help you.
And the riches find themselves in this place, again, where someone has come out of nowhere, sort of seized on this grief and this uncertainty that is just sort of defining their lives at that point.
and offering to help them. They're very skeptical. They don't know who this guy is,
but he really convinces them that he will pay for this PI, that he's not going to do anything else.
He's not going to talk about the case. He's not going to meddle with it. He's not going to go
running to the press with it. He just wants to help them.
He just wants to do this for them because he feels bad for the riches. And Joe and Mary feel
like they get enough of an assurance from this guy, Wachowski, that it can only help. And again,
the thing that matters most to them is finding who killed Seth.
It is this, you know, open wound for them that cannot heal without some kind of clarity, some kind of closure.
And so, they agree to sign a contract with Rod Wheeler, the private investigator that Batowsky recommended.
And they agree to go along with this and hope that really just to say, you know, Rod, go out, go forth, help us find some answers, help us find some tips, something.
And maybe, you know, this will work out and we'll finally get that answer that we're looking for.
And, you know, as I write in the book, what really happens is at the same time that Butowsky is talking to the Riches and all that, there is a whole different back channel going on where he's working with a reporter at Fox News and also the P.I., Rod Wheeler, to try to bring into fruition, really, a story that says Seth Rich was the source for WikiLeaks.
To put that story out into the world, a story that would, as Ed himself said in that clip, that would, you know, let President Trump off the hook.
That would completely, quote-unquote, destroy the Russia, Russian interference in 2016.
Hoax, as the President at the time, President Trump put it.
That basically would change the narrative entirely.
It would be this massive, massive story.
Uh, and the riches know nothing about this, but they, you know, they just think that Ed came out of nowhere to help them get answers.
Just like Jack Berkman had initially.
And of course the, the, the, the involvement with Petoskey blows up in a huge way when this, this Fox news story comes out in May of 2017.
Yeah.
That, um, that, that story you're talking about is the one by a reporter, Malia Zimmerman.
Uh, so that was a real debacle.
So, I mean, how did that Zimmerman report come about?
And like, what was it sort of like impact and its fallout?
Yeah, so you have Butowski talking with Joel and Mary Rich and urging them to hire this private investigator that Butowski would pay for himself to try to get answers.
And then you have this completely different track that Joel and Mary don't know anything about.
That is Ed Butowski, Malia Zimmerman, a reporter at Fox News.
And Rod Wheeler, and they're basically trying to put together a story that says Seth Rich was the DNC leak source, not Russia, because obviously this would be the ultimate gift to President Trump and would demolish the, you know, what the critics call the Russia hoax.
And it would completely, really change the course of recent history if you step back and think about it.
All these very fundamental facts that intelligence agencies and congressional investigations and cybersecurity experts and analysts of all sorts say happened, Russian interference in the election, was actually fake and that instead it was this 27-year-old DNC staffer who pulled this off.
And they worked together, Butowsky, Zimmerman, the Fox reporter, and Wheeler, Trying to put together this story that, you know, confirms a thesis.
You know, the thesis came first.
The sense that Seth did this seemed to come first.
In the making of this story, and then they were racing to try to find evidence of some kind that would confirm it.
And it leads to this story, May 16th, 2017, front page of Fox News, front page of the Drudge Report, totally viral story, saying that it was Seth, that he was the source.
And the sources in that story are an anonymous federal investigator, And Rod Wheeler, the PI that the Rich family thought they had hired to help them solve the murder.
So you can imagine Joel and Mary's shock on May 16, 2017, when the front page of the Judge Report is a photo of Seth Rich, their son, and the banner headline is that Seth had committed this brazen cybercrime in the 2016 election and not Russia, despite the conclusions and the analysis of basically every expert who had looked at it.
And what follows is just like a week of chaos.
In the book, you know, I kind of slow down for this one week in May of 2017.
I think it's maybe two or three chapters from everyone's perspectives because it really is one of the climactic moments in the entire Seth Rich story.
Fox News comes out with this huge piece.
It's viral.
It's everywhere online.
People are talking about it on cable news.
It's on Drudge.
It's on obviously Reddit.
