A federal judge in Texas ordered in a FOIA case against the F.B.I. that the bureau must produce an index of the contents of Seth Rich’s laptop computers by Monday, reports Joe Lauria.
According to a court order of August 2024, the F.B.I. is to release a list of the files it is holding from the laptops of slain DNC staffer Seth Rich on Monday.
Rich was murdered on a Washington D.C. street on July 10, 2016, 12 days before WikiLeaks released its DNC emails and 15 days before the start of the DNC convention on July 25, 2016.
Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange raised suspicion that Rich was the source of the emails.
The F.B.I. was sued in a FOIA case to release the contents of both Rich’s work and personal laptops. In November 2023 a federal court in Texas ruled that the F.B.I. had improperly withheld the contents of Rich’s computers.
In dismissing the bureau’s bid to dismiss the case, District Judge Amos L. Mazzant, III ordered on Aug. 15, 2024 that the F.B.I. must produce a so-called Vaughn Index, showing what files it has and the reason why they won’t be made public. The deadline is March 10. The F.B.I. also has the option to file another motion for summary judgement, which was denied by the judge in August 2024.
The F.B.I. had been originally told to hand over the list in November 2023. It remains to be seen whether the index will list recipients of emails from Rich and whether WikiLeaks is among them.
We are republishing today an Aug. 8, 2017 article written for Consortium News by Joe Lauria, that gives extensive background into the case.
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
First published Aug. 8, 2017
With U.S.-Russia tensions as dangerously high as they’ve been since the worst days of the Cold War, there is potential new evidence that Russia was not behind a hack of the Democratic National Committee, although Congress and the U.S. mainstream media accept the unproven allegation of Russia’s guilt as indisputable fact.
The possible new evidence comes in the form of a leaked audiotape of veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in which Hersh is heard to say that not Russia, but a DNC insider, was the source of the Democratic emails published by WikiLeaks just before the start of the Democratic National Convention in late July 2016.
Hersh said on the tape that the source of the leak was former DNC employee Seth Rich, who was murdered on a darkened street in a rough neighborhood of Northwest Washington D.C. two weeks before the Convention, on July 10, 2016.
But Hersh threw cold water on a theory that the murder was an assassination in retaliation for the leak. Instead, Hersh concurs with the D.C. police who say the murder was a botched robbery.
Mainstream news outlets have mocked any linkage between Rich’s murder and the disclosure of the DNC emails as a “conspiracy theory,” but Hersh’s comments suggest another possibility – that the murder and the leak were unrelated while Rich may still have been the leaker.
In dismissing the possibility that Rich was the leaker, mainstream media outlets often ignore one of the key reason why some people believe that he was: Shortly after his murder, WikiLeaks, which has denied receiving the emails from the Russian government, posted a Tweet offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to the solution of the mystery of who killed Rich.
ANNOUNCE: WikiLeaks has decided to issue a US$20k reward for information leading to conviction for the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 9, 2016
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and publisher, brought up Rich’s murder out of context in an interview with Dutch TV last August. “Whistle-blowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks,” Assange said. “As a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington.”
Pressed by the interviewer to say whether Rich was the source of the DNC emails, Assange said WikiLeaks never reveals its sources. Yet, it appeared to be an indirect way of naming Rich, while formally maintaining WikiLeaks‘ policy. An alternative view would be to believe that Assange is cynically using Rich’s death to divert the trail from the real source.
But Assange is likely one of the few people who actually knows who the source is, so his professed interest in Rich’s murder presents a clue regarding the source of the leak that any responsible news organization would at least acknowledge although that has not been the case in many recent mainstream articles about the supposed Seth Rich “conspiracy theory.”
Hersh’s Unwitting Tapes
Hersh’s taped comments add another element to the mystery, given his long record of shedding light into the dark corners of the U.S. government’s crimes, lies and cover-ups. He exposed the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War; revealed illegal C.I.A. spying in the 1970s spurring wide-ranging Congressional investigations and reform; and uncovered U.S. torture in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
In the audiotape – which Hersh told me was made without his permission – he quoted an unnamed government source who told him that Rich offered the DNC emails to WikiLeaks in exchange for money.
“What I know comes off an F.B.I. report. Don’t ask me how. You can figure it out, I’ve been around a long time,” Hersh says on the tape. “I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. This person is unbelievably accurate and careful, he’s a very high-level guy and he’ll do a favor. You’re just going to have to trust me.”
