The idea that the DNC email disclosures were produced by a hack — not a leak —makes less and less sense, writes Daniel Lazare.
By Daniel Lazare
Special to Consortium News
After bungling every last aspect of Russia-gate since the day the pseudo-scandal broke, the corporate press is now seizing on the Mueller report to shut down debate on one of the key questions still outstanding from the 2016 presidential election: the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich.
No one knows who killed Rich in Washington, D.C., on July 10, 2016. All we know is that he was found at 4:19 a.m. in the Bloomingdale neighborhood “with apparent gunshot wound(s) to the back” according to the police report. Conscious and still breathing, he was rushed to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead at 5:57.
Slain Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich. (LinkedIn)
Police have added to the confusion by releasing information only in the tiniest dribs and drabs. Rich’s mother, Mary, told local TV news that her son struggled with his assailants: “His hands were bruised, his knees are bruised, his face is bruised, and yet he had two shots to his back, and yet they never took anything…. They took his life for literally no reason. They didn’t finish robbing him, they just took his life.”
But cops said shortly after the killing that they had no immediate indication that robbery was a motive. Despite his mother’s report of two shots in the back, all the local medical examiner would say is that the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the torso. According to Rich’s brother, Aaron, Seth “was very aware, very talkative,” when police found him lying on the pavement. Yet cops have refused to say if he described his assailant. A month later, they put out a statement that “there is no indication that Seth Rich’s death is connected to his employment at the DNC,” but refused to elaborate.
The result is a scattering of disconnected facts that can be used to support just about any theory from a random killing to a political assassination. Nonetheless, Robert Mueller is dead certain that the murder had nothing to do with the emails — just as he was dead certain in 2003 that Iraq was bristling with weapons of mass destruction “pos[ing] a clear threat to our national security.
Scene of the crime. (YouTube)
Mueller’s Theory About Assange ‘Dissembling’
Mueller is equally positive that, merely by expressing concern that the murder may have had something to do with the release of thousands of DNC emails less than two weeks later, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was trying to protect the real source, which of course is Russia.
Here’s how the Mueller report puts it:
“Beginning in the summer of 2016, Assange and WikiLeaks made a number of statements about Seth Rich, a former DNC staff member who was killed in July 2016. The statements about Rich implied falsely that he had been the source of the stolen DNC emails. On August 9, 2016, the @WikiLeaks Twitter accounted posted: ‘ANNOUNCE: WikiLeaks has decided to issue a US$20k reward for information leading to conviction for the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.’
Likewise, on August 25, 2016, Assange was asked in an interview, ‘Why are you so interested in Seth Rich’s killer?’ and responded, ‘We’re very interested in anything that might be a threat to alleged WikiLeaks sources.’ The interviewer responded to Assange’s statement by commenting, ‘I know you don’t want to reveal your source, but it certainly sounds like you’re suggesting a man who leaked information to WikiLeaks was then murdered.’
Assange replied, ‘If there’s someone who’s potentially connected to our publication, and that person has been murdered in suspicious, circumstances, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the two are connected. But it is a very serious matter … that type of allegation is very serious, as it’s taken very seriously by us’” (vol. 1, pp. 48-49).
Mueller: Says Assange’s real source was Russia. (All Your Breaking News Here via Flickr)
This is what the Mueller report calls “dissembling.” The conclusion caused jubilation in corporate newsrooms where hostility to both Russia and WikiLeaks runs high. “The Seth Rich conspiracy theory needs to end now,” declared Vox.com. “The special counsel’s report confirmed this week that Seth Rich … was not the source,” said The New York Times. “The Mueller report might not end the debate over what President Donald Trump did,” the Poynter Institute’s Politifact added, “but it has scuttled one conspiracy theory involving a murdered Democratic party staffer and WikiLeaks.”
One Conspiracy Theory for Another
But all the Mueller report did was replace one conspiracy theory with another involving the Kremlin and its minions that is equally unconvincing.
Remarkably, there’s nothing in the Mueller report indicating that the special counselor independently reviewed the forensic evidence or questioned family members and friends. He certainly didn’t interview Assange, the person in the best position to know who supplied the data, even though Craig Murray, the ex-British diplomat who serves as an unofficial WikiLeaks spokesman, says the WikiLeaks founder would have been “very willing to give evidence to Mueller” while holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, “which could have been done by video-link, by interview in the Embassy, or by written communication.”
Bike rack and plaque outside DNC headquarters.
(Johanna745, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons)
Murray says Mueller’s team made no effort to contact him either even though he has publicly stated that he met clandestinely with an associate of the leaker near the American University campus in Washington.
Why not? Because Mueller didn’t want anything that might disturb his a priori assumption that Russia is the guilty party. If he had bucked the intelligence community finding – set forth in a formal assessment in January 2017 – that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign aimed at undermining Hillary Clinton’s candidacy — it would have been front-page news since an anti-Trump press had already accepted the assessment as gospel. ButMueller is far too much of an establishmentarian to do anything so reckless.
So he selected evidence in support of the official theory that “[t]he Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,” as the report states on its very first page. And since Assange had consistently maintained that the data was the result of an inside leak rather than internal hack and that “[o]ur source is not the Russian government,” he cherry picked evidence to show that Assange is a liar, not only about Russia but about Seth Rich.
Cryptic Exchange
It’s a self-serving myth that corporate media have swallowed whole because it serves their interests too. One problem in exposing it, however, is Assange’s pledge – intrinsic to the WikiLeaks mission – to safeguard the identities of whistleblowers who furnish it with information. The upshot has been a good deal of beating around the bush. A month after the murder, the WikiLeaks founder appeared on a Dutch program called “Nieuwsuur” and took part in a cryptic exchange with journalist Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal:
Assange during exchange with Rosenthal. (YouTube)
Assange: Whistle blowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. There’s a 27-year-old – works for the DNC – who was shot in the back, murdered, just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington, so….
Rosenthal: That was just a robbery, I believe, wasn’t it?
Assange: No, there’s no finding, so –
Rosenthal: What are you suggesting?
Assange: I’m suggesting that our sources take risks, and they become concerned to see things occurring like that.
Rosenthal: But was he one of your sources then? I mean –
Assange: We don’t comment about who our sources are.
Rosenthal: But why make the suggestion about a young guy being shot in the streets of Washington?
Assange: Because we have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States and that our sources, you know, face serious risks. That’s why they come to us – so we can protect their anonymity.
Rosenthal: But it’s quite something to suggest a murder. That’s basically what you’re doing.
This was as close as Assange could come to confirming that Rich was tied up with the leak without actually saying it. Hours later, WikiLeaks tweeted about the $20k reward.
Four months after that, Craig Murray told the Libertarian Institute’s Scott Horton: “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that he [Rich] was the source of the leaks. What I’m saying is that it’s probably not an unfair indication to draw that WikiLeaks believe[s] that he may have been killed by someone who thought he was the source of the leaks.” (Quote begins at 11:20.)
Thanks to such foggy rhetoric, it was all but inevitable that conspiracy theories would ignite. Two months after the killing, an ultra-conservative talk-radio host named Jack Burkman – best known for organizing a protest campaign against the Dallas Cowboys’ hiring of an openly gay football player named Michael Sam – approached members of the Rich family and offered to launch an investigation in their behalf.
The family said yes, but then backed off when Burkman grandly announced that the murder was a Kremlin hit. Things turned even more bizarre a year later when Kevin Doherty, an ex-Marine whom Burkman had hired to look into the case, lured his ex-boss to a Marriott hotel in Arlington, Virgina, where he shot him twice in the buttocks and then tried to run him down with a rented SUV. Doherty received a nine-year sentence last December.
The rightwing Washington Times meanwhile reported thatWikiLeaks had paid Seth and Aaron Rich an undisclosed sum, a story it was forced to retract, and Fox News named Seth as the source as well. (A sympathetic judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Rich family on technical grounds.) But still the speculation bubbled on, with conservative nuts blaming everyone from ex-DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to acting DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and Bill and Hillary themselves.
All of which plays into the hands of a corporate press happy to write off any and all suspicion as a product of alt-right paranoia.
But if speculation refuses to die, it’s for a simple reason. If the DNC email disclosure was a hack, then Rich clearly had nothing to do with it, which means his death was no more than a robbery gone awry. But if it was a leak, then – based on broad hints dropped by Assange and Murray – it looks like the story could well be more complicated. This proves nothing in and of itself. But it guarantees that questions will grow as long as the Washington police make zero progress in its investigation and the Mueller report continues to fall apart.
And that’s just what’s happening. Mueller’s account of how Russian intelligence supposedly supplied WikiLeaks with stolen data makes no sense because, according to the report’s chronology, the transfer left WikiLeaks with just four days to review some 28,000 emails and other electronic documents to make sure that they were genuine and unaltered – a clear impossibility. (See “The ‘Guccifer 2.0’ Gaps in Mueller’s Full Report,” April 18.)
The FBI assessment that Paul Manafort associate Konstantin Kilimnik “has ties to Russian intelligence” – which Mueller cites (vol. 1, p. 133) in order to justify holding Manafort in solitary confinement during the Russia-gate investigation – is similarly disintegrating amid reports that Kilimnik actually served as an important State Department intelligence source.
So the idea of a hack makes less and less sense and an inside leak seems more and more plausible, which is why questions about the Rich case will not go away. Bottom line: you don’t have to be a loony rightist to suspect that there is more to the murder than Robert Mueller would like us to believe.
Daniel Lazare is the author of “The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy” (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs about the Constitution and related matters at Daniellazare.com.
Now that the DNC Mob is about to see the light of day, it may be time for America to really look into Seth Rich’s hit, and also there was another reported who’s brand new Mercedes was electronically hijacked and remotely crashed into a tree after a incendiary device exploded before he crashed. I think that MR Barr would be interested in that .
Michael Hastings from the Rolling Stone was doing an investigative report on John Brennan when he met his untimely “vault 7” ending.
So, at least some of CN’s writers are getting closer to, if not fully into, Seth Rich conspiracy theory land?
