Matt Gertz at MMFA:
It's 2026 and MAGA lickspittle Benny Johnson is hosting a discussion of whether Hillary Clinton had former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich killed in 2016. “This is why it's called a conspiracy theory,” former American Conservative contributing editor Chris Brunet told Johnson during a lengthy interview about Rich’s tragic murder on Johnson’s show Wednesday. “It's because it's a conspiracy of top DNC officials, including Hillary Clinton, to essentially murder Seth Rich in cold blood, is the conspiracy theory. And I believe that's what happened. I don’t believe he was the victim of a random mugging.” Brunet added that President Donald Trump “should open a new investigation into the murder of Seth Rich to try to find his killers.” “I would love for there to be a full investigation into this,” Johnson replied, later telling his audience to subscribe to Brunet’s Substack and “send tips if you know anything about this.”
These ghouls are reviving the Seth Rich conspiracy theory nearly a decade after it first became a cause célèbre for the online right, which baselessly linked Rich’s tragic murder on July 10, 2016, in what police determined was an unsolved botched robbery while he was walking home late at night in Washington, D.C., to WikiLeaks’ release 12 days later of thousands of internal DNC emails whose contents damaged Clinton’s presidential campaign.
News accounts citing intelligence sources quickly suggested that Russian hackers had stolen the emails and provided them to WikiLeaks; the U.S. intelligence community publicly stated in October 2016 that Russia had hacked the DNC; and the final report from then-special counsel Robert Mueller, who secured indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers for the DNC hack, concluded that the emails were stolen and released through WikiLeaks as part of a Kremlin plot to undermine Clinton’s campaign. But right-wing conspiracy theorists, seeking to undermine arguments that Trump was too close to the Kremlin, claimed based on just about nothing that Rich had been the true source of the emails, and that he had been murdered — perhaps on Clinton’s order — in retaliation for their release.
[...]
This was perhaps the saddest and most grotesque saga I’ve seen come out of the right-wing media in my 19 years at Media Matters. And as the 10th anniversary of Rich’s murder approaches, the conspiracy theorists are back. The hook for Brunet’s appearance on Johnson’s show is an allegation from attorney Ty Clevenger, posted online Monday and boosted the next day by the conspiracy theory site Gateway Pundit, claiming that “an attorney for the government told me that I would soon be getting confirmation that several hundred pages of documents related to Seth Rich were found in a previously-hidden room at FBI headquarters” where they were supposedly “among the files designated for destruction.”
10 years ago, former DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered. The murder spawned unhinged conspiracy theories among the far-right fever swamps.
10 years later, MAGA hack Benny Johnson held a discussion on the death of Rich on his show.
