The murder of Seth Rich was a family tragedy. Fox News helped make it a national spectacle that has haunted his loved ones for years
Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone:
He was almost home. In the early-morning hours of July 10th, 2016, Seth Rich walked alone across northwest Washington, D.C., making calls to his friends and family, thinking about his future.
Like so many idealistic twentysomethings, he had moved to the nation’s capital after college to work in politics. It was the first place he’d lived outside of Omaha, and he’d gradually found his way, falling in with a group of fellow strivers, biking everywhere, cooking out, and playing soccer on the weekends. A glorified internship at a polling firm led to a job at the Democratic National Committee registering new voters and protecting against voter suppression. Days earlier, he’d gotten an offer to join Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in Brooklyn. Sitting in his drafts folder was the start of an acceptance email: “All my life I wanted to be in a position that I can make a difference….”
Yet he felt conflicted. Taking the Clinton job would mean months away from the people he loved, the life he’d built. Earlier that night, he had called his father, Joel, who had already gone to bed. He tried his older brother, Aaron, in Colorado, but they missed each other’s calls.
It was past two in the morning on the walk home when his girlfriend picked up. She stayed on the phone with him for more than two hours, until he was a block from his front door. She heard voices in the background. “I gotta go,” Seth calmly said, then hung up.
A neighbor heard gunshots and looked at the clock: 4:19 a.m. The police raced to the scene and found Seth in the street, shot but still breathing, and the paramedics rushed him to the hospital. A few hours later, Seth’s parents, Joel and Mary, received another call: Their youngest son, Seth Conrad Rich, age 27, was dead.
He was the 67th homicide victim of the year in Washington, D.C. Seth’s neighborhood had suffered a rash of armed muggings, and there were clues to suggest a physical altercation — a rip on his watch wristband, bruising on his hands and face — but nothing was taken from him, leading the police to call the crime an attempted robbery gone wrong.
The local news ran a photo of Seth from after he had moved to Washington: Sandy-haired and clean-shaven, dressed in a starter suit and candy-striped tie, he stands with his arms folded and a wry look on his face, the Washington Monument off in the distance. On July 13th, his body was buried at Beth El Cemetery in Omaha. “There are no answers for a young man gunned down in the prime of his life,” his family’s rabbi eulogized. “All we have is questions of what could have been, what should have been, and talk of potential greatness for which we will never bear witness.”
Ten months later, the cameras went live for the latest episode of Hannity, one of the most-watched cable-news shows in America. As the words “Murder Mystery” flashed onscreen, Fox News host Sean Hannity, gazing straight into the camera, began his show by informing his audience of “explosive developments” in a “massive breaking news story.” The bombshells that he was going to deliver, Hannity told the 2.4 million viewers of his May 16th, 2017, show, could lead to “one of the biggest scandals in American history.”
That morning, FoxNews.com had published a story claiming the existence of an FBI report that named murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich as the source for thousands of stolen DNC emails published by WikiLeaks in the summer of 2016. U.S. intelligence agencies, members of Congress, and cybersecurity experts had said hackers working for the Russian government carried out the election-year cyberattack on the DNC. But according to Fox, the DNC hack was an inside job — and the FBI knew it. The story even quoted a private investigator hired by Rich’s family who asserted that Rich had sent the emails to WikiLeaks.
“Now, let me connect the dots,” Hannity told his audience. Hannity was arguably the most influential TV host in America, a friend and confidant to the president of the United States, with whom he spoke regularly. If a “disgruntled” Democrat had leaked the emails, Hannity said, it “could completely shatter the narrative that, in fact, WikiLeaks was working with the Russians,” and, further, could mean that Rich was murdered “under very suspicious circumstances.” Maybe Rich “was upset,” he went on, “that the DNC was conspiring to hurt Bernie Sanders and help Hillary Clinton win the nomination.” Later in the show, Hannity interviewed Rod Wheeler, the investigator hired by the Riches and quoted in the Fox News story, who said it “sure appears” that Rich communicated with WikiLeaks.