You DID, per Thomas Drake, go looking for your own “Curveball” and found him, on Forensicator, and you’re doubling down on it now.
https://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2018/08/shirtlost-dumbshit-zach-haller-actual.html
There are a few details missing. A) The autopsy report has never been released. B. Not only has there been no statement as to which hospital they took Seth too, I recall reading that there’s evidence he was transferred fe one hospital to another. 3. There was allegedly a doctor who wrote about his experience being on hospital duty when Seth was admitted. His statement was never absolutely verified, but interesting to say the least. After working with Rich, when the police came everyone was asked to leave except attending do for. He was making rounds on patients next door to Rich but was pysically blocked when he tried to enter.
When Rich died, no one other than the attending physician was allowed to see him. There was no code alert or call for a cardiopulmonary resuscitation team.
When questioning if he was a larp
or for real, this person began writing in medical terminology.
Here’s his initial statement. I don’t know if the whole conversation can be found any more.
Why has no one looked for this person for questioning ?!
“SURGEON WHO OPERATED ON SETH RICH
4th year surgery resident here who rotated at WHC (Washington Hospital Center) last year, it won’t be hard to identify me but I feel that I shouldn’t stay silent.Seth Rich was shot twice, with 3 total gunshot wounds (entry and exit, and entry). He was taken to the OR emergently where we performed an exlap and found a small injury to segment 3 of the liver which was packed and several small bowel injuries(pretty common for gunshots to the back exiting the abdomen)
which we resected —12cm of bowel and left him in discontinuity (didn’t hook everything back up) with the intent of performing a washout in the morning. He did not have any major vascular injuries otherwise. I’ve seen dozens of worse cases than this which survived and nothing about his injuries suggested to me that he’d sustained a fatal wound.In the meantime he was transferred to the ICU and transfused 2 units of blood when his post-surgery crit came back —20. He was stable and not on any pressors, and it seemed pretty routine.About 8 hours after he arrived we were swarmed by Law Enforcement Officers and pretty much everyone except the attending and a few nurses was kicked out of the ICU (disallowing visiting hours -normally every odd hour, eg lam, 3am, etc- is not something we do routinely). It was weird as hell.At turnover that morning we were instructed not to round on the VIP that came in last night (that’s exactly what the attending said, and no one except for me and another resident had any idea who he was talking about).No one here was allowed to see Seth except for my attending.When he died. No code was called. I rounded on patients literally next door but was physically blocked from checking in on him. I’ve never seen anything like it before, and while I can’t say 100% that he was allowed to die, I don’t understand why he was treated like that. Take it how you may, /pol/, I’m just one low level doc. Something’s fishy though, that’s for sure.”
Sickening how corrupt these bastards are.
Mueller has been nothing but a complete fuck-up his entire career. He botched the Enron affair, causing the Arthur Anderson
accounting firm (85,000 employees) to collapse; only having his opinion overturned 9 – 0 by the Supreme Court. Too late; all
those people lost their jobs. Mueller was responsible for the imprisonment of a man falsely accused of sending the anthrax letters
to the White House. That too was wrong and the man sued, and won, over a million dollars from the government. He was
totally incorrect declaring “weapons of mass destruction”.
You wonder wby someone with that kind of public record of idiocy remains gainfully employed.
He knew for a fact that Trump was not guilty of collusion; ergo, he couldn’t have been guilty of obstruction; there was nothing to
obstruct. There was no misdoing. Crooked politics. Crooked media. There’s the collusion.
Spot on. Thank you.
Well known psychopaths and criminals like the Clintons have more blood on their hands than just the one of Seth rich.
The bitch Hillary had him killed for having given her dirty secrets to Wikileaks and this is why the invented the phony Russian hoax…
When are they going to charge this old stinking bitch?
“Because Mueller didn’t want anything that might disturb his a priori assumption that Russia is the guilty party.”
Never trust ANYONE who makes declarative statement about another person’s motives, intent and/or reasoning without presenting evidence of that intent.
– Proving even a ‘probable’ intent, even to yourself, takes piles of evidence and work.
– Anyone who has actually DONE the insane amount of work reasonably demonstrate intent is almost certain to include some of that work.
Mueller failed to address any of the large body of criticism of the claim that Guccifer 2.0 was Russian, and he accused Assange of “dissembling” in his comments about Seth Rich without making any attempt to interview Assange, Craig Murray, Kim Dotcom, Sy Hersh et al. who claim that the people who provided the DNC and Podesta emails to WikiLeaks were not Russian. With all of the efforts that went into catching witnesses in misstatements (see e.g. Michael Caputo’s account of his experience being interviewed, for example in his interview with Michael Tracey), leading to charges of lying and obstruction, one would think doing so would be even more important with regard to the central alleged fact of Russiagate. The complete failure to do so speaks to the bad faith of the “investigation”.
Nice list – aside from Assange, all the people you listed had no firsthand contact with Guccifer 2, only second/third-hand rumors.
– They could not give any legally actionable evidence, only hearsay.
– And Assange was legally outside the reach of the FBI, so any “sworn testimony” he gave would be unenforceable and legally useless.
Not doing legally useless interviews is not “bad faith”.
I have been following this for several years. One thing that has not been mentioned here is what happened at the DC hospital after Seth Rich arrived at 4:19 or so. Clearly, people have reported that Donna Brazil arrived sometime that early morning. There have been two informal emergency room nurse reports that on arrival Rich was conscious and vocal. His back wounds were serious, they reported, but not lethal. They had seen gunshot survivors with much worse. The nurse who accompanied him to the operating room said he was in good spirits, that the operation went well, and that he was returned to his room in ICU and was expected to survive.
Soon after this several people that this nurse did not know, including law enforcement types, arrived in the ICU. One stated that he was a doctor. They blocked entrance to Rich’s room for hospital personnel and basically ‘took over’ his care.A short time later at just before six the nurse was very surprised to hear that Rich had died. Obviously someone(s) official did not want to take any chances on his survival.
These two nurses reported to various lists at different times, but their stories were similar. They did not give their names, and most likely could not give out info on this, yet I think they should be sought out. Their indications are clearly of orchestrated murder.
Thanks for that.
I hadn’t read it before.
And two saying the same thing is a big deal, a very big deal.
Well, if a President can be murdered in the streets and no serious explanation offered after nearly sixty years, it is hardly surprising that the same could happen to someone like Seth Rich.
That is the kind of culture America has nourished with its empire and CIA and Pentagon and other secret agencies.
The country bears no resemblance to the high-school civics textbooks or the politicians’ Fourth of July speeches.
Except, DC has cameras and mics EVERYWHERE. I had a friend serve on DC grand jury and the only thing he would tell us of his experience is there are cameras all over DC.
The hospital has cameras. Let’s see those
Good point.
But we have so many events these days where we see no photos, even though it is clear cameras were operating.
The downing of Flight MH-17 in Ukraine.
American spy satellites, the Keyhole satellites, operate 24-7, and they have telescopic cameras much like the Hubble Space Telescope. Plus other observation gear.
And of course there was concern and attention on that area at that time.
But never a picture. Not one.
No radar tracks produced either even though they must exist.
But if Seth was shot at 4:19 a.m. and pronounced dead at 5:57 a.m., that simply isn’t enough time to be transported, processed into surgery, operated upon and then out of surgery in ICU when someone interfered in his presumed recovery to cause his death. I do suspect he was murdered by nefarious characters related to his leak, but I’m not sure your timelines could have occurred as such. I was an ICU nurse for years and have worked in hospitals enough to know how long it takes for things to transpire.
Well, the tempting answer is that someone in his own political tribe was responsible.
I believe “cui bono” still applies to such matters?
We now know to a certainty that the WikiLeaks material on the sordid inside workings of the Democratic Party, 2016, involved an insider download and definitely not a hack, Russian or otherwise.
I suspect the case will never be solved. All along, the police have behaved quite oddly.
Remember, all aspects of local government in Washington are under federal supervision.
Reading though all this, I am left to wonder whether Barr has the stomach to blast this in to the open?
Probably not. There appears to be too many toes to step on. My hunch is that Barr is boxed in because there are too many players with blood on their hands.
because Mueller knows Russiagate is a product of American and Russian Intelligence working together to create Russiagate.
????
Oh, and what did you think of that movie, “Plan 9 from Outer Space”?
He’s convinced that it was a documentary.
All significant leaks are made by insiders, not by long-distance hackers. Simple logic. Insiders know where the significant material is and how to sort it and find it. Outside hackers don’t know what they’re looking for.
“foggy rhetoric” There’s a great deal of that surrounding Assange’s dissembling. Is dissembling the right adjective? I only know who the good and bad guys are here, and Assange isn’t the bad guy.
The Twitter user McCabe’s Porsche on Blocks (@Larry_Beech) today notes some HIGHLY eyebrow-raising timing regarding the Mueller Report’s (hereafter referred to as the Report) claim that WikiLeaks received the DNC emails from Guccifer 2.0 (who the report further claims is the Russian GRU). Questions have previously been raised regarding several other aspects of the Report’s account of the transfer, but to my knowledge Beech is the first to point out a possible connection to Seth Rich. He also suggests a plausible, and if correct, damning explanation of what this may mean.
The relevant paragraph in the Report’s p. 46 is as follows:
“On July 14, 2016, GRU officers used a Guccifer 2.0 email account to send WikiLeaks an email bearing the subject ‘big archive’ and the message ‘a new attempt’. [163] The email contained an encrypted attachment with the name ‘wk dnc link1.txt.gpg’. [164] Using the Guccifer 2.0 Twitter account, GRU officers sent WikiLeaks an encrypted file and instructions on how to open it. [165] On July 18, 2016, WikiLeaks confirmed in a direct message to the Guccifer 2.0 account that it had ‘the 1Gb or so archive’ and would make a release of the stolen documents ‘this week’. [166] On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks released over 20,000 emails and other documents stolen from the DNC computer networks. [167] The Democratic National Convention began three days later.”
Note the date: July 14, 2016.
Previously several suspicious aspects of this account have been pointed out. Notably,
(1) Julian Assange had announced a full month earlier that WikiLeaks already possessed, and planned to publish, emails related to Hillary Clinton. This was in an interview on ITV on June 12, 2016: “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton … We have emails pending publication, that is correct.”
