Althouse: "Pro-Trump media outlets that promoted for months the baseless conspiracy that former DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered for political gain struggled Tuesday..."

August 2, 2017

"Pro-Trump media outlets that promoted for months the baseless conspiracy that former DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered for political gain struggled Tuesday..."

"... with how to report the news that the detective they had believed blew the case open was now suing Fox News for allegedly pressuring him to concoct that story. Some far-right sites believe that the Fox News contributor turned private detective, Rod Wheeler, was railroaded by the mainstream media. Others made the story footnotes in their reports. Still others turned on Wheeler altogether, claiming they stopped believing him months ago...."

Writes Ben Collins at The Daily Beast.

45 comments:

Dear corrupt left, go F yourselves said...: Twist, turn, wiggle, obscure, lie,

Meanwhile, who killed Seth Rich and why?; 8/2/17, 8:34 AM
David Begley said...: has CNN ever broadcast a baseless conspiracy story?; 8/2/17, 8:37 AM
Dear corrupt left, go F yourselves said...: Murdered for "Political gain"?

How about... political retribution.; 8/2/17, 8:38 AM
rhhardin said...: Seth Rich is Vince Fostered.

Conspiracy story is Seth Riched.; 8/2/17, 8:39 AM
Todd said...: OK, now I am super-duper confused.

The Trump/Russia story is totally, completely, almost assuredly, practically verifiablely TRUE (all caps) according to the MSM.

But this story is "baseless"?

They both share the very same amount of "actual proof" so I can't help but wonder what makes one "baseless" and the other not "baseless"???; 8/2/17, 8:42 AM
Todd said...: Also, how come every "anti-Trump" story reported on by the media does not include the headline tag of "anti-Trump media outlet"?

That is a real stumper...; 8/2/17, 8:44 AM
bagoh20 said...: Putin probably has murder envy over this.; 8/2/17, 8:52 AM
John henry said...: I saw yesterday that Seth Rich and Imran Awan had dinner the night before (night of?) Seth Rich's murder.

OTOH, I saw it in some fairly sketchy sites and was unable to find it anywhere else so I don't think I believe it.

It will be interesting if there turns out to be a connection.

John Henry; 8/2/17, 8:57 AM
Sebastian said...: Seth's problem was that he wasn't named Marc and had no Denise.; 8/2/17, 9:13 AM
CStanley said...: @John Henry:

The story about Seth Rich attending a party with Imran Awan is debunked here:
https://heavy.com/news/2017/08/seth-rich-imran-awan-partying-theories-truth-hoax-debunked-photos-rumors-dnc-leaks/

Apparently Roger Stone is peddling it, and Alex Jones and some other outlets like WND appear to be running with it. Very discouraging that people push fake stuff which makes it easy for the establishment sources to claim that anything suspicious relating to Rich's murder is just fake news.; 8/2/17, 9:26 AM
CStanley said...: Here's a link to the article that debunks Rich partying with Awan.; 8/2/17, 9:28 AM
Clyde said...: Sure, it's "baseless." Like all those German authorities reacting to the Hamburg stabber, who yelled "Allahu Akbar!" by saying that he was mentally unbalanced, and just using Islamism as a pretext. No terrorism. Move along. Nothing to see here.

And a dead Democratic staffer, who apparently wasn't robbed, definitely is a curious story. But as the media authorities are saying, no conspiracy. Move along. Nothing to see here.

Yeah, right.; 8/2/17, 9:42 AM
holdfast said...: In an era where Obama and Ben Rhodes sold the entire Iran Agreement scam based on a massive web of lies and media manipulation, this seems like very small beer indeed.; 8/2/17, 9:48 AM
MacMacConnell said...: The heavy.com doesn't debunk whether Rich and Awan both attended the IT party. It debunks the fact that the photo is not the IT party, but a wedding. Truth is we don't know.; 8/2/17, 9:53 AM
CStanley said...: I agree, Mac McConnell, but putting out a photo under false pretenses makes it less likely that we'll ever know the truth.; 8/2/17, 9:56 AM
HoodlumDoodlum said...: Ok, but hold on: is this "Fox News" or is this just some Fox news affiliate and some reporters who happen to work for a Fox news channel?
I mean, it would be a real shame to get this wrong now. We might have to hear about it for a looooong time.; 8/2/17, 10:05 AM
tim maguire said...: Seen Rich was murdered for unknown reasons under suspicious circumstances. It is totally reasonable to float plausible theories so long as they are properly qualified. It is totally unreasonable to rush to close the book and attack anyone who floats theories inconvenient to Democrats.; 8/2/17, 10:20 AM
mockturtle said...: Big mystery. Kinda like 'who killed Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman'. Still unsolved!; 8/2/17, 10:38 AM
tim maguire said...: You saying OJ killed Seth Rich? From his prison cell?

Maybe.; 8/2/17, 10:43 AM
FullMoon said...: AUDIO: Reporter Seymour Hersh Claims Seth Rich Was DNC Email Leaker

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMcHblG9_j8; 8/2/17, 10:44 AM
MacMacConnell said...: At this point there is as much evidence for Trump / Russian collusion of hacking the election as Avan and the democrats killed Rich.; 8/2/17, 10:57 AM
Big Mike said...: @CStanley, thank you for the link, however you do need to refresh your understanding of the word "debunked." If it was, indeed, a party for DNC IT staffers, doesn't that make it more likely than not that both were present?