This is the true story of an untrue story. It’s the story of how Fox News took a conspiracy theory from the online fringes and mainstreamed it into global news. It’s the story of how a Fox News staff writer, a Fox News paid contributor, and a Fox News unpaid commentator worked together to win the trust of a family wracked by grief and then used their imprimatur to publish a “sham story” that would become an article of faith in MAGA culture. It’s the story of how Fox News and some of its biggest stars have so far escaped any accountability for actions whose consequences continue to haunt the Rich family.
This story draws on tens of thousands of pages of court documents and interviews with dozens of key figures, including people close to the Rich family. (The family declined to be interviewed for this story.) The court records include newly revealed text messages, emails, voicemails, and sworn testimony that show how Fox ignored journalistic norms and basic human decency to publish and promote a fiction that could “solve” the problem of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and Trump’s welcoming of Russia’s help. “The most generous way to look at it is Fox News didn’t do their job,” says Kelly McBride, a senior vice president and journalism ethics expert at the Poynter Institute. “The less generous way to look at it would be they didn’t even try to do their job. And if they didn’t even try, the obvious question is ‘Why?’ ”
[...]
Three years later, Fox’s Seth Rich story and the conspiracy theory it was based on and amplified have been widely discredited by findings of the U.S. government, including Trump’s Justice Department and two Republican-led congressional investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian intelligence agents for the cyberattacks on the DNC and the Clinton campaign, and his final report accuses Assange and WikiLeaks of making statements “designed to obscure” the source of the DNC leaks and of having “implied falsely” that Rich was his source. More recently, the FBI’s section chief in charge of records testified in court that the bureau had searched for any records about Seth Rich or his murder and found nothing.
Further evidence produced in court casts even more doubt on Fox News’ now-retracted May 16th story about Rich and WikiLeaks. The evidence suggests Zimmerman may not have spoken with the anonymous “federal investigator” in her report. In a voicemail message produced in court, Butowsky told Wheeler that one reason Fox “pulled the story” is because “Malia did not actually speak to someone. She heard.” In a deposition, Wheeler testified Zimmerman told him “she did not physically speak to the FBI source. Someone else did.”
But the people who assembled Fox’s Rich-WikiLeaks story, and the network that published and broadcast it, have escaped accountability — so far. After the retraction, Jay Wallace, the network’s president of news, said the story was “being investigated internally.” (He also said it was “completely erroneous” that Fox published Zimmerman’s story to “help detract” from the alleged Trump collusion with Russia.) Yahoo News last year cited a source “knowledgeable about the inquiry” who said Zimmerman’s responses about the federal investigator “caused some editors at the network to question whether the source was in fact who she said he was, or even whether he existed.” But the findings of Fox’s investigation have never been released, and a Fox spokeswoman would only say that Zimmerman’s story “was published to the website without review by or permission from senior management.”
Hannity is still on TV every weeknight and is one of the most-watched cable-news hosts. Malia Zimmerman is still employed by Fox News, but hasn’t published a piece under her byline since August 2017. Her first story about Rich, published in January 2017, was also removed from FoxNews.com without explanation. (Citing ongoing litigation, Fox declined interview requests with Zimmerman, Wallace, and Hannity.)
To this day, Butowsky insists Zimmerman’s story is accurate. He says that Joel and Mary Rich “are not innocent bystanders” and “are in possession of material evidence indicating that Seth Rich downloaded the DNC emails, sent them to Wikileaks, and requested payment,” which Joel and Mary have denied. He did not provide evidence to support those claims. He says Zimmerman, who has described him in court filings as one of her sources, “had her own source and that’s who she relied on for the story.” Butowsky says he was sitting next to Refet Kaplan, a top editor at FoxNews.com, when Kaplan was told to retract Zimmerman’s story at the request of Kathryn Murdoch, the wife of James Murdoch and daughter-in-law of Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox News’ parent company, News Corp. (A Fox News spokeswoman denied this allegation, saying there was “zero evidence” to back it up. James and Kathryn Murdoch declined to comment.) Butowsky has sued journalists, news organizations, and even lawyers for the Rich family. “I’m going to sue the hell out of a lot of firms,” he told a reporter. “I want to see these people choke on their nerves and go through the same crap I had to go through.”
Read the full story at Rolling Stone.