(2) Transfer and receipt dates of July 14 and July 18 would have left far too little time for WikiLeaks to review the material for authenticity and public interest in time for publication on July 22.
Now Larry Beech points out this, in a series of Tweets (June 15, 2019):
“Now go back to the May 2017 infamous, but reluctantly retracted, Fox News article by Malia Zimmerman”
At that point he quotes an extract from Zimmerman’s article:
“A federal investigator who reviewed an FBI forensic report detailing the contents of DNC staffer Seth Rich’s computer _ generated within 96 hours after his murder_, said Rich made contact with WikiLeaks through Gavin McFayden, a famous American investigative reporter and director of WikiLeaks.” [Beech’s emphasis added.]
” ‘I have seen and read the emails between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks’, the federal investigator told Fox News, confirming the McFayden connection. But he said the whole case was put to rest after the FBI initial audit, and agents were told not to investigate further. The emails sit inside the FBI today, said the federal agent, who asked to remain a confidential source.”
In other comments below, I have quoted Larry Johnson as saying, of the Fox News report,
“I know who Malia talked to. She was right. The FBI knew Seth contacted Assange.”
Likewise, Bill Binney had earlier remarked, probably based on conversations with Johnson:
“the people I know, they have at least two other avenues of information coming to them that verify what [Sy Hersh] said about the FBI having the data on Seth Rich’s computer, where he contacted WikiLeaks and transferred some data and wanted money for the rest of the data. I don’t think that’s publicly known yet.”
Beech’s next three Tweets note the coincidence of the Mueller Report’s July 14 transfer date and the Fox News report’s “within 96 hours” statement:
He writes:
“Note: ‘within 96 hours’, that my friends is extremely specific and not likely fabricated. Why does it matter?
“SR was shot July 10, 2016 at 4:19 am and died at 5:57 am. Add 96 hours and youre [sic] looking at early morning of July 14, 2016.”
Then in his next two Tweets, he writes:
“So if G2’s real purpose was to plant russian fingerprints and frame/discredit WL’s pending release, wouldn’t the best way to do that be to send the exact same material the actual leaker sent to wikileaks, to wikileaks from your Guccifer 2.0 hoax account?”
And,
“Problem is, you cant do that until you know for sure exactly what was given to wikileaks in the first place.”
“But suddenly on July 14 they knew exactly what wikileaks had, and the fix was in.”
If I’m not mistaken, earlier discussions of the Mueller Report’s citing of “the 1 Gb or so archive” have noted that this roughly corresponds to the compressed file size of what WikiLeaks published on July 22, 2016.
All correct. Russia had nothing to do with anything. But the dems needed a RUSSIA angle to try to criminalize the President.
I read the Binney report and it makes perfect sense. Seth’s family has allowed the dems to screw them over.
Except the Forensicator has recently demonstrated that Wikileaks published closer to 2 Gb of DNC emails – some of them were published shortly before the election. Why Wikileaks held back these emails for later publication has not been clarified – perhaps they hadn’t verified the authenticity of all of them by their initial July 22 release date. This constitutes further evidence that the Mueller indictment is a fraudulent fantasy.
https://theforensicator.wordpress.com/sorting-the-wikileaks-dnc-emails/
In any case, G2.0 clearly recognized the need to contact Wikileaks before the DNC emails were released, so as to leave a “trail of breadcrumbs” for future investigators. But the indictment never explicitly claims that the documents which G2.0 sent to Wikileaks were in fact the published DNC emails – it allows the reader to draw this (no doubt fallacious) conclusion.
Mueller didn’t investigate because it might lead to the awful truth…
I am glad the author picked this up as it was something that caught me at the time. That Mueller was talking about something he hadn’t investigated. Thus undermines anything else the report might say
Maybe you should ask Seth Rich’s family? Ever wonder if you might just be the”left” version of Info Wars?
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexcampbell/seth-rich-family-refutes-report
Discussing Mueller’s “consummate dishonesty”, Mark F. McCarty observes:
“Mueller’s report on ‘Russian meddling’ is simply intended to reinforce the Deep State’s preferred narrative, which he achieves by cherry-picking the evidence that he deigns to consider. This was the precise strategy that our Deep State?—?including Mueller himself?—?employed when they sold our nation on Saddam’s vast stocks of WMDs. Mueller’s gang of partisans reluctantly had to admit that that Trump’s campaign had not ‘colluded’ with the Russian state, because to do otherwise would have obligated them to bring (unprovable) charges and then prove them in court. Whereas Mueller knows that the Russians he has indicted will never be brought to trial, so he can make up any claims he likes about them, laced with a smattering of alleged facts to give these claims a seeming credibility, without ever needing to prove a thing?—?and can expect people lacking in intellectual subtlety or integrity (i.e. most people) to automatically believe the claims.
McCarty mentions “another intriguing point” about Crowdstrike:
“Crowdstrike’s co-founder Shawn Henry used to be Mueller’s deputy at the FBI, acting as head of the counterintelligence division. Adam Carter informs me that, while Henry headed that division, it made an attempt to destroy Wikileaks’ reputation by feeding it documents that had been purposely altered; fortunately, Wikileaks exercised its customary caution and refused to take the bait. G2.0?- ?very likely a creation of Crowdstrike? – ?appears to have been another attempt to smear Wikileaks, one that has worked wonderfully well with much of the American public. Clinton’s incompetence was expiated, Wikileaks was smeared, and the Russia was further defamed, all in one stroke?—?the Deep State’s wet dream! Assange became, not a journalist working with an American whistleblower disgusted by the gross bias of the DNC against Bernie, but instead a tool of malign Russians intent on meddling in our democracy and saddling us with the ridiculous Trump.”
https://caucus99percent.com/content/bill-binney-states-nsa-has-32-pages-communications-between-seth-rich-and-julian-assange
What “commenters” on the drama universally ignore is the precincts of the pro-Israel Lobby that vigorously backed both the ridiculous Trump and the ridiculous Clinton, not to mention the Dems’ ridiculous sheepdog who barks at mention of emails.
Obviously it’s much more fun (for both “commenters” and “veteran intelligence professionals”) to blather on about “the Deep State” while ignoring the devil in the details. That’s consummate dishonesty for ya.
Jonathan Cook, a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism, notes:
“More than a decade ago, two leading American academics wrote a study of the Israel lobby’s role in the United States, Israel’s chief patron for half a century. It was a sign of the lobby’s influence that John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt could not find a publisher at home. They had to turn to a British journal instead.
“The Israel lobby’s strength in western capitals has depended precisely on its ability to remain out of view. Simply to talk about the lobby risks being accused of perpetuating anti-Semitic tropes of Jewish cabals.
“But Mearsheimer and Walt described a type of pressure group familiar in the US – and increasingly in European capitals. Everyone from Cuba to health insurers and arms manufacturers operate aggressive lobbyists in Washington to secure their interests.
“What is special about the Israel lobby in the US – an amalgam of hawkish Jewish leadership organisations and messianic Christian evangelicals – is the fear it exploits to silence critics. No one wants to be labelled an anti-Semite.
“Rarely identified or held to account, the lobby has entrenched its power […]
“There is growing hysteria about foreign interference in US and European politics. Is it not time for western states to show as much concern about the malign influence of Israel’s lobbyists as they do about Russian hackers?”
http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2017-11-12/priti-patel-uk-israel-lobby/
Excellent points, thanks for the detail.
I want to agree w/many other’s comments: First, please stop calling only a certain group of people “looney rightists”. This illuminates nothing and obscures reality. If “looney rightists” means something today, then you need to include Hillary Clinton,Donald Trump, Mike Pence, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Bob Mueller, James Comey, John Brennen, Barack Obama and a lot of other Democratic and Republican “leaders” in the description.
As the self proclaimed left now loves the IC, regime change and war, I think it is imperative to stop pretending there is a left or even centrist wing of the kakistocracy (or in much of the rank and file Democratic party). There isn’t. Some of the staunchest defenders of civil liberties and anti war people are on the right. (Of course there are also actual left wing people who are civil libertarians and anti war.)
Secondly, the problems associated with Seth Rich’s murder read much like the list of things which have gone “wrong” regarding Assange’s legal battles. There are amazing inconsistencies, weird actions, lack of action etc. connected to Seth’s murder. Reading all these things, it is an astounding list.
Finally, Mueller isn’t making any “mistakes”. Real mistakes will go in different directions. Muellers’ “mistakes” always go the same way–. That’s called a plan.
Norumbega,
Yes, thank you, I just saw it. If Mueller or any journalist talked to Mr. Binney, both would have to run down the information, get copies etc. and investigate further. Yes, please, some of that.
And Mueller really should have talked to Mr. Binney anyway about the testing that was done to conclude it was a leak as Rob kindly pointed out.
A strong case can be made that the creator of the Guccifer 2.0 hoax would have had a strong motive to eliminate the leaker of the DNC emails – as that leaker could have blown that hoax to smithereens, imperiling Hillary’s electoral chances. Here is a new essay which sets forth this idea:
https://caucus99percent.com/content/crystal-clear-%E2%80%93-find-creator-guccifer-20-hoax-and-you-find-murderer-seth-rich
It could be too late for FBI to look into Seth Rich’s case because whoever behind Seth Rich’s killing would have also ordered to erase his emails, texts and any other forms of communications from his end, probably had erased any of his hard drive over and over again just like Hillary Clinton’s private home server has been treated.
Before Assange died from the heart attack or hung himself in his prison cell, can any British intelligent agent give him some drugs to induce him to half sleep, then question him who the sources were? There must be some nonviolent way to make Assange talk while at the same time Assange is not violating his ethics on his mission to protect the whistle blowers. Beijing could have offered some advises to help clear Trump had he not relentlessly imposed tariffs on Chinese goods and made the American pay for it.
Maybe one more reason to get Assange to the US and shut him up for good?
Two weeks ago I bookmarked an article on medium.com about a Freedom of Information request revealing 15 pages of emails between Seth Rich and Julian Assage. The emails themselves were “redacted” but the existence of 15 pages is significant. I just went to take a look at the bookmarked article and got the message that the page is “suspended.” That’s creepy.