R. The Donald is euphoric that this has come out and all of these things they believed have been supposedly proven true.
And then the story falls apart.
The police in D.C.
say it's not true.
The FBI issues a rare denial and says there's nothing to this, which they had also told the Fox reporter in private as well that there was nothing to it.
The story basically implodes, Fox News scrambles to figure out what happened, what went wrong, really.
And in the end, they retract the story a week later, saying that there's some mealy mouth statement they put up that it didn't receive the scrutiny that we usually apply to all of our reporting on Fox News.
It's one of the biggest scandals in recent history for Fox News that this absolutely bombshell story that had led the news and Sean Hannity had talked about for four or five nights on his show got completely deleted from the internet, retracted.
And it's also a traumatic moment for the Riches and, you know, they basically went into complete rapid response mode in that crazy week in May 2017, trying to do everything they could to show that the story was not accurate and to try to stop this, you know, viral explosion of tweets and memes and stories and TV segments that were basically saying, you know, Seth was the source.
Yeah, you describe in the book the impact that Hannity with his, you know, millions of Twitter followers and massive TV audience promoting the Seth Rich conspiracy theories.
So here's the passage that I thought was really, really heartrending.
Mary didn't think her grief could sink any deeper until Sean Hannity amplified the lies.
Mary felt scared beyond anything she could imagine.
She studied the cars that rolled down her block, the drivers who pulled up next to her at red lights.
Speaking to Aaron, she could tell from the sound of his voice that he was exhausted.
Watching the online chatter about his brother surge to the highest levels he'd ever seen, Aaron imagined the day when his future son or daughter would be old enough to Google his brother's name.
Staring at page after page of strange articles and videos, that child would inevitably ask, quote, did my uncle do such a terrible thing?
As they talked, Mary felt so overcome with emotion that she pulled her car to the side of the road.
A moment passed in silence.
Quote, This is worse than when we lost Seth, Aaron said.
Both of them started to cry.
Aaron was right.
The Fox story and everything that had come afterward made her feel like Seth had been murdered again.
And somehow, this felt worse than the original crime.
They were torturing her dead son's memory.
He couldn't defend himself.
And Joel and Mary couldn't defend him either.
They had lost Seth's body the first time, but now it felt like they had lost his soul.
Yeah, really, really terrible stuff.
There's another big promoter of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, which was the organization Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity or VIPS.
And this is an organization that has been around since 2003.
And it was at one point seen as like a thoughtful critic of U.S.
intelligence agencies.
But accounts among its members, the former NSA official Bill Binney, who was a QAnon promoter, who at one point was even on the phone with Ron Watkins, which was revealed by the HBO documentary Q Into the Storm.
Vips produced a memo which cast doubt on the official story regarding the DNC hack.
And you describe sort of like how that all happened in the book.
Was the Russian hack an inside job?
Was the VIPs 50th memo?
And its controversial assertions, which rested almost entirely on the word of a, quote, independent analyst who used to work for IBM and an anonymous source called, quote, the forensicator, had driven a wedge between the members of VIPs.
Thomas Drake, the NSA whistleblower and one of the best-known members of VIPPS, believed the analysis was so shoddy he refused to sign it.
The analysis was premised on the notion that it was impossible to extract all those files and transfer them at such high speeds across the world, so they must have been downloaded from inside the DNC.
Drake ran his own experiment, running a file transfer between his home in Maryland and Eastern Europe, and found he could easily recreate the transfer speeds used by the Russians.
The memo was bogus, Drake declared, quote, a conspiracy theory draped in very thin Gossamer robes, which when pulled aside basically revealed nothing.
The Seth Rich conspiracy theorists seized on the memo as evidence they were right all along.
They especially pointed to the fact that Bill Binney, the legendary NSA whistleblower, had signed the report, giving it his full endorsement, along with a dozen other VIPs members.
The memo earned coverage in right and left-wing media, prompting a long story in The Nation, the 120-year-old liberal magazine.
The Nation article provoked a strong backlash, with many accusing the magazine, whose editorials
had long taken a sympathetic stance toward Vladimir Putin's Russia, of once again minimizing
Russia's aggressions. So that was a really bizarre episode.
