Evidence doesn’t back accusation about Rich

Russian involvement in WikiLeaks to harm Dems a settled point.

Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich “apparently was assassinated at 4 in the morning, having given WikiLeaks something like 53,000 emails and 17,000 attachments . ... It turns out, it wasn’t the Russians.” — Newt Gingrich May 21 on “Fox and Friends”

It’s been several months since the intelligence community concluded Russia tampered in the election in ways that included stealing Democratic Party emails and giving them to WikiLeaks.

Yet an unfounded conspiracy theory persists that WikiLeaks got the emails from a Democratic National Committee staffer who was shot and killed in July 2016.

Seth Rich, who worked on voter access projects for the DNC, was killed early in the morning near his Washington home. Ten months later, the case remains unsolved. Washington police have said they

believe it was likely a botched robbery.

On May 15, private investigator Rod Wheeler said he had evidence to prove the theorists right. But Wheeler backtracked on his claims the next day, and the Rich family has sent him a cease-anddesist letter, saying their son was not WikiLeaks’ source.

Even so, some right-wing pundits continue to peddle this conspiracy, most prominently on Fox News. Among them are host Sean Hannity and former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

“We have this very strange story now of this young man who worked for the Democratic National Committee, who apparently was assassinated at 4 in the morning, having given WikiLeaks something like 53,000 emails and 17,000 attachments,” Gingrich said on Fox on May 21. “Nobody’s investigating that, and what does that tell you about what was going on? Because it turns out, it wasn’t the Russians.”

Contrary to Gingrich’s statement, the thin case that Rich was the DNC leaker is not substantial enough to outweigh ample evidence that Russia was the culprit. Two days after Gingrich made this claim, Fox News retracted its report promoting this conspiracy theory.

Wheeler told CNN that he hadn’t seen the evidence himself, and his knowledge of Rich’s alleged email contact with WikiLeaks came from the national Fox News reporter, not his own investigative work.

Fox retracted its own May 16 article, saying “the article was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting.”

The allegation that Rich was the DNC leaker, and the related insinuation that Rich was murdered because of it, rests nearly entirely on claims from an unnamed federal investigator with unspecified connections to the case.

No evidence has emerged that Rich was so disgruntled with the DNC that he felt the need to expose its leaders to WikiLeaks. Further, the leaked emails were, overall, rather mild. They were embarrassing and prompted Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz of Florida to step down from her role as DNC chairwoman, but they didn’t expose any conspiracies or illegal activity.

The intelligence community and private cybersecurity professionals have widely concluded that the DNC hack and WikiLeaks dump are covered with Russian fingerprints.

The technical methods behind the hack were similar to those used by two Russian intelligence groups, dubbed APT28 and APT29, also known as Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear. And experts have said that dumping large quantities of stolen political information is a signature move of Russian influence operations.

There’s also the fact that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and the Russian government have a well-documented relationship. Assange has hosted a television show on RT, a state-owned network, for example.

There’s evidence that Russia engaged in cyber operations against Republicans, too, though it wasn’t as robust as the DNC hack.

Our ruling

There is no trustworthy evidence that Rich was WikiLeaks’ source for thousands of DNC emails. The police believe his death was the result of a botched robbery. The intelligence community and cybersecurity experts have reached a broad conclusion that all the available evidence points to Russia as the actual perpetrators.

Gingrich and others are talking about an unfounded conspiracy theory as if it’s fact. It is far from it. We rate his claim Pants on Fire.