The F.B.I. cyber unit got involved after the D.C. police were unable to access protected files on Rich’s computer, Hersh said. So the F.B.I. “found what he’d done. He had submitted a series of documents, of emails. Some juicy emails from the DNC,” to Wikileaks, Hersh said.
“He offered a sample, an extensive sample, you know I’m sure dozens of emails and said ‘I want money.’ Then later Wikileaks did get the password, he had a Dropbox, a protected Dropbox,” Hersh said. He went on:
“Wikileaks got access, and before he was killed … he also, and this is also in the F.B.I. report, he also let people know, with whom he was dealing. … I don’t know how he dealt with the Wikileaks and the mechanism but … the word was passed according to the NSA report, ‘I’ve also shared this box with a couple of friends so if anything happens to me it’s not going to solve your problem.’”
Hersh said he didn’t know what this “problem” was.
Either Hersh misspoke when he mentioned an “NSA report,” instead meaning the F.B.I. report, or the National Security Agency may have provided a record of Rich’s communication to the F.B.I. Both the F.B.I. and the D.C. police have denied that the F.B.I. got involved in the case.
The Tape Is Leaked
Seymour Hersh at the 2004 Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award. (Institute for Policy Studies/Wikimedia Commons)
The Hersh audiotape was posted on a website called Big League Politics, which displays links to Project Veritas, a right-wing group run by James O’Keefe, though there is no evidence that Veritas was involved in the Hersh tape.
Veritas does undercover audio and video recordings of unsuspecting subjects and has been accused of doctoring its video and audiotapes. But a recent O’Keefe undercover video of a CNN medical producer saying the network’s coverage of the Russia-gate story was “bullshit” was confirmed by CNN, which took no action against the producer.
People who believe that Hersh’s apparent revelation could reduce Russia-U.S. tensions are clamoring for him to confirm what he said.
Popular blogger Caitlin Johnstone wrote:
“If Hersh has any information at all indicating that the WikiLeaks releases last year came not from Russian hackers but from a leaker on the inside, he is morally obligated to volunteer all the information that he has. Even the slightest possibility that his information could help halt America’s collision course with Russia by killing public support for new cold war escalations makes his remaining silent absolutely inexcusable.”
Only Hersh’s voice is heard on the taped interview, which was conducted by Ed Butowsky, a wealthy Republican donor and Trump supporter. Until now, Hersh’s only public comment about the tape was to National Public Radio. “I hear gossip,” Hersh said. “[Butowsky] took two and two and made 45 out of it.”
I contacted Hersh on Friday via email. He confirmed to me that it was his voice on the tape by angrily condemning those who he said secretly recorded him, without identifying them. He did not respond when I asked him whether he thought the tape may have been altered. Hersh refused to comment further. [Hersh likewise refused to discuss anything about Rich in a Feb. 18, 2023 interview with Consortium News‘ CN Live! webcast.]
On June 2, [2017] in an exchange of emails between Hersh and Butowsky, Hersh denied any knowledge of the F.B.I. report. That was two months before Hersh discovered that he had been secretly recorded when the tape was made public on Aug. 1 by Big League Politics. A screenshot of the Hersh-Butowsky email exchange was published by Big League Politics last week.
“I am curious why you haven’t approached the house committee telling them what you were read by your F.B.I. friend related to Seth Rich that you in turn read to me,” Butowsky wrote.
Hersh replied: “ed –you have a lousy memory…i was not read anything by my fbi friend..i have no firsthand information and i really wish you would stop telling others information that you think i have…please stop relaying information that you do not have right…and that i have no reason to believe is accurate…”
Without informing him that he had been recorded, Butowsky replies: “I know it isn’t first hand knowledge but you clearly said, my memory is perfect, that you had a friend at the F.B.I. who read / told you what was in the file on Seth Rich and I wonder why you aren’t helping your country and sharing that information on who it was?”
Further suggesting that Rich may have been the source of the DNC emails, WikiLeaks posted a link to the audiotape on Twitter.
Audio tape of Seymour Hersh discussing WikiLeaks DNC leaks and Seth Rich https://t.co/STp9u7Vtbn h/t @CassandraRules
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 1, 2017
Hersh has given no indication he’s planning to write a piece based on his source who he said has seen the F.B.I. report. Hersh has found it difficult to be published in recent years in the United States. He has been writing for the London Review of Books until that publication earlier this year rejected a piece challenging the purported U.S. evidence blaming a chemical weapons attack in Syria, which led to Trump’s bombing of a Syrian air field. Hersh’s story was published instead in a major German weekly, Die Welt.