So what did you learn about, like, how, you know, VIPs' sort of involvement and impact? I'd
followed VIPs for years leading up to all of the Seth Roach stuff because there had been so many
smart, well-known whistleblowers and critics of the national security state in this country
who had joined VIPs.
Bill Binney, obviously, was one of them.
You know, famous whistleblower for the post 9-11 abuses of the NSA.
Thomas Drake was another.
A whole bunch of others that you could put in that group.
And I thought that, you know, this group needed to exist.
We needed some thoughtful critique of what seems like an ever-expanding intelligence apparatus in Washington and in the federal government.
But when I dug more into this VIPS memo, it felt so much more like, unlike the analyses that VIPS had done in the past, thoughtful, carefully worded, Not going any further than they seem to have in terms of their evidence and it felt like so much of the other stuff I'd seen online whether from Assange or from Reddit threads from all kinds of just online chatter
That had no basis to it.
That had no real data evidence.
You know, VIPPS had fallen down that rabbit hole, and I didn't understand why.
I didn't understand how someone like Bill Binney, who would later, as you said, go on to talk to Ron Watkins and provide sort of supporting evidence in court for Roger Stone at one point, could get sucked into this kind of thing.
I really think it gets back to a sort of basic human Motivation, which is wanting, you know, you have your belief, you have your conclusion, and you just go and seek out the evidence for it.
You want to cherry pick even the thinnest possible data, you know, the least impressive, the least conclusive data from the least reputable source.
But if it confirms what you already believe, Confirms what you want to believe is true.
You grab it and you run with it.
And what was striking to me is just that VIPS was not this kind of operation in the years before this 50th memo came out.
And yet, in this case, this is very much what they did.
And their report was dismantled in that sort of nation backlash.
It was picked apart by actual experts online.
What I will say is really fascinating also about this Binnie episode is that Benny goes on Tucker Carlson's show after that memo comes out to kind of regurgitate the top-line conclusions of the VIPS memo that, you know, based on this really substantive technical analysis, we've decided that it has to have been an inside job and it couldn't have been a hack, and so...
That points toward a DNC insider.
President Trump, of course, watches this Tucker Carlson segment and tells Mike Pompeo, who is the director of the CIA at that time, get this Benny guy into the CIA, find out what he knows, see if this is true.
Because if this is true, this is huge.
And so Bill Binney, who is one of the most well-known intelligence whistleblowers of the 21st century, someone who was more or less persona non grata to the US government based on what he had done as a whistleblower, is ushered into Langley, CIA headquarters, taken through the front doors, doesn't even have to go through the metal detectors, As he later told me when I asked him about all this.
It goes right up to the director's office on the seventh floor where Pompeo and two analysts are waiting and they say, okay, Mr. Binney, tell us your theory.
Tell us why you think we, the CIA, the FBI, basically every other branch of the U.S.
government is wrong and you are right.
And they talk for an hour and, you know, Binney said, well, if you need anything more from me, let me know.
And he never hears from Pompeo again.
But the way that President Trump would see someone on Fox, Pluck them out of that world and send them straight to the CIA.
I just thought captured something so quintessential about Trump and about his administration and just the kind of upside down bizarro world that Trump and his people live in that they would think that this was the way to get the answers.
Oh, this guy's on Fox News.
Tucker seems to think he knows what he's talking about.
Let's get him in here.
That's absolute insanity.
TV president.
Another interesting element of your book is the way in which you describe how people don't just get into the business of spreading conspiracy theories for solely political reasons.
There's also a pretty big financial incentive.
And the most notable of people who seem to, like, do well for themselves by spreading conspiracy theories is a man named Matt Couch, who made some of the most outrageous accusations about Seth Rich and Aaron Rich.
Now, in your book, you describe Matt Couch as kind of like a hustler who just goes from thing to thing before finally landing on being a sort of a political commentator and promoting Seth Rich and getting a big audience from that.
So what was Matt Couch's role in promoting Seth Rich conspiracy theories?
And I mean, what do you think it says about the economics of conspiracism?
Couch, I thought, was the perfect stand-in or embodiment of, you know, these kind of clout chasers that you see on Twitter or you see on Reddit or you see on the other social media platforms.