Does anyone have an alternate link to offer? If the FOI result is legit, then the existence of those 15 pages seems pertinent to Lazar’s article.
Oops – typos. Assange. Lazare.
As an addendum to my previous post, and to leveymg’s apt comment, here is the pdf of the NSA’s response letter to Clevenger’s FOIA request: http://lawflog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/2018.10.04-Letter-from-NSA.pdf
Sorry to hear what Medium to Mark McCarty. Glad to hear his work is still available on a new platform, and look forward to checking it out.
Thanks Norumbega for the PDF. This FOIA answer from the NSA Initial Denial Authority says, on the Seth Rich documents:
“The documents are classified because their disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave or serious damage to the national security.”
I ran that statement through the Bureaucratese Translator: “The documents are classified because their disclosure would reveal grave crimes committed by those responsible for classifications”.
Thanks for refreshing my memory regarding that wording, which may be the most significant statement in the response letter. If one considers a hypothetical random DNC staffer in his/her 20s, and then suppose a FOIA request is submitted to the NSA for any records relating to that staffer’s communications, it would seem significant if release were refused on grounds of potential “exceptionally grave or serious damage to the national security”, as opposed to the more mundane ground of not revealing information that relates to the NSA’s spying activities – which is a separate reason given in the letter.
When I dug up the pdf, I was simply following through with something I had promised rather than revisiting the issue I had discussed in my previous post from memory. But in an earlier comment under Larry Johnson’s article at Sic Semper Tyrannis, “Fake News Media Suffers Body Blow On Case Linked to Seth Rich,” (April 29), I offered an interpretation of the “exceptionally grave or serious damage” wording’s significance.
The relevant part reads as follows:
“About the NSA’s response to Clevenger’s FOIA request, I think you are right to stress that the most significant part is their stated first ground for refusal that ‘The documents are classified because their disclosure could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave or serious damage to the national security.’ ”
“I assume the wording comes from the language of the Act, as does the language of the second (and for our purposes, less interesting) ground that disclosure would compromise certain information that the NSA is authorized to protect regarding its activities. Nevertheless the appeal to the former ground would seem significant in itself.”
“However, to be clear, we don’t know whether the relevant pages they admit to possessing are relevant specifically to the existence of communications between Seth Rich and Julian Assange or WikiLeaks, since they could instead pertain to communications between Seth Rich and his brother Aaron Rich, or Seth Rich and the Awans, or Seth Rich and any person outside the US, or any phone calls to or from Rich on the final day of his life, among other possibilities given by the wording.”
“One my point to an extensive body of claims or insinuations by individuals with plausible claims to knowledge that Seth Rich was involved in the DNC leak, and the absence of any public claims specifying, say, a connection between Rich and the Awans, as supporting the inference that the documents in the NSA’s possession the release of which could ’cause exceptionally grave or serious damage to the national security’ could well have pertained to a Seth Rich-WikiLeaks connection. But we cannot know that.” (Comment posted May 1, 2019)
See: https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/04/fake-news-media-suffers-body-blow-on-case-linked-to-seth-rich-by-larry-johnson.html
I can look for the original link to NSA’s response letter to Ty Clevenger’s FOIA request. The admission that they possess 15 documents totaling 32 pages responsive to his request has been misleadingly reported. That is because the request was worded much more broadly than simply requesting any records of communications between Seth Rich and Julian Assange.
In fact the request, as cited or quoted in the NSA’s letter, requests any records on communication between Seth Rich and a list of others – including Assange, his brother Aaron, and the Awan brothers. It also requests any records of any communications at all on the final day of Rich’s life.
Will try to locate the letter.
I was the author of the suspended article. Without explanation, Medium.com suspended every one 0f my postings there over 2 years – 234 essays and comments. I have yet to receive an explanation, and doubt I ever will. However, I have reposted many of my Medium essays at caucus99percent.com.
You’ll find that article here: https://caucus99percent.com/content/bill-binney-states-nsa-has-32-pages-communications-between-seth-rich-and-julian-assange
And here is an explanation of my current situation, with links to many of my suspended articles: https://caucus99percent.com/content/i-demand-explanation-mediumcom-regarding-their-censorship-my-work
The FOIA request was extremely broad and asked for any NSA record of communications between and about some 20 people, only two of whom are Rich and Assange. Contrary to some claims, such as those repeated in Medium, the fact that there are records doesn’t prove that the USG intercepted and retains messages between Rich and Assange. There may have been such messages between the two, but this FOIA unfortunately doesn’t prove it.
The catch is, that is not reality, and we must stick with reality on these critically important issues. Russiagaters should do a little research. Since Trump took office, we saw him reinforce economic sanctions against Russia, increase US/NATO troops near the Russian border, increase dangerous US “meddling” in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, etc. Would you be shocked to hear that Russia has not considered these measures to be gestures of friendship by Trump?
The purpose of the Mueller investigation was to determine if there was evidence showing that Russia somehow interfered with the 2016 election. There wasn’t. What they did end up with was a long list of indictments, several convictions to date, for perjury/financial crimes. A long list of things allegedly related to the 2016 election have not been investigated yet, or were already solved to their satisfaction.
I’m trying to understand the coyness of Craig Murray about the person(s) who passed on the emails to him. Protecting their identity is certainly understandable, BUT that must be balanced against the enormous damage done and continuing risks posed by the unchallenged mainstream assumption that it was a Russian hack.
Obviously, rather than Murray (or Assange) revealing information without permission, it would be better if any person(s) responsible for obtaining and providing the emails to Wikileaks would themselves step forward. One can understand their reticence, but they may well be safer if they are known publicly than discovered privately. They started something in motion, and even if they are not responsible for how it has all played out, there were always going to be consequences, intended and unintended, to their actions, and the honorable course would be to admit their role, it seems to me.
If Seth Rich was involved, his fate is now alas moot, so isn’t it best for Murray to say whether, to his knowledge, Rich was or wasn’t involved? Murray has suggested he’d be willing to say what he knows if questioned by police or government authorities. But as they aren’t questioning him, why the continued secrecy?
Assange’s situation is somewhat different. But some of the considerations above may apply to him, too.
Because my experience with CN comments has not always been pleasant, I’m going to make a plea for civil responses. My questions are sincere. I’m no “troll.” I have no idea who all took the emails and who passed them to WikiLeaks, but I read these articles because I’m skeptical of the received wisdom. I’m genuinely interested to know what people’s thoughts are, including disagreements.
Craig Murray denies that the person he met near American University on September 25, 2016 passed any emails to him. Many share this misconception due to the Daily Mail story of December 14, 2016, but we need to finally get that idea out of our head and look at what Murray has actually said. Posts of mine at Lee Stranahan’s new discussion forum (stranahan [dot] com) provide details on this mistaken story and many links regarding what Murray has actually claimed.
Actually the [Podesta] emails were already safely with WikiLeaks by the time Murray met the [Podesta] whistleblower for some purpose he characterizes as “administrative” in nature. It is fairly clear from his descriptions that this person, an American, had had access to the NSA database, and that is the origin of that trove. He says that US intelligence specifically monitored the Podesta brothers communications due to their status as highly paid lobbyists for Saudi Arabia. (Horton, Credico interviews)
Murray implies in the Scott Horton interview (December 13, 2016), that the DNC email leak (as opposed to the Podesta one) was from an American source from within the Democratic Party or DNC. He specifies “DNC” in his interview with David Swanson on the same day. With Horton, he also discusses Assange’s statements regarding Seth Rich as reflecting concern that Rich may have been killed by someone who _thought_ he was the leaker, whether correctly or incorrectly. Stated this way, he avoids confirmation or denial that Rich was the DNC source, but the statement would arguably assume the existence of _some_ rational basis for so thinking. And Murray does seem to know the identities of BOTH leakers, in the DNC case presumably because Assange has told him.
One problem may be that Aaron Rich may have also been involved in the DNC leak, and so far has not released (according to Ed Butowski’s attorney Ty Clevenger) Assange or others from confidentiality obligations.
Thank you for this information.
“Protecting their identity is certainly understandable, BUT that must be balanced against the enormous damage done and continuing risks posed by the unchallenged mainstream assumption that it was a Russian hack.”
But that also in turn has to be balanced by Murray’s current and future work. If he willingly (non-duress) divulges everything he knows about Rich (assuming he does know something juicy), his sources may no longer trust him and dry up. Thus depriving us of potential future scoops and info.
For instance, if he’d done this a couple years ago, perhaps sources he’s leaned on for the Skripal affair wouldn’t have existed, and it wouldn’t have been exposed as much. And in this current situation of massive government propaganda and MSM complicity, a Seth Rich-as-source revelation, even if true and ostensibly momentous, would likely be ignored in a similar manner to the recent OPCW report coverup. No need to journalistically martyr oneself in these troubling times, when it won’t even be appreciated or have much impact.
If this is true, why doesn’t someone collect this reward?
http://www.fox5dc.com/news/republican-lobbyist-offers-100k-reward-in-murder-of-democratic-national-committee-staffer-seth-rich
Maybe no one knows anything except the people involved in the murder. Also, if there is someone not involved who has relevant information, some lobbyist’s promise of $100k may seem like very little given the potential downsides of stepping forward. I don’t think this reward tells us anything one way or the other.
He didn’t investigate Seth Rich because Mueller wasn’t investigating anything. He was covering up the Deep State’s attempted coup to install Three Names in the White House.
Answer to the title question is, because he (Mueller) didn’t want to investigate the Seth Rich case. Investigations are kabuki theater in this land of greed and home of the afraid. Nearly three years later and obfuscations continue.
Konstantin Kilimnik now, along with Joseph Mifsud, are two characters with western intelligence links whom Mueller has misidentified as Russian actors. I mention this because when Mueller investigated Pan Am 103 he didn’t notice the McKee Team, a joint US intelligence team returning back to the US from Beruit against orders. One would think he might have wanted to clear that up before he went on to blame the two Libyans. He also might have wanted to find out if Monser al-Kassar, identified by Barron’s based on an insurance investigator’s report, as being the person who supplied the PFLP-GC cell in Frankfort the bomb which brought down the plane. Unfortunately. al-Kassar, besides being responsible for 20% of the heroin coming into the US, was also an arms dealer providing weapons at the Middle Eastern side of Iran-contra. The first big story on Pan Am 103 in the NY Times also identified the PFLP-GC cell as the source of the bomb. Initially. All that was forgotten with Mueller’s incurious investigation.