MSM Contempt
Corporate media’s uniform reaction has been to treat the idea of Seth Rich being WikiLeaks‘ source as a “conspiracy theory” – while mostly ignoring Assange’s hints and now the Hersh tape. Major U.S. media outlets cover Russia-gate as if Russian interference in last November’s U.S. election is proven, rather than based on a shaky “assessment” by “hand-picked” analysts from three – not all 17 – U.S. intelligence agencies.
If Russia-gate special prosecutor Robert Mueller is serious about getting to the bottom of who WikiLeaks‘ source is there are several avenues he could pursue. He could check Rich’s bank accounts to see if there was a transfer of money from a representative of WikiLeaks. He could try to find Rich’s friends who may have been given his DropBox password. He could seek to interview Hersh.
“Someone ought to ask Mueller, if he had an ounce of integrity (which he doesn’t), why he’s not showing these F.B.I. and/or NSA reports to his Grand Jury which could blow the lid off of ‘Russiagate’ that Mueller was appointed to investigate,” former F.B.I. official and whistleblower Coleen Rowley told me in an email.
“It’s sad the F.B.I. could be keeping this secret. But I think the [Rich] family could sue to get the F.B.I. report that Hersh mentioned or now that FOX is sued, its attorneys could try to subpoena the F.B.I. documents in discovery.” She added that the F.B.I. would likely fight such a subpoena, however.
The lawsuit that Rowley mentioned was filed by Rod Wheeler, a D.C. private detective, against Butowsky and Fox News. Wheeler was hired by Butowsky on behalf of the Rich family to find the killer. In a Fox News item on May 16, [2017] Wheeler was quoted referring to a Fox source in the federal government who said that Rich was WikiLeaks‘ source.
Fox News retracted the story a week later citing unspecific breaches of its editorial policies. At the time Fox had suffered ad boycotts when its chairman, Roger Ailes, and then its top presenter, Bill O’Reilly, faced sexual harassment allegations. Both later resigned. Sean Hannity, another top presenter, continued to pursue the Rich story until he was threatened with an ad boycott, at which point Fox retracted the story.
Wheeler’s suit now alleges that he was misquoted and that the purpose of the Fox story was to distract attention from Russia’s connection with the DNC emails. Big League Politics has posted audio of Wheeler saying that Aaron Rich, the victim’s brother, blocked him from pursuing leads on Seth Rich’s computer.
It is not clear if Hersh’s source is the same as Fox’s (or if Fox was using Hersh in a second-hand way). Butowsky has a connection with Fox as an on-air commentator. The date of the Hersh audio recording has not been made known although it presumably predated his email exchange with Butowsky on June 2 [2017].
If an F.B.I. report exists indicating that Rich was the source of the DNC emails and the report is made public, it could reduce tensions with Russia that Congress ratcheted up further last week by escalating sanctions – a form of economic warfare – against Russia as punishment for its alleged role in exposing the DNC emails and others belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta.
What the Emails Revealed
Hillary Clinton formally accepts the Democratic Party’s nomination for President on the fourth night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 28, 2016. (A. Shaker/VOA/Wikimedia Commons)
The DNC emails revealed DNC officials improperly interfering in the Democratic primaries to undercut Clinton’s chief rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders. The Podesta emails included the contents of Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street and other special interests as well as pay-to-play features of the Clinton Foundation.
On Jan. 6 [2017] – before leaving office – President Obama’s intelligence chiefs oversaw “hand-picked” analysts from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and NSA creating an “assessment” blaming Russia for the hacked emails albeit without presenting any hard evidence. Russian officials have denied supplying the emails to WikiLeaks and WikiLeaks has denied receiving them from Russia.
Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and an associate of Assange, has said categorically that the WikiLeaks source was a leak from an insider, not a hack. In an email message last week to former C.I.A. analyst Ray McGovern, which McGovern shared with me, Murray wrote:
“To my certain knowledge neither the DNC nor Podesta leaks to Wikileaks involved Russia. I met with someone while in Washington who, to the best of my knowledge, was an actual leaker.”