He was sort of searching for different causes or different, you know, trending stories, right-wing outrages.
If you go back and look at his Twitter, the start of the Trump presidency, you know, he's kind of like a an echo chamber for all things Trump Trumpism all the outrages
all the you know the Trending buzzwords or whatever that the present president
his people were cheering out at that time You're seeing kind of echoed and parroted by Matt couch
Couch eventually gloms onto the Seth Rich story, and he keeps kind of pushing it more and more to the extreme, you know.
His tweets get more, you know, more aggressive, more conspiratorial, pushing lines, pushing statements that he clearly doesn't have any factual basis for because they're so out there.
Statements that would end up in a lawsuit brought by Seth's brother, Aaron.
And, you know, as he does that, his audience grows.
He builds this little team of influencers and quote-unquote investigators.
I mean, his Twitter bio couches he called himself a conservative truth slinger.
If that gives you a sense of what we're dealing with here.
But he becomes, you know, in these online Trump worlds, This online Trump world, kind of a big deal.
Eventually, you know, he's got hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands of people tuning in for his Periscope videos, of which there are an endless number.
He's just churning them out at all times.
He's asked people for money so he can go to Washington D.C.
and quote-unquote continue his investigation, which he does.
He really builds this audience and these followers and people are donating money to him, tens of thousands of dollars to him for his team, his investigations, his Seth Rich work.
And it just felt like, you know, Couch himself was kind of interesting, but what he stood for, what he kind of captured about the economics and the incentives of that sort of hard right MAGA online world seemed really
interesting to me because, you know, it really rewarded the guy who pushed it to the absolute
extreme.
The guy who was always posting, always tweeting, always, you know, glomming on to the next cause,
whatever it was.
And he was pretty successful in it by the measurement of, you know, social media and some, you know, crowd fundraising stuff that he did.
And he was just a guy in Arkansas before that who wasn't particularly successful by all indications.
You know, had declared bankruptcy at one point.
Just an average dude who, through the Seth Rich stuff, Became someone who was then getting invited to conferences, hosting conferences.
He was invited to speak at the bus tour that preceded the January 6th, you know, the rally at the Ellipse and then, of course, the insurrection right afterward.
He became kind of a figure.
And I just wanted to know, like, how did he get from A to January 6th?
How did he travel that path?
And, you know, it just brought out a lot about how, you know, the internet works and, you know, how far this sort of extreme You know, conspiracy theory posting and paranoia can get you, especially in that kind of closed off world of, you know, the very online MAGA crowd.
I mean, like you mentioned, you know, there's, you know, the rich family just endured this nonsense.
for years, including some really horrifying accusations from Matt Couch and others.
So, what made Ehrenreich decide that it was so bad that it required taking his tormentors to court in order to get them to stop?
What made him decide that the only recourse left was litigation?
In the summer of 2017, after all of the Fox insanity goes down, there's a kind of a quiet period, almost like a time where people are regrouping.
The Seth Rich conspiracy theorists are kind of figuring out, well, what do we do next?
And what happens now?
And wow, that Fox thing was a huge debacle.
What happens next is Aaron finds that he's starting to get pulled in to the same kind of vortex that His brother got pulled into starting right after his brother had been killed.
Aaron is starting to get mentioned on bigleaguepolitics.com and getting, you know, mentioned by people like Matt Couch.
He becomes the focus in a way that his brother had only been up to that point.
And eventually it gets to a place where the online chatter about Aaron, the things that Matt Couch in particular, and Ed Butowski as well, are saying about Aaron, like he feels like he's got no other choice.
He feels like, just like the The Sandy Hook parents who have sued Alex Jones.
Eventually you get to a point where it's like my name's being destroyed.
If you search my name online, put my name into Google, the stuff that comes back is not who I am.
It's just insane.
And everything that I've tried in the court of public opinion doesn't seem to be working.
So I need to try something else.
And I think that this is increasingly a sort of a fixture of online culture, politics... I mean, geez, just the country right now is... Victims of these conspiracy theories come to believe that, you know, the only choice I have is Court of Law.
Because the Court of Public Opinion ain't working.
What is Aaron Rich supposed to say?