Mueller managed to prosecute Manuel Noriega without noticing how Ollie North, the CIA and others moved weapons and drugs through Noriega, nor the money-laundering our secret services did.
Ask Colleen Rowley what happened to numerous investigations the FBI was running pre and post-9/11 while Mueller was in charge there. He also charged two different scientists at the Fort Detrick labs without any proof and without the ability or equipment to produce military-grade anthrax while overlooking that Battelle Memorial, which was responsible for producing military-grade anthrax, had an office within a mile of where the anthrax letters were mailed. And he discounted the fact that two of the letters just happened to be sent to two Democratic politicians opposing the Patriot Act.
Finally, I once again point out that Mueller married his childhood sweetheart, Ann Cabell Standish, in 1966, three years after the JFK assassination. Not coincidentally, his great uncle was Richard Bissell, who had been fired by Kennedy after lying to him about the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy fired three executives from the CIA over the Bay of Pigs: Bissell, director of operations, Allen Dulles, the Director of Intelligence, and Charles Cabell. Cabell was Mueller’s bride Ann’s grandfather and second in command at the CIA. Her grand uncle, Earle Cabell Jr., was the mayor of Dallas and hosted JFK’s assassination there in 1963. Recently declassified documents show that Mayor Cabell was also a CIA asset at the time.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that Robert Swan Mueller III was ever an honest prosecutor. He protects the Agency. That is his role in life. Ask yourself why the MSM never seems to string these things together.
…good work here! Salud!
Their purpose is not to connect the dots as you have done, but to regurgitate the nonsensical narrative that has been laid out for them by their masters. It seems to be working, as the average citizen doesn’t seem to care much about what is being done in our names.
You have all of that right Bob In Portland and many thanks for doing the work and posting it here. One day we’ll see a real investigation with this Cabal being the ones being “looked into”…
Bob In Portland, Lots of dots to connect… Thanks!
Bob, do you happen to have a link to a web page that collects that sort of information about Mueller?
— Paul from Springfield
This is an outstanding piece by Mr. Lazare.
Mr. Mueller, you probably could have learned something if you had interviewed Bill Binney about this. His interviews are always enlightening. Mr. Binney seems to enjoy sharing what he knows with the public and believes himself to be beyond retaliation. (My sincere hope is that this is true.)
There is an interview Mr. Binney did with Ed Butowski on Vimeo 2 months ago. (Sorry, the link will not show up here.) At the 6:40 mark Mr. Binney states:
“Ty Clevenger has FOIAed information from NSA asking for any data that involved both Seth Rich and also Julian Assange.
And they responded by saying we’ve got 15 files, 32 pages, but they’re all classified in accordance with executive order 13526 covering classification, and therefore you can’t have them.
That says that NSA has records of communications between Seth Rich and Julian Assange. I mean, that’s the only business that NSA is in — copying communications between people and devices.”
And as Binney pointed out the available data about the leak indicate a info transfer rate that was so fast it could only have been completed using a local device — a flash drive or other storage device — which means that the DNC could not have been hacked across the internet but the leak must have been an inside job. Interestingly the FBI never inspected the actual servers at the DNC — the DNC refused to hand them over and the FBI did not issue a subpoena for them. They agreed to have them inspected by a 3rd party. One would think if the FBI felt a foreign government had hacked the DNC they would want to look at the actual physical evidence. These two facts indicate to me that Mueller knew from the start that the Russian hacking story was simply a fable manufactured to draw attention away from the corruption and incompetence of the Clintonite Democratic party.
Sharon: See my response to Jock, above. Binney was evidently interpreting what Publius Tacitus had misleadingly reported regarding the NSA’s response to Clevenger’s FOIA request. Best to consult the original NSA response letter.
Rob: I suspect you are correct that the Russian hacking story was simply a fable – but it is not a _simple_ fable. There is a lot of confusion about this among casual critics.
It seems likely that the Guccifer 2.0 operation was an effort to falsely associate WikiLeaks with Russia and to falsely claim to have hacked the DNC. The conclusions of the download speed study directly applies to a subset of Guccifer 2.0 material and by extension to all Guccifer 2.0 materials.
However it says nothing at all about the DNC emails that WikiLeaks published (unless Guccifer 2.0 was the source). Nor does it say anything about the Podesta emails that WikiLeaks published (unless Guccifer 2.0 was the source).
Craig Murray is clear that DNC and Podesta materials that WikiLeaks published came from two different sources, both American, the former being from within the DNC and the latter being from an intelligence source. And he has stated that neither had anything to do with Guccifer 2.0.
Instead of “it was a leak, not a hack,” we should begin saying “they were all three of them leaks and not hacks.”
Norumbega,
Yes, thank you, I just saw it. If Mueller or any journalist talked to Mr. Binney, both would have to run down the information, get copies etc. and investigate further. Yes, please, some of that.
And Mueller really should have talked to Mr. Binney anyway about the testing that was done to conclude it was a leak as Rob kindly pointed out.
well?life is cheap in the USA, and fantasy fictions about conspiracies are as common as mosquitoes. :-(
So glad you brought up the Iraqi WMD hoax. This should be enough to clear up the confusion right in your first sentence: the system didn’t “bungle” anything, Mueller and his media pals went out of their way not to investigate anything. It’s all staged drama, a scripted pillow fight–remember Trump is a show-wrestling MC. The dems are distracting Trump’s base from his total inaction on immigration–indeed making the problem worse by destabilizing Venezuela. Trump is distracting the dems’ base from their support of Trump’s belligerent foreign policies, most pointedly by shoveling the money of their voters to the war machine. And meanwhile, the Establishment is free to do as it always has done; they hate but do not fear the rubes.
Yes, maybe a loser like Strzok will be made a fall guy (D), to balance the fall guy (R) Manafort. But after that, the script demands that Trump will say “it’s time for us to come together as Americans”, just like he did with “lock her up” Hillary after the election. The CIA is simply not prepared to accept to see one of their own, Brennan, being perp-walked on TV. Even the “alternative” media largely color within those some lines: Mr. Lazare wouldn’t be so impolite to suggest that Barack Obama should be prosecuted for sedition.
Seth Rich would upset the apple cart. A felony which the rubes can understand, with an actual corpse, might lead to actual consequences for someone powerful. And the one thing which unites Washington more than money is its dislike of consequences for themselves.
But this was such a contrived investigation, it reeks to high heaven. Mueller was contriving, not imcompetent, just like Comey who could not do forensics on computers. It would have revealed leak not hack and the NSA could have provided to data to corroborate that fact. This is what Intel was hoping for. Mueller will probably retire and write a book, or has he already?
It would be wonderful to see a complete article from Seymour Hersh on these issues. According to the leaked phone call, his sources suggest that Rich’s murder was a simple “botched robbery”, but routine investigations of his laptop by DC police quickly turned up the DNC emails and / or communications with Wikileaks. After this the DC police were told to bury the issue.
I have no idea of the provenance of the audio recording of the phone call with Hersh, or the motives of the person or persons who recorded and released it. It is possible they were genuinely concerned for the truth to come out, and were angered by Hersh’s reticence in keeping what he knew confidential in order to protect his sources. Hersh has spoken out about the difficulties in practicing investigative journalism in the era of “Collect it All”, and had to abandon a book about Dick Cheney’s evil deeds out of fear for his sources safety. It is also possible the recording was released in order to rattle Hersh’s sources and ensure that his investigations would never see the light of day.
I suggest you consult what Ed Butowski has said about why he recorded the conversation – see especially his interview with Cassandra Fairbanks of Gateway Pundit.
Seymour Hersh has described how he has decided not to publish an entire book that he wrote on Dick Cheney, because of loss of the ability to protect sources.
Much appreciated Norumbega, I was unaware the source had been made public. Apologies for the uninformed speculation regarding motivation etc.
Norumbega, I think you mean the extensive interview about the private investigation into the Seth Rich case to help the family, what they found, and what happened (the DNC assigned someone to represent the family, etc.; the mentioned lawsuits were later dropped/dismissed):
Ed Butowsky Sits Down With Gateway Pundit for First Interview After Being Sued by Family in Seth Rich Murder Mystery
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/03/ed-butowsky-sits-first-interview-gateway-pundit-sued-family-seth-rich-murder-mystery/
The Seth Rich case reminds me of the Gary Condit/Chandra Levy business, which was the object of a lot of media attention back in 2001 until people found something else to talk about around the middle of September that year.
In both cases it’s possible something other than street crime was involved, but I don’t see any affirmative evidence for it, and even less for the specific allegations that have brewed such fascination.
Assange’s statements and the Wikileaks reward give me some pause, but in the end they are more irritating than informative (as well as being journalistically problematic, as I mentioned in a prior comment which may emerge from moderation someday).
Bad analogy. Unlike Condit/Levy, the Seth Rich case was never given much airtime in the MSM, apart from a few mentions on Fox. And now, just bringing it up is ritually denounced as spreading a ‘Russian conspiracy theory’ by the very media which should be investigating it.
That’s a straw man: I didn’t liken the two cases in terms of how much media attention they received.
I said the Condit/Levy case received a lot of attention, which it did. And I said the Rich situation reminded me of it, which I can say on excellent authority it does.
The similarity I see between the two – which now that I am setting it up in a way that makes it harder to distort, I’m sure you will still want to knock down – is that they both seem to be instances of random D.C. street crime that were seized upon to tell a political story without any real evidence (so far).
They also seem to both reveal substandard work by the D.C. Metropolitan P.D.: it was a year before Levy’s body was found in Rock Creek Park, which while pretty rugged for an urban park, is no Yellowstone. But it doesn’t take individualized conspiracies to explain bad police work in the U.S.
And they both make me feel bad for the victims’ families, who have had to deal with not only the loss, but also the exploitation.