Raising Tensions With Russia
Nevertheless, the unproven allegations of Russian interference in the election have raised tensions between the two nuclear powers to levels not seen since the darkest days of the Cold War and possibly worse. Stephen Cohen, a leading U.S. expert on Russia, said the current showdown may be even more hazardous than the Cuban missile crisis.
“I think this is the most dangerous moment in American-Russian relations, at least since the Cuban missile crisis. And arguably, it’s more dangerous, because it’s more complex,” he told Democracy Now! in April [2017]. “Therefore, we … have in Washington these – and, in my judgment, fact-less – accusations that Trump has somehow been compromised by the Kremlin.”
In the missile crisis “there was no doubt what the Soviets had done, putting missile silos in Cuba,” Cohen said. “No evidence has been presented today of anything. Imagine if Kennedy had been accused of being a secret Soviet Kremlin agent. He would have been crippled. And the only way he could have proved he wasn’t was to have launched a war against the Soviet Union. And at that time, the option was nuclear war.”
As it still is today.
Joe Lauria is a veteran foreign-affairs journalist. He has written for The Boston Globe, the Sunday Times of London and The Wall Street Journal among other newspapers. He is the author of How I Lost By Hillary Clinton published by OR Books in June 2017, which analyzes the DNC emails. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter at @unjoe.
It’s Tuesday morning now. Were the Seth Rich Files released? Or, as in the case of the Epstein files, is the same suppression of the facts continuing under new management. I assume the latter, as I don’t see any press reports about information having been released.
hxxps://consortiumnews.com/2025/03/11/fbi-redactions-on-seth-rich-index-leave-no-answers/
But John F. Kennedy WAS accused of being a “secret agent of the Soviet Union” by the war hawks in the Pentagon and CIA because Kennedy refused to support the Bay pf Pigs invasion, negotiated with Nikita Krushchev to end the missile crisis and was planning on pulling out of Vietnam. Read “JFK and the Unspeakable”, a book that figures prominently on videos with Ray McGovern.
It is way past time to quit discussing whether a story involving a possible conspiracy is a “conspiracy theory” or not. That has nothing to do with its credibility, and following the common bastard usage does no one credit.
We know, and CN has published, that the files were downloaded to a thumb drive or similar. The “Russiagate” rumor started as a simple lie, long before any evidence could be gathered to credibly suggest it. Famously, none appeared later.
The DNC urgency to not pass the computers to law enforcement and the law enforcement urgency to not release related information are telling. On the other hand, the odds that a particular young man get shot at a particular time in DC are one in many thousands. To ask that people believe that Rich did download DNC document, yet that neither the DNC nor related agencies had anything to do with his death is not credible, frankly. It is surpassingly unlikely, and it fails to explain DNC behavior afterward.
I would far sooner believe that the courageous and respectable but also eminently practical Mr. Hersh had to protect a source, or that the source had to protect someone. Readers get in a moral snit because someone is not willing to die immediately for the Truth, but the gun is not pointed at us, generally. This would be very common behavior, and for understandable reasons. One chooses one’s risks.
Since the hyperlink further clarifying Robert Mueller’s lack of integrity in Coleen Rowley’s remarks appears to be broken, I will excerpt the article that it was presumably linking to below (which was syndicated by Consortium News upon publication at the time):
“Commentators display amnesia when they describe former FBI Directors Robert Mueller and James Comey as stellar and credible law enforcement figures. Perhaps if they included J. Edgar Hoover, such fulsome praise could be put into proper perspective. Although these Hoover successors, now occupying center stage in the investigation of President Trump, have been hailed for their impeccable character by much of official Washington, the truth is, as top law enforcement officials of the Bush administration (Mueller as FBI Director and James Comey as Deputy Attorney General), both presided over post-9/11 cover-ups and secret abuses of the Constitution, enabled Bush-Cheney fabrications to launch wrongful wars, and exhibited plain vanilla incompetence.”
Source:
Coleen Rowley, “No, Robert Mueller And James Comey Aren’t Heroes,” The Huffington Post (HuffPost), June 6, 2017 (archive.ph/rq8H2)
Undead FOIA aka SleuthNews btw happens to regard Rich´s murder a coincidence.
At least he did so 2024.
re: Hersh. Hersh is in a very difficult position.
If you are working with intelligence people it does not matter what ideals one might have and neither does matter the law at large. What matters is integrity towards your sources and their trust in you as a reporter.
There are no universal laws in this line of work.