Is he supposed to write an op-ed for the New York Times that says, no, I did not help my brother hack the DNC?
We all know what's going to happen when he does that, right?
It's going to just, you know, fan the flames, give fodder to the conspiracy theorists.
Of course Aaron Rich would say that.
He was in on it.
You're presented with this horrible, this horrible choice.
I mean, I talked to James Aliphanis, the owner of Comic Ping Pong, about the same question.
And you remember James saying to me, you know, what am I supposed to do?
Go on television and say, no, there isn't like a secret child sex dungeon in the basement of my restaurant, which by the way, doesn't have a basement.
Like, that's not going to do any good in trying to change people's beliefs and trying to get this stuff, you know, tamped down online.
So in Aaron's case, he decides that really he's got to, he's got to sue these people and try to hold him accountable.
Joel and Mary Rich decide this could come to the same decision as it relates to Fox News.
And the lawsuits are sort of act three of the book.
And you know, I know that the first two acts are, Can be kind of grim at times just because of the facts of what happened.
You know, at least Act 3, there's some justice.
There's some accountability.
Joel and Mary and Aaron win these settlements in their cases and they do manage to extract some Some apologies or retractions or, you know, some just accountability from people like Ed Batowsky and Fox News and Matt Couch.
So there is some hope pushing back against these things.
But gosh, you have to go to hell and back to try to do it because I don't think the riches would wish upon even their worst enemy what they've gone through in the last six years.
Funnily enough, Hannity, after Fox News, you know, printed that retraction and he basically left or was, you know, kind of asked to leave.
He went on his radio show and doubled down.
So, you know, his character hasn't changed.
That's a real sore point for the riches as well.
I know especially from talking to them that The fact that Hannity never apologized, never even just sort of held himself accountable for the things he'd said, or just came out and said, I was wrong.
You know, I got bad intel, as they love to say.
He's never done that.
And I've tried to talk to him for the book through Fox directly.
I don't know what he believes on this particular subject, but he has never fully accounted for what he said.
And I know that that is something that the rich still think about.
Now, those lawsuits were, obviously, not counting not getting an apology from everyone, including Pandy, were mostly pretty productive.
They got a pretty big settlement from Fox News.
They got Ed Batowsky and Matt Couch to offer apologies and retractions.
So, I mean, do they at least feel satisfied by the consequences of the lawsuits?
I think they do.
I think that Joel and Mary and Aaron all have a different reaction when I've asked them that very question.
Does it feel satisfying?
Do you feel like you've got What you hope to get.
And I think that they do view the Fox settlement, which was the result of Joel Mary's case specifically, as a sort of element, kind of a warning shot or kind of a deterrence.
They set an example that, you know, if you do what Fox did to Seth, there can be consequences.
And the riches, Joel and Mary, show that there can be consequences.
I think that you can look at these ongoing lawsuits filed by Dominion and Smartmatic, the voting machine and software companies against Fox, as lawsuits that followed That's Fox.
They're going to be Fox.
which was, you know, holding Fox accountable. I mean, for a long time Fox
kind of operated exactly how it wanted. It said whatever it wanted and that was
just kind of accepted. That's Fox. They're gonna be Fox.
Bill O'Reilly's gonna say what Bill O'Reilly's gonna say. I think Joel and Mary's
suit showed that you can hold Fox accountable.
Now, Dominion and Smartmatic want a lot more money than Joel and Mary Rich did, but I think there is a line that connects those cases, and I think that we're seeing that play out now, and I think we're going to get more on those cases pretty soon.
And I think Aaron does as well.
I think it was really important for Aaron and for his lawyer, a guy named Mike Gottlieb, that Ed Batowsky and Matt Couch apologize and retract what they said.
It was important that they set the record straight.
I think more important than money or any kind of other parts of the settlement, Aaron really wanted that sort of public accountability for it.
You know, the interesting thing is that these kinds of lawsuits seem to be the only tool that's working these days to try to get some justice for people like the Riches or the Sandy Hook families or, in their own way, these voting machine companies.
Mike Gottlieb, the lawyer I mentioned, he's gone on to help start this group Law for Truth that is basically lawyers suing conspiracy theorists For things that they've said, you know, and they've represented the election workers in Fulton County, Georgia.
