Originally published at National Justice.
For years, officials in the US government have held that Democratic National Convention voter expansion data director Seth Rich was killed during a random robbery in July 2016. Nothing was taken and there are currently no suspects in the case.
Julian Assange and others have suggested that Rich was in fact the source for the Wikileak’s dump of DNC emails and that foul play from political actors was involved in his death. Debate on this matter has been suppressed through high powered litigation and dismissed as a baseless conspiracy theory.
Now, lawyers representing the Rich family have been able to obtain 68 pages of heavily redacted FBI documents on the case that reveal Assange and others may have been right after all.
While the FBI has repeatedly asserted over the years that it was not involved in the investigation into Rich’s death, the documents show that they were lying.
New information shows that Rich’s homicide was in fact the subject of a Department of Justice meeting in 2018. In another document, it is speculated that “given [redacted] it is conceivable that an individual or group would want to pay for his death.”
Most pressing is the revelation that an individual, whose name is also redacted, had snatched Rich’s laptop and taken it home. The FBI is currently in possession of the laptop but will not say if anything was altered or deleted from it. The FBI revealed this information earlier this year, but has stated it has not investigated a pertinent piece of evidence in the case.
According to the narrative spun by the Metropolitan Police Department, Rich was killed in a failed robbery after leaving a bar in Washington DC.
Rich was still alive when the police reached him, but was supposedly “too drunk” to describe his attacker before his death. Journalist Joe Hoft reported in 2017 that the police body camera footage from the encounter has mysteriously gone missing.
Countless pages of the FBI’s records on Rich are redacted in their entirety. The FBI’s FOIA office has been battling in court for more time to meet the rest of their Rich FOIA obligations (hundreds of more pages) citing the need to fully censor information in the interest of “privacy.” As others have pointed out, the FBI and DoJ don’t have any problem releasing totally unredacted files on people they dislike.
Ultimately, its clear that the FBI and DoJ agree with skeptics that the Rich murder wasn’t just a mugging gone bad. The explosive story appears to be heavily suppressed by Google search algorithms. Suspicions of Rich being a victim of a US government sponsored or otherwise politically motivated assassination will only rise the more the FBI drags its feet and covers for the suspects.
Originally published at National Justice.