Finally, I conceded that in both cases there may be more to the story (Levy’s murder remains unsolved, with one suspect ultimately released for lack of evidence, and Condit is probably still lying about his relationship with her), but I haven’t yet seen the evidence for it.
From this and other events in the past I get the impression that SOP for the DC police is to obfuscate and make irrelevant any murder with potential political ramifications. They know they are small fry in the capitol of the Deep State.
Good point. Burying the investigation was doubtless made even easier by the fact that Steven Wasserman, Debbie Wasserman-Schulz’s little brother, was a prosecuting attorney for the District of Columbia at the time:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/05/debbie-wasserman-schultzs-brother-steven-wasserman-accused-burying-seth-rich-case/
To followers of Consortium News and some other non-corporate news outlets, there’s a pretty big pile of relevant evidence that Mueller avoided looking at. As Coleen Rowley pointed out at CN, Mueller was a central player in the less-than-stellar investigation of 9/11.
The RussiaGate theory originated in the DNC immediately after their 2016 loss to Trump. Normal police procedures for a computer break-in were not followed, instead, having their own private security firm do the crime scene investigation, easily allowing for a cover-up to begin. To say nothing of the absurdly salacious Steele dossier being financed by them, and then used to prompt a diverting investigation into Trump.
Following the money, Hillary’s camaign was primarily financed by Israelis, and she had openly promised to practically like Israel’s boots. It makes sense that Israel would want to keep their HUGE influence on American politics hidden from the general public. Because if the public knew the truth about Israel, about its 70 year campaign of ethnic cleansing by terrorism, mass murder, and robbery, about its financial control over so many members of Congress, about its current push for laws in the US which make criticism of Israel illegal, thereby directly attacking the 1st Amendment to the US Constitution, then Americans would stop giving money to Israel, would make AIPAC register as an agent of a foreign government, would get all Israeli money out of American politics, and would likely jail some of the more egregious perpetrators.
I don’t think Julian Assange/Wikileaks have been at their best in their handling of the question of the sourcing of the DNC leaks.
It seems to me that if a journalist wants to protect a source’s anonymity, they should just keep their mouth shut about it. If, for whatever reason, the time comes to identify the source, then they should just unambiguously spill it.
To me, the statements from Assange and Wikileaks that Daniel Lazare recounts here occupy a questionable middle ground.
The main problem for me doesn’t have anything to do with Rich (it’s not clear to me what he had to do with this case), but rather with what it means for Wikileaks (and other journalists) going forward.
For instance, the next time Wikileaks comes up with some big haul of documents that rattles the Beltway (let’s hope!), if the political/media establishment again calls somebody the source, but this time Wikileaks *doesn’t* deny that that somebody was responsible (as happened here with the Russian government), people will make inferences based on past denials.
Once a journalist starts saying some things about their anonymous sourcing, their future silence will be construed for hidden meaning. Might this affect the willingness of potential sources to give information to Wikileaks?
Secondarily, these semi-statements from Assange and Wikileaks seem unfair to Rich’s bereaved family – especially if in fact he was not involved, but even if he was.
I think they were shocked to see one of their sources murdered, and decided they had to say something (and offer a reward) in hopes that Rich’s killers could be identified and brought to justice, precisely out of obligation to their source. In this case they skirted their competing obligation of confidentiality by expressing their reasons for concern while avoiding explicit identification of Rich as their source.
From their point of view they weren’t “handling the question of the sourcing of the DNC leaks” in the first instance, although what they and their associates said certainly touches on the latter question.
I don’t doubt that Assange & Co. have been operating from decent motivations (though they’re not necessarily making things any easier for Rich’s family). And I think we have to make allowances for some lapses by Julian after years of captivity and other outrageous pressures.
But if accuracy is Wikileaks’s number one stock in trade, source protection is a close second. Therefore the reward and the various coy statements, which predictably fed the did-he-or-didn’t-he speculation, aren’t great journalistic practice (regardless of Rich’s actual involvement).
But I’m not condemning Assange, just noting a problem I haven’t seen anyone else mention.
Is it necessary for a publisher to protect a source after the source is dead? I would say not ordinarily.
It makes sense if WikiLeaks (which was praised heavily by the press when it started) has been an intelligence honeypot the day Assange arrived. The original creator of WikiLeaks let fearing it had. WikiLeaks has put out a lot of fake news that plays right into the War Machine agenda – including a bunch of made-up anti-Putin crap. So not letting Russia off the hook is part of the long game. WikiLeaks only recently became a liability AFTER it was exposed as a spying operation- see the Guardian article.
I disagree completely! Have a nice day.
@ “WikiLeaks has put out a lot of fake news …”
I’m not aware of a single instance. Citations please.
typo: According to Rich’s brother, Aaron, Jeff “was very aware, very talkative,” jeff should be seth right?
Yeah, thanks for picking up on that. Sorry for the error.
It seems likely that Assange does not know who the source of the leaks was, as various intermediary/dropbox schemes were used, but suspects that one source was Rich. TruthDigdotdom has a good Chris Hedges article today on this “The Thought Police Are Coming” urging organization to resist and confront our totalitarian tyrant government. Same site has a Lee Camp article on the Microsoft/DoD combination to control US elections, for our safety and convenience.
This is unnecessary…
“you don’t have to be a loony rightist to suspect that there is more to the murder than Robert Mueller would like us to believe. ”
Besides most people who believe that Russia hacked the DNC computers are centrists not rightists. They can’t believe that Hillary could have lost the election without outside help.
Assange is not the only person Mueller didn’t interview. He didn’t interview anyone in the FBI involved with setting this up. Nor did he anyone in Fusion GPS or the other agencies involved. That anyone can believe that a few adds and the exposure of Hillary’s emails could overcome the election interference from Israel. The Saudis or any of the other people who actually do interfere with the elections.
And that they believe that Mueller is an upstanding guy just is beyond belief.
The other thing that Mueller didn’t put in his report was that Comey killed the deal to have Assange testify to congress about where he got the information. You’d think that he would want to know about that.
to this day the fbi maintains that it has not checked seth rich’s phone or computer. ditto of course on the dnc email servers.
it is as fishy as the four black boxes on 9-11: two lost, two destroyed. out of four flights. batting 1.000.
p.s. mueller ran that investigation too.
You seem to know more about the case than Mueller, at least based on his skimpy report. Why does that not surprise me?
Thank you! The real problem in this country is not the left or the right; rather, it’s the loony center that controls our media and political establishment.
The so-called “center” of American politics is far to the right on an objective spectrum — see The Political Compass. The Overton window has shifted a long way in my parents’ lifetime.
Mueller would not dare go anywhere near that issue as he is a lying, whitewasher and has refined that role through a lifetime of repetition. Rosenstien likewise.
The reason he wont go there? cover HRC and her repetitive crimes against USA national security PLUS he would contradict the narrative to destroy wikileaks and intimidate a free press.
Mueller is a low scumbag and has no interest in disturbing the ruling elite. But this time he has failed and that elite might be in far a sound flogging. We live in hope.
It does not make sense to postulate that Rich was shot in retaliation for leaking the E-mails, when simply making the information public would have ruined Rich’s career. However, Rich might have identified, and then been killed, by the leaker.
Yes, Mueller should have questioned Binney et al. That said, the analysis of the time stamps and so forth by the VIPS, which is taken to mean that the downloading of the E-mails was too fast to have been done by the Russians operating over a long distance, might not be meaningful. Is it not possible that some people far away (the Russians?) had control of a local (in Washington) computer that they operated remotely to make the download quickly?
You are misunderstanding it. It was too fast for anything but a download on site. It doesn’t matter if it was in another room in the same building or in Moscow, trying to hack through the internet in 2016 at those speeds was impossible.
More bosses should be shot in the buttocks, don’t you think?
To Miranda M Keefe:
The download speed study related to Guccifer 2.0 materials. There are no solid grounds for relating these to the DNC leak that WikiLeaks published or to the most likely DNC leaker – Seth Rich. The Guccifer 2.0 persona was likely an attempt by someone else to associate Russia together with WikiLeaks, make it look like a hack, and claim responsibility as WikiLeaks’ source. In any case, Guccifer 2.0 certainly outlived Seth Rich.
On the other hand Binney and Johnson’s work showing FAT formatting on the DNC materials published by WikiLeaks suggests download to a storage device on May 23 and 25, 2016. Also The Forensicator’s detailed work on the latter. This is where a possible connection to Seth Rich enters the picture.
Guccifer 2.0 is the most ham fisted effort by US intelligence to fabricate a persona. Just as ham fisted as McCarthyism 2.0.
“Is it not possible that some people far away (the Russians?) had control of a local (in Washington) computer that they operated remotely to make the download quickly?”
That question had popped into my head a long time ago. I dismissed it simply: forensics could have provided PROOF of the “Russia” connection, it would have been a slam dunk; instead, we got a lot of wishy-washy “evidence.” Again, that there was NO investigation of a key piece of evidence would suggest that They knew what they’d find and that it would not comport with their official story line.
The only question in my mind is whether the CIA et al were working in concert with HRC/DNC to set this up. I will continue to put forth the notion that the CIA was involved during the primaries, involved with discrediting Sanders: some folks on this site have laughed at me, claiming that Sanders is a puppet of Israel (and other such); but what is overlooked is the Movement, the numerous people that would come in on Sander’s coattails- this has the “establishment” very concerned, so much so that throwing an election is totally in the picture- and the CIA has LOTS of experience in this (don’t have to look far to see their antics all around the globe). Spooks have now come out in the open, into our living rooms via “MSM.” If folks thought the 2016 elections were bizarre, well, ain’t seen nothing yet: 2020 elections will be sure to surpass- DNC won’t be able to stop Sanders (I’ll go so far as to predict that Sanders will pick Gabbard as his running mate; this combo will be insurmountable, it’ll be nearly bulletproof [will be hard to take out the two of them]).
NOTE: I did not support Sanders in 2016. And, I have not, to date, supported him. My comments are based on my thoughts early-on in the RussiaGate affair.