They have this group, Law for Truth, representing someone who was a victim of a Project Veritas series of reports around the 2020 election.
So there is a kind of playbook.
That has come out of this whole Seth Rich story that I think does point the way toward, like, what the heck do I do if I'm the victim of a viral conspiracy theory and I have no clue how to defend myself?
There is a little bit of a playbook coming out of this.
And again, I think that's not to say that there's good news in this story, but there's something that at least points toward an answer.
I think that this legal strategy is definitely part of that.
It certainly is a bit of a crack of light in what is otherwise a very dark saga.
Now, big picture, I mean, zooming out, what do you think that this whole weird twisted tale says about the role of conspiracism and like the political landscape and the information landscape that we're living in right now?
I would love to know what you guys think of this, but I'll take a stab at it because I wrote this dang book.
You know, I think that conspiracy theories have obviously been around for, I think, God, as long as humans have been able to think, right?
People have been spinning crazy stories, paranoia, all the elements of a conspiracy theory, certainly as long as this country has existed, and well before that.
What feels different to me now, I think this is something I hope people take away from the book, but again, I'd love to know what you guys think about this.
I think what feels different now is the means by which people can create, spread, and receive these crazy harebrained theories.
All the tools that are out there that make it just so easy and make it not just easy, but fast, not just fast, but in some cases profitable.
I mean, I think about some of the people in this book and, you know, they would have been potentially conspiracy theories in the pre-internet age.
But maybe that's like sitting at a bar with five of your friends saying, wow, you know, there's no way this is true.
It's definitely an inside job, definitely a coverup, whatever.
But now when you have Facebook and Twitter, True Social and Getter and whatever else people are It's just the ability to get the message out is so much greater than it was in the past.
It just makes it so much easier for people to find this stuff, to find other people who believe this stuff, to gather together, you know?
It's just the tech piece has always felt so critical to me in telling this, at least telling the rich story.
But I don't know, what do you guys think is so different now?
I think one of the things is that the way in which a lot of high-powered political players and conspiracists and commentators think that they're engaged in a kind of information war, and everything just can be boiled down to a battle of narratives.
And just like in a, you know, if people who are engaged in a kinetic war have a certain tolerance for civilian casualties, people who just happen to be in the wrong place in the wrong time, and tragically, you know, innocent lives lost, but Ultimately, they can justify this in their minds because it's in the service of some sort of greater cause.
I really think that a lot of like conspiracist theories, they are indifferent to the fact that, you know, they are possibly smearing the life of an innocent murdered person and the fact that they are causing torment to his family because they imagine that the political goals in the service of this narrative information warfare was too important to let go. They're just, they had to, you
know, push this story that the DNC hack was an inside job and,
you know, whoever happened to be harmed in service of pushing the
story is not quite as important.
I think also, you know, the fact that the algorithms are designed to
value, you know, what spread first and what spread fast and that, you know, fast answers that fit with whatever, you
know, prejudice or narrative somebody's already bought into.
Um, that exacerbates the problem, certainly.
Um, and the fact that, you know, over time, uh, media has, uh, broader mainstream media has failed the public in certain ways or carried certain narratives, let's say about the Iraq War, causing, you know, deterioration of, of trust in these, uh, institutions.
That people are just more prone, more vulnerable, and that it's encouraged as well by the way that these social media companies monetize and design their feeds.
Yeah, I think Julian hit on one of the things that I wanted to talk about is that, you know, this idea of speculative media.
And, you know, the analogy that I always make when I'm like talking to friends about it and stuff is I'll say, you know, you could just call the Super Bowl on the day that it happens and call what plays happen, who makes what play, what the points are, but there's no money in it.
You know, it's way better to talk You know, to do talking heads and panels and speculations for months beforehand, because you can generate way more ad revenue.
And I think that that's beginning to happen over the last couple of years with information as well.
And in a lot of cases, you know, because of the sort of corporate nature of your more mainstream media outlets, they're not going far enough.
And so people are looking for other sources to really give them the real story of what's going on.
And as long as it matches what they kind of already believe, They're inclined to just keep following that source.