No UN Charter for Human Rights.
It´s more like war and being in the field. You have to develope your own set of rules by which you and your sources survive the system.
This is about operating in a space of absolute power as the one who has zero power with those who are powerless too.
It took 30 years for Deep Throat to be revealed. For good reason.
Why should this have changed. In fact the state of things has deteriorated since.
p.s. Consider what it does to a person (Hersh) if you move in this space for 50+ years and if CIA and friends threaten you and your family and people which they did. This is not a game. And as much as I respect Johnstone: Hersh is a muckraker. Not just a “writer “of text or a novelist.
I read the leaked emails of Hillary and Podesta wherein she said she’d attack Iran and oust Putin when she became president. I always assumed she ordered the hit on Seth Rich.
I wouldn’t put it past her. She’s an evil woman.
Sounds more to me that Hersh doesn’t necessarily trust his source or at least is not willing to put himself out there on the basis of the conversation. It could also be that he doesn’t want to be dragged into court and told to reveal the source too but I think the former is more likely. Any good journalist would require two sources before – formally – opening their mouth anyway. Doesn’t mean it’s not true but as Hersh says, he has no firsthand information.
The odds that Rich was a random murder victim is slim to none.
Though the underlying circumstances of Rich’s murder are certainly highly suspicious (particularly in light of the kneejerk opposition to further inquiry or investigation among influential elements within US governmental and social institutions), and I do contend that they warrant openmindedness, I also do not utterly discount the possibility that Rich’s murder in Washington DC and his possible involvement in the 2016 Democratic National Committee (DNC) disclosures to WikiLeaks could have been a product of coincidental but unrelated causes (which is an intriguing alternative to both of the predominant accounts of his death).
I will certainly grant that different people undoubtedly grieve and respond to the death of loved ones (alongside disconcerting possibilities more generally) in a variety of ways, which is attested to by, for instance, the diverse responses from the likes of Jim Swire, Ken Dornstein, and Daniel and Susan Cohen to the death of their loved ones in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. That being said, it still seems worth bringing up the reactions of Seth Rich’s family members, particularly his parents, who appear unconvinced of the notion that their son’s death was the product of a retaliatory murder by any DNC/intelligence-connected assassin and went so far as to have a lawsuit against FOX News over it.
As one analogy, while I personally have found stronger reason to suspect that the domestic deaths of, e.g., Karen Silkwood, Don Henry and Kevin Ives, Danny Casolaro (and several others connected to the “Octopus” scandal, such as Alan Standorf, Fred Alvarez, etc.), Kenneth Michael Trentadue, Michael Hastings, and various others were murders connected to parapolitical elements rather than simply random coincidental killings (as several of their respective friends and family members, and other high-level figures, do), I am generally inclined to believe that Gary Webb’s death actually was the product of a suicide rather than a direct assassination. I suspect that those were the circumstances of Webb’s death given that comparable reports of suicides involving ballistic trauma to the head from multiple gunshots were relatively rare but far from unprecedented prior to Webb’s death (as multiple medical publications and coroners reports can attest), and that several of his closest friends and family members reported Webb’s descent into terminal depression in the time preceding his death, largely as a direct consequence of the unambiguous intelligence and media campaign to discredit his work, ruin his reputation, and drive him into despair (see Ryan Devereaux, “Managing a Nightmare: How the CIA Watched Over the Destruction of Gary Webb,” The Intercept, Sep. 25, 2014).
I have to wonder.
After this amount of time a judge rules in favor of a plaintiff to release Rich case documents after the Agency has been assaulted administratively by Trusk & Co.
What could go wrong.
“On Jan. 6 [2017] – before leaving office – President Obama’s intelligence chiefs oversaw “hand-picked” analysts from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and NSA creating an “assessment””
LOL
Hersh is betting on a pretty big coincidence: the leaker just so happened to be brutally murdered and his unsolved homicide was totally unrelated to the leaking the victim did about unsavory conduct of the most powerful people on earth.
One thing we can say for sure is that Rich did not lead an uneventful life.
It strains credulity to believe his murder can’t be resolved to some degree with the ubiquity of cameras everywhere.
They’ll solve Rich’s murder about the same time they solve the case of the 1/6 DNC/RNC pipe bomber or find a motive for Trump’s first assassination attempt.
Those cases will never be solved because doing so would do institutional damage to the FBI or some other intelligence branch that was involved.
Definitely correct.