I think you are putting things out of proper order. The big question, in terms of the Mueller “investigation”, is whether Seth Rich was, in fact, the DNC email leaker. The question of whether he may have been murdered for that reason is a separate question.
You are both right and wrong. Seth Rich might have been the leaker, but had he not been murdered, no one in the public sphere would have ever heard of him, and we would not be having this conversation about him regarding a possible DNC leak.
Your point is well taken. Had he not been murdered, Julian Assange would have not made his public statements about Rich, and WikiLeaks would not have offered a reward. The FBI would not have examined Rich’s laptop, and Sy Hersh would not have read (or had read to him) the FBI report he cited in that telephone conversation.
However, the fact is a number of individuals with plausible claims to knowledge have stated or insinuated that Rich was the DNC leaker, whereas they do not actually seem to have knowledge of who killed him. This is why I keep trying to direct focus to the former issue.
???
But what if Seth Rich was the leaker? Are you trying to imply that he killed himself? Or what?
Perhaps someone knew Seth was in the process of leaking and tried to stop it?
podesta emails revealed that he specifically stated; `we need to make an example out of the leaker´. i do believe the date of the email immediately precedes the murder.
@ “It does not make sense to postulate that Rich was shot in retaliation for leaking the E-mails …”
It does if the murder wants to blame someone else, i.e., the Russians.
This is an excellent article. I do disagree with the author’s conclusion that Mueller didn’t look into the Seth Rich murder.
Rod Rosenstein’s scope memos which lay out Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation which required a finding be given to the Department of Justice did not include a murder investigation.
Certainly Mueller worked in tandem with the Washington DC Metropolitan Police to pursue such a lead. I think it is highly unfair for the author to slander Robert Mueller because the author didn’t get an answer to the question we all want to know. Fortunately, the DOJ investigates and solves crimes first and divulges information to the public later.
I am intrigued by the huge discrepancies the author clearly lays out in the physical evidence. How can a mother and a medical examiner diverge on such crucual details?
I guess I should put my tin foil hat back on. I am apt to believe if Seth Rich was a brave whistleblower, maybe the government faking his death was the safest way to protect Seth Rich.
Since I believe there is strong evidence Mueller was working as a government investigator for the State Department going back to at least February 2015 when the New York Times broke the Hillary Clinton personal email story. It isn’t unreasonable to think Mueller has been investigating Hillary and Sid Blumenthal’s email security breach since Guccifer 1.0’s public disclosure in the Spring of 2013.
And if as I believe Donna Brazile’s emails were stolen and shepherded to Jennifer Palmieri and on to John Podesta during the Democratic debates, then I believe Mueller and his team would have also oversaw this hack along with Cozy and Fancy Bear intrusions. And any leak by a DNC whistleblower whether murdered or not would have been a part of his perview.
And if Mueller was overseeing the Clinton investigations at State as it is becoming increasingly more obvious, then Kilimnik was probably an informant on Eurasian organized crime and reporting to Mueller. I believe Kilimnik was the conduit between Deripaska, the insurance policy, and Mueller to share evidence against corrupt, global criminals.
So the irony is that it is quite possible Robert Mueller was the Russian Collusion Maestro between the Obama administration, the FBI, the State Department and the Russian government to help elect Donald Trump by diffusing the Trump Russia collusion frame job ensuring a fair election.
Crap I am running out of Tin Foil.
Mueller also failed or refused to interview:
Seth Rich
Craig Murray
KimDotCom
Seymour Hersh
All of whom would have told him that Seth Rich was their source/leak.
Mueller also failed to independently investigate the DNC servers. Which could have shown who leaked the DNC emails. Instead, they were investigated by Crowdstrike, a company headed by a former high ranking FBI employee, Shawn Henry.
Yet Mueller concludes that Julian Assange was ‘dissembling’ when he hinted that Seth Rich was the source?
Sounds more like someone is protecting the DNC from unwelcome or even incriminating information.
KimDotCom: I was warned not to turn over Seth Rich evidence to Mueller
https://twitter.com/MrK00001/status/1018166240538439681
Craig Murray on the Mueller Report and blaming Julian Assange
https://twitter.com/MrK00001/status/1127094581663813632
Hillary Clintonjokes about drone bombing Julian Assange
https://twitter.com/MrK00001/status/1117081393027268609
Much more interesting I think – Jack Burkman interviews his witness ‘Luke’, who gives a very interesting alternative interpretation of the Seth Rich murder – the thumb drive he always carried with him was stolen by 2 individuals working for Rod Rosenstein, making this not a ‘botched robbery’, but a successful robbery and homicide.
https://twitter.com/MrK00001/status/1017057961821253632
Typo in fourth para, “Jeff” should be “Seth.”
The public will never learn any more about this killing than they did the JFK assassination. The evidence was conveniently scrubbed or is locked up so deep within the bowels of the Deep State it will never be found, even if Kreskin had real powers. The MSM is especially talented at ignoring any suspicious facts, promising leads or intriguing connections. Potential witnesses tend to disappear or change their stories at the most inopportune times. All one is left with is a hat full of unanswerable questions. Grist for the tabloids, the MSM and their string pullers in government and other power centers will say. Life is full of coincidences, is it not? Certainly when so much power rides on an accurate recounting of history. The more decisive the event, the more fallible human minds seem to become.
Lazare has provided some interesting and (to me) new information about the aftermath of Rich’s murder. For example all I knew about his family was that they didn’t want anyone looking into his murder other than the local police (who weren’t doing much). Now I read that they did after all want a private investigator to look into it, but unfortunately that person turned out to be a con man or a flake or both which is why they were turned off by the investigation.
However, for the life of me, I cannot understand WHY Lazare has made no mention, not even a minor passing one, about Binney and what he has been saying. When it comes to William Binney, there is no person on this planet who has more expertise than he does about the workings of the NSA listening ability or what it can and cannot do. To fail to even mention what Binney says is a bewildering act of omission! What gives here?
My thoughts exactly. Binney said it is impossible for the NSA to be unaware of any digital transfer out of the country.
I wondered about that too, the missing Binney part, and so I wanted to post Binney’s article about it on Facebook, but I got a “503” error for that page. Everything I am searching for shows up as a link and thumbnail but when I click on it, 503. And the people I shared this with are getting 503 errors too. I know google has CN censored; I am wondering what else is going on. But excellent point about Binney. That, together with Julian Assange’s reveal, convinces me that Seth Rich was the leaker.
MOST of yesterday, from early afternoon till way past midnight I was getting that 503 message whenever I tried to simply link to CN or to post a comment to an article. It sure seemed to me that the website was under intense cyber attack, and especially this article.
I got a 503 yesterday as well. Just because we’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get us.
Consortium news has recently posted an article on Qanon. In it Binney is named as a public spokesman for a website attempting to capitalise on the “Q” drops. The whole endeavour seems shady (article included) and I fear a smear campaign may be forming. Does anyone have any info?
It occurs to me now–
Craig Murray, who delivered the documents, said that there was an intermediary, someone else involved in the transfer. What if that intermediary was Rich’s BROTHER?
The family could be trying to protect the brother from a similar fate by claiming Seth had nothing to do with political motivations for his killing. That would explain much. If you’re going to trust someone in a crime of this magnitude, you probably only trust family…
We need to finally dispose of the misinformation that the Daily Mail originated about what Craig Murray supposedly claimed – so that we can move on to the really interesting things Craig Murray has _actually_ claimed about the leaks (plural).
Craig Murray did not receive any emails from a source or deliver any emails to WikiLeaks (though he does claim to have met the [Podesta] leaker (or intermediary – see below) after the Podesta materials were already safely with WikiLeaks, in September 2016). The claims in the Daily Mail article that he claimed to have done so are not supported by ANY direct quotations within the article, and he denies that he said this. For details, see my post to Lee Stranahan’s new forum, Stranaha [dot] com, in the “Assange and WikiLeaks” subforum, titled “What Craig Murray has NOT said about the leaks – but many THINK that he has”.
A second key point that the Daily Mail story attributes to Murray but is actually not well attested, is that he said he did not meet the (Podesta, _not_ DNC) leaker himself, but rather an intermediary. This one I’m not so sure is false, but it is also unsupported by any direct quotation from Murray within the article. Furthermore, the Guardian quotes Murray as saying flatly that he has met the source (of the Podesta leak). Murray quotes the Guardian’s quotation in his blog without objection, and also does not object when David Swanson, in an interview with Murray, quotes his words as given by the Guardian. Robert Parry, in his article providing some details of the Scott Horton interview with Murray, says something like “the source or an intermediary”, perhaps having mind the Daily Mail article when qualifying it this way.
Looking at Murray’s interviews with Scott Horton, Randy Credico and David Swanson on December 13, 2016, one may say with reasonable assurance that the source of the Podesta leak was an American with access to the NSA database.
Murray does appear to also know the identity of the DNC leaker as well, but presumably because Assange has told him. It is clear from the above three interviews that the person was (1) American, (2) a DNC insider, and (3) may have been Seth Rich. Technically, like Assange, Murray has neither confirmed or denied that Seth Rich was involved in the DNC leak, but given Murray’s statement that Assange is concerned that Rich may have been killed by someone who _thought_ he was the leaker, whether correctly or incorrectly (see quote given in Lazare’s article, above), this interpretation still assumes that there existed _some_ rational basis for so thinking.
In one of his blog posts, furthermore, Murray suggests that a report that the FBI has NOT examined Rich’s laptop, if true, proves a lack of real interest in solving Rich’s murder. Note that this does not imply that Rich was murdered for that reason, merely that a good faith investigation would have examined Rich’s laptop – in a context where the claim about Rich’s laptop is that it shows a connection to WikiLeaks.
In his most recent blog post related to this subject, Murray says that Mueller provides no evidence that Seth Rich was NOT the DNC leaker.
I have started a thread, also at Stranahan [dot] com, about what Craig Murray HAS said about the leaks. So far I have not found time to fill in details, but a fairly full list of source materials may be found there.
“Yes. We can say, we have said, repeatedly that over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party.”
— Julian Assange (Jan 2017), answering Sean Hannity
“Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians. The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks. [The leaks were motivated by] disgust at the corruption of the Clinton Foundation and the tilting of the primary election playing field against Bernie Sanders.”