And then the other point I wanted to make is this idea, and Travis sort of touched on it with his answer, this idea that posting is equal to action.
You post something on Twitter and it gets 50,000 likes?
Oh my god, well you've done something!
That feels like you are fighting some kind of war.
And so, you know, all of these things sort of combined, I think, just create... Also, you know, given where we are as a society and what's happening to, you know, the working class, I think that, you know, all of these factors contribute to a, you know, a petri dish that is just teeming with conspiratorial bacteria.
And it's really hard to sort of imagine how we correct that path, which You know, makes a lot of the stuff that, you know, we all cover, you know, seem kind of bleak.
The idea of, you know, influence operations and narratives, you know, that is essentially, you know, in a kind of post-colonial era, what the new empire that the United States built It's an integral element of it and they've long considered, you know, both foreign and domestic influence operations a really crucial part of what they do.
You know, the rise of marketing and wetting that with a kind of design for what's best for people to believe, to get what you want in terms of, you know, political goals or the goals of empire.
And I think that has had a profound damage, even though America has become essentially the best
at doing that.
The result is that everyone thinks everything is an op, so there is no, you know, innocent
murder if it involves someone who worked at an institution like the DNC or whatever, you
know.
So it's, I think that there's, the effects of the Cold War, the paranoia that was, you
know, wielded and kind of encouraged in the population has led to this in a way.
And it's interesting that Russia in this case, you know, is one of the big talking points that got mixed up with the Seth Rich story, because for a long time, There were narratives about Russia, you know, pushed by the institutions and the intelligence agencies here that were incredible or useless or, you know, just kind of encouraged this kind of way of thinking.
And I think it's a bit of that story of, you know, the chickens come home to roost and now no one trusts anything.
And if they're savvy enough, they know, yeah, actually these are all just pawns in, you know, a kind of narrative warfare.
Which, you know, there's an aspect of that that is a correct assessment of the way some of these institutions have treated people.
Like, they're just...
Containers that can be filled up with whatever useful belief and at the end of the day the end justifies the means and you know, I think that's Really, you know the idea of Seth Rich as a casualty in this has long been treated Or that kind of that aspect of the the damage that you know This kind of perception of reality does is that the casualties are considered?
you know kind of part and parcel of getting something done for a good reason.
For example, with Russia, when we talk about the operation and the influence that they had on the 2016 election, I think the idea that they had influence or interference is a valid one, as there is valid concern about the United States' interference in other people's elections and electoral processes.
But the extent to which that had an effect is where a lot of the times the kind of theories fall on their face, which gives, I think, allows the right to weaponize the belief that this was a hoax in some way.
And so you ignore, you know, certain more fundamental aspects of what happened.
Because the scale is being exaggerated and it's also being packaged with less credible stuff, all because what you want to do is delegitimize someone like Trump.
And so then you have Butowsky, you know, believing, oh, well, I'll engage in this info war, you know, I'm going to get in on this and feels totally warranted.
In doing so.
So I don't know.
I mean, you know, I mean, even even for example, VIPs is like such an interesting example of people who were hired and, you know, employed to be information warriors falling to just the level of paranoia and conspiratorial mindset that were part of their job and becoming, you know, kind of like Casualties and also, you know, instruments themselves of this entire, you know, development.
So, yeah, I think it's... there's so many elements that contribute to it that oftentimes people, you know, it's easy to go, oh, well, why do people believe these crazy, stupid things?
But there are a number of macro developments that have all kind of, like, funneled everything to this point.
I think you'll find too in the book that the sort of Russia interference and troll farm element, you know, I didn't actually end up putting that much of that in the book.
One, because for what you just said that I thought it in some ways was overplayed or was packaged, you know, the sort of the more fundamental provable or seemingly confirmed elements were packaged with a whole bunch of other garbage that then had the effect of making the whole thing look silly or less credible.
But also just I was so much more interested in the real people who say in the hours and days after Seth Rich was tragically killed, jumped immediately to this must have been a hit or a cover-up or he must have known something that he was trying to get out and was killed before he could.
And that was from flesh-and-blood Americans, some of whom I interviewed for the book.
I tracked them down, sought them out, and asked You know, why did you say this?