— Craig Murray (Dec 2016), who met the whistleblower in Washington, D.C.
“This is according to the FBI report. What they find is. First of all you need to know some basic facts. There’s no DNC or Podesta email that’s beyond May 21st or May 22nd. The last email from either of those groups. So what the report says in sometime in LATE SPRING, we’re talking June, summer starts June 21st. I don’t know, I’m just saying late spring, early summer, he makes contact with Wikileaks. That’s in his computer, and he makes contact.”
— Seymour Hersh (2016 or 2017), investigative journalist, he doesn’t comment on this
“If Congress includes #SethRich case into their Russia probe I’ll give written testimony with evidence that Seth Rich was @Wikileaks source. . . . I knew Seth Rich. I know he was the @Wikileaks source. I was involved.”
— Kim Dotcom (May 2017), who is now fighting extradition to the US
Thanks for compiling some relevant direct quotations (we should attempt to do this more comprehensively).
I would add the qualification that the person Murray met was the Podesta emails whistleblower (or associate), not the DNC emails whistleblower (or associate). It is quite clear from several interviews that the meeting related to the Podesta leak, but occurred after the materials were already safely with WikiLeaks. Murray is most explicit about this in his December 13, 2016 interview with Randy Credico. Referring to Facebook traffic to his blog, he says “It’d been down close to zero really ever since I started releasing stuff from WikiLeaks on the Podesta emails.”
Seth Rich, on the other hand, seems to very likely have been involved in the OTHER leak that WikiLeaks published, i.e. that of the DNC emails. He is not a candidate for having leaked the Podesta materials.
Larry Johnson says that he has two sources corroborating the Seth Rich-WikiLeaks connection. In comments under his article “Fake News Media Suffers Body Blow in Case Linked to Seth Rich,” Johnson makes several replies of his own:
The first of them is this:
“I know who Malia talked to. She was right. The FBI knew Seth contacted Assange.” (April 30, 2019)
In a second such reply, he states:
“You’re right. Apart from the offer of a reward, I know the person who was speaking to Assange and who then spoke to Ed Butowsky. This person is credible and had access. I personally have no doubt that Seth Rich was the source for the DNC emails. Whether that fact played a role in his subsequent death is something I do not know. But I do think it merits being investigated rather than dismissed outright as a crazy conspiracy.” (May 1, 2019)
This prompted me to ask:
“I’m just curious. Is this the same person who told you and Malia Zimmerman about the FBI’s knowledge of Seth Rich’s contact with WikiLeaks?” (May 1)
To which Johnson replied:
“No. Different person.” (May 1)
The US spy agencies were involved in US election tampering. I would think that if The People were to find this out then all heck would break loose. Trump is right, though the original “sin” (tampering”) was, IMO, aiding and abetting the discrediting of Sanders. The leaker was exposing all of this: pry into the DNC’s tactics and behind them you’ll find support from the spy agencies. The REAL story/evidence is being buried. That’s Mueller’s specialty. Assange is to be buried. Kim Dotcom is to be buried. Hersch probably knows what line to not cross.
Control over Internet content is one of the biggest tasks yet to be undertaken as it is necessary to disarm the “tripwire” that Assange/Wikileaks likely has set out (and perhaps Kim Dotcom). The “approved” “news” outlets will not publish such information. “Discredited” ones will be “Russian Troll Farm operations.”
Back at the beginning of March, in Bill Binney’s interview with Jason Goodman, he let out a preview of the information that Larry Johnson has since given in the quotations above. Though Binney’s info isn’t independent of Johnson’s, his words are I think an interesting supplement:
“the people I know, they have at least two other avenues of information coming to them that verify what [Sy Hersh] said about the FBI having the data on Seth Rich’s computer, where he contacted WikiLeaks and transferred some data and wanted money for the rest of the data. I don’t think that’s publicly known yet.”
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwUoE8UecC0&t=527s
When the Deadstream Media cry conspiracy, then you’re likely looking in the right direction.
This is a good overview of the problems with the Mueller Report’s handling of the DNC and Podesta emails. The forensic work of Bill Binney and the VIPS should be added in here to show that the theft of the emails was not a hack but a download directly from the DNC server. And then add in that Mueller relied on the report of the DNC server done by CrowdStrike, a company with dubious connections to the Clinton campaign and the Russia hating Atlantic Council. There are gaping holes CrowdStrike’s theory about how the server was hacked, not the least of which was the fact that neither CrowdStrike nor the DNC bothered to notify the FBI of the intrusion for more than a month.
It has also been reported that the FBI took possession of the physical evidence the DC police had, most importantly Rich’s laptop which he had with him when he was shot. The contents of this laptop might be crucial. Kim Dot Com has been claiming that there are messages between himself and Rich discussing the DNC materials. If the FBI does really have this laptop, then Mueller would have known everything about its contents. If the FBI does really have the laptop, then Mueller has hidden evidence that is very likely exculpatory. This is serious. Mueller may have destroyed exculpatory evidence, which would be criminal.
We need to get to the bottom of the Seth Rich story. Once reason Assange has been totally silenced is that he could blow the lid off this story and destroy one-third of the Mueller Probe. That might set off the total implosion of the Mueller Probe — fake news at its highest point.
Thanks, Daniel for keeping up on this issue. I was appalled when I read Mueller’s theory about Assange inventing the Seth Rich story as a way of distracting attention from Russia. Mueller just pulled that whole thing right out of his ass. It was really quite amazing. You don’t want to see that kind of thing.
Actually the DNC emails were a leak, but the Podesta emails were likely given to wikileaks from a member of the US “intelligence” community. Murray says there were two separate providers, and then hints that the Podesta brothers were under surveillance for their lobbying on behalf of the Saudis. I imagine there were many within the beltway who were disgusted by the shenanigans the DNC was pulling to sabotage Bernie in favor of Hillary.
Do you remember the documentary program on the CBS network called the Twentieth Century that recounted history to the American public throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s? This was back when television was actually amenable to unearthing and divulging some real truths (though I suspect not all, even back then).
There was one run of shows that I particularly remember: “The Rise of Khrushchev.” It got down deep into the intrigue and ruthless acts carried out in the acquisition of pure power. Of course, the American establishment also wanted to tarnish the Soviet brand, so anything negative said about Mr. K was always a positive in that regard.
Anyway, I’m thinking that, if it ever becomes possible (and with modern technology, a clean unblemished look at history and the facts that make it up may never again be possible), this era (the first quarter of the 21st century) in America will look as provocative, revolting and scary to our descendants as that Khrushchev documentary was to us impressionable young Boomers. What’s playing out right now is, in fact, the final power struggle of that Boomer population with septuagenarians still occupying or striving for every position of power in our government. Some (Bernie and Biden to give two examples) will soon be octogenarians… and the “Singularity” hasn’t even yet arrived!
Do you remember the documentary program on the CBS network called the Twentieth Century that recounted history to the American public throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s? This was back when television was actually amenable to unearthing and divulging some real truths (though I suspect not all, even back then).
There was one run of shows that I particularly remember: “The Rise of Khrushchev.” It got down deep into the intrigue and ruthless acts carried out in the acquisition of pure power. Of course, the American establishment also wanted to tarnish the Soviet brand, so anything negative said about Mr. K was always a positive in that regard.
Anyway, I’m thinking that, if it ever becomes possible (and with modern technology, a clean unblemished look at history and the facts that make it up may never again be possible), this era (the first quarter of the 21st century) in America will look as provocative, revolting and scary to our descendants as that Khrushchev documentary was to us impressionable young Boomers. What’s playing out right now is, in fact, the final power struggle of that Boomer generation with septuagenarians still occupying or striving for every position of power in our government. Some (Bernie and Biden to give two examples) will soon be octogenarians… and the “Singularity” hasn’t even yet arrived!
I missed that one. I have seen very little television since I started going to sea in 1979. Come to think of it, I didn’t watch much after High School. I just read a great article by Caitlin on narrative control:
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/propaganda-is-the-root-of-all-our-problems-3209ab8650a4
It’s amazing how much extracurricular crap, funded by a fully comprehensive shadow government exclusively serving the billionaire population, goes on outside of official government operations specifically to channel, thwart or redirect those government functions and policies. The “Atlantic Council” and “Crowdstrike,” mentioned by Caitlin, are just two such moving parts of that shadow government. I’m sure the shadow government has more clout with the Deep State than anyone elected to office in a long long time.
Sometimes a rose is a rose and a cigar is a cigar. My god, a family lost their son. Just imagine if their was nothing behind this case, other than a robbery.. Nothing will bring their son back, and just think if it was you and your child. Please, leave his parents and his family alone.
A cigar may just be a cigar, but a cigar is also a smoke.
Hillary, is that you?
If it was one of my children I wouldn’t stop until the murderer was apprehended. So what if people “talk” (free speech, people can make up any stories they wish, and publish/broadcast them- IF there is libel then there’s the courts).
And perhaps this IS about meddling in US elections by US spy agencies, and their conspiracy theory that the Russians did all of this has put the entire world at risk of a nuclear war? Rich’s murder is of grave public interest, it’s outside the total control of his family.
We are all children of our parents. Sometimes parents and their children are a significant story, and sympathy for them is no reason to stop diligent reporting and analysis.
All of this is why I hope WikiLeaks has a “Dead Man’s Switch” in case anything untoward happens to Assange.
As I mentioned above, I’m sure there is. BUT… I’m also sure that the US intel agencies have been active in defusing it: the big push to censor the Internet.
Hope is not enough. There needs to be action. We have to survive until the 2020 elections, and during that time support those who have spoken out in defense of Assange and others. I’m not seeing how the DNC is going to be able to derail Sanders this time, without OR with efforts by the intel agencies. Sanders is a movement. It’ll get us actual fire power: Trump mouthed the words “drain the swamp,” but the real swamp busters WILL come in, and one of the fiercest will be Tulsi Gabbard (hated by the establishment, liked by Oliver Stone, Jill Stein, Ron Paul, Joe Rogan, Mike Gravel and on and on).
Right-on Seer!