Why did you believe this?
Not from a place of criticizing them or lecturing them, but genuine curiosity.
What made you feel like you wanted to put this Reddit thread out into the world or these series of tweets about why you think something nefarious happened here?
And some of those people reached, you know, four or five years later, showed a bit of contrition and Said more or less.
Well, yeah, that didn't age.
Well, and you know, I hope that I didn't do anything to hurt the rich family because I didn't mean to I was just kind of operating off the information I thought I had okay, and then some people thought you know, there was there still 100% on board and and and believed it and And were critical of me for asking them why they would believe such a thing.
And, you know, that gets to the question then of like, if it's an information war, a battle of narratives, how do you demobilize people?
Does anything, can anything demobilize people who are in, believe that they're in that war?
And I certainly don't know what the answer to that is.
Maybe you guys do.
Yeah, I think this idea that, you know, nothing is as it seems, there's a broad backing for some of that.
And the problem then becomes that everything gets carried away, right?
Everything gets maximized.
Everything gets, you know, the more salacious elements get spread faster than the deeper, more investigative stuff that can reveal these kinds of things.
So it just, it snowballs, and also, if you make people paranoid, if you make people understand that, you know, actually the Russians are inserting their talking points or whatever, or, you know, actually the CIA inserted these talking points, over time, everyone just sees everything as, yeah, currency in the information war.
Well, and in Seth's case specifically, the imagination that was deployed in coming up with the narratives immediately following his murder was insane.
I remember there was a post that was very popular on 4chan that then leaked out into the more mainstream conspiratorial boards like Reddit and what have you.
That was a post that you know was pretending to be a nurse from the hospital where Seth had been admitted and it was a incredibly intricate story about how Seth had been brought in alive and that he was fine and that he wasn't gonna die from his gunshot wounds and that it was a A routine case and then, you know, an hour later, you know, people showed up and then all of a sudden, you know, he was dead.
And so the lengths to which that people began to write, creatively write, you know, about what they believed was going on behind the scenes and trying to pass it off As truth was I remember being surprised by the the level of detail in these stories that were you know coming out on the on the message board forums and stuff and it was you know it's crazy man
Okay.
Not depressing at all.
Great stuff.
We're all completely sane from all of this.
Everybody's feeling good.
Andy doesn't have a wall of, you know, red yarn and post-it notes in his basement.
Definitely don't.
Not a real thing at all.
We've been speaking with Andy Kroll.
The book is A Death on W Street, The Murder of Seth Rich, and The Age of Conspiracy.
It will be sold everywhere on September 6th.
Andy, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.
I really enjoyed it, guys.
Thanks for having me on.
Thanks, Andy.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
As you know, you can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and sub for five bucks a month.
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Listener, until next week, may the Deep Dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's AutoCue.
Now, I'm sure everyone here remembers the murder of Seth Rich.
I'm sure a lot of people even might remember where they were when they learned about Seth Rich's murder.
It was right after the DNC leaks came out, and it seemed only natural that a lot of people that are in this research field would look at what happened to Seth, look at what happened to those DNC leaks, and think, I wonder if they had something to do with each other.
And one of the main proponents of that story is the fact that we don't have any answers.
We've never had a really solid investigation by the federal government into the murder of Seth Rich.
Or should I say, we've never had a public investigation into the murder of Seth Rich.
Now, ever since Seth Rich was murdered, just about anybody who was anybody Trying to determine how he died.
You know, who was it that killed him?
Why was he killed?
Julian Assange made that comment when he was on a news program offering a bounty for anybody who might have information on the murder of Seth Rich.
And then he also said directly that one of their sources had been killed, but he stopped short of saying that that source was Seth Rich.
But as we're trying to figure this out, people are researching.
People are digging into this story.
There are things coming out in the mainstream media.
There are people coming out of the woodwork saying that they might have information about the murder of Seth Rich.
Twitter went on a banning spree, getting rid of anybody who might suggest that the murder of Seth Rich had anything to do with the DNC, or even more specifically, the DNC leaks.
And in the absence of hard evidence, in the absence of a public investigation by the FBI or the government, Of course, we are going to come up with our own theories.