People need to spend more time reading "The Daily Caller" and less time reading "The Daily Beast." If the DC Is right about the transcript of the Fox News interview with Wheeler, then they will not only win the suit but may have grounds to countersue and clean out what's left of his bank account.; 8/2/17, 11:01 AM
Big Mike said...: Irrespective of the Wheeler suit, here are three dots to connect that have never been debunked:

1) Assange has always asserted that the DNC Emails came from a DNC insider.

2) People with Assange at the time he learned of the murder of Seth Rich remarked on how shaken he was by the news (as in why would he care if Seth Rich was just another Washington murder statistic?).

3) Assange offered a reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Rich's killer.

These facts are not going to go away.; 8/2/17, 11:10 AM
Yancey Ward said...: Wheeler can't win this suit- he is literally captured on camera saying the things he claims to not have said. He may have been lying through his teeth when he made those initial claims, but he cannot claim he didn't say them.; 8/2/17, 11:27 AM
Mike Sylwester said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 8/2/17, 11:34 AM
hombre said...: Most of the leftmedia stories focus on the same stuff easily refuted.

A. Fox may well have withdrawn the story because Wheeler was the sole source and a known crackpot. Anybody can make allegations. The claims about Trump are, at best, double hearsay, and unprovable by Wheeler.

B. Only Crowdstrike, the IT contractor hired by DNC, has had access to DNC servers in the wake of the hack. Comey claims the FBI was refused access. Why? (What ever happened to subpoenas and warrants?) All assessments about Russian hacking derive from Crowdstrike, the DNC employee.

C. DNC emails and Podesta's illustrated extensive collusion between Hillary, DNC and leftmedia personalities and journalists, including the theft of debate questions. If Fox did the same, as Wheeler alone claims, what is the big deal? There were no consequences for the lefties.

D. D.C. Police are investigating this as a robbery? Seriously? No evidence has been produced by the police to support this theory! He was murdered and nothing was taken. There were no witnesses and as far as the killers knew, no imminent police presence. So they shot him multiple times in the back and forgot to take his wallet? Sure they did. 👎👎

Wheeler's lawsuit is a loser and the articles are pap for lefties.; 8/2/17, 11:37 AM
Bruce Hayden said...: Despite every U.S. intelligence agency’s statements claiming Russia hacked the DNC, Posobiec still believes the private DNC correspondences released by WikiLeaks in the run-up to the 2016 election “were likely a leak, not a hack,” but added that “it hasn't been conclusively proven to connect with Seth Rich.”

Don't you love how they so blithely ignore that it was only a handful of those agencies, not "every" one, that the determination of Russian hacking was made without physically inspecting the actual servers, that the CIA was shown shortly after that to routinely use hacking tools that left the same sort of Russian "fingerprints" that were used here to identify the source as Russian hacking, that these intelligence agencies were being run, at the time, by Dem President Obama's political appointees, in the midst of a national election, after having heavily politicized those intelligence agencies during his 8 years in office, etc. We are expected to believe them, just like we are supposed to believe that the FISA unmasking of Trump people's identities by Obama's inner staff, in the midst of the election campaign and during the transition, was not the least bit politically motivated. (Funny thing there is that Ben Rhodes, who has admitted to being the author of a number of Obama's biggest whoppers, has now been implicated as having ordered such unmasking). Reminds me a bit about CAGW/CAGCC, where proponents try to shut down debate by citing the (heavily discredited) 97% figure. You are supposed to feel like an unelightened Neanderthal if you question those (cherry picked) 97% of "climate scientists" or the honesty and truthfulness of the Obama appointees running these heavily politicized intelligence agencies, or their heavily Dem workforces.; 8/2/17, 11:39 AM
Mike Sylwester said...: I want to clarify what I wrote about the DNC download that occurred at the DNC e-mail server on July 5, 2016.

The memo issued by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity includes the following passage:

[quote]

.... Based mostly on the cumulatively unique technical experience of our ex-NSA colleagues, we have been saying for almost a year that the DNC data reached WikiLeaks via a copy/leak by a DNC insider (but almost certainly not the same person who copied DNC data on July 5, 2016).

From the information available, we conclude that the same inside-DNC, copy/leak process was used at two different times, by two different entities, for two distinctly different purposes:

-(1) an inside leak to WikiLeaks before Julian Assange announced on June 12, 2016, that he had DNC documents and planned to publish them (which he did on July 22) – the presumed objective being to expose strong DNC bias toward the Clinton candidacy; and

-(2) a separate leak on July 5, 2016, to pre-emptively taint anything WikiLeaks might later publish by “showing” it came from a “Russian hack.”

[end quote]

The download that was done before June 12 has been attributed to Seth Rich. If it was not done by him, then it must have been done by another DNC "insider".

The download that was done on July 5 was done, in my opinion, by Debbie Wasserman Schultz's Pakistani IT employees. However, I am not sure about that. I can imagine that it was done instead by the CIA and/or NSA in order to prepare to eventually discredit the expected Wikileak leaks.

I must admit, however, that I didn't really understand the word taint in the above passage, although I gave the impression that I did understand it.

As best I can figure out the scheme, the alleged hacker "Guccifer 2.0" -- a supposed Russian hacker operating from Romania -- is actually a creation of the CIA or of the NSA (or both). The download of July 5 was doctored by CIA/NSA with false indicators of Russia and then was given to Guccifer 2.0, who subsequently would present the download (full of false indicator of Russia) as the result of his supposed hack of the DNC server.

If this CIA/NSA discrediting of Wikileaks by means of Guccifer 2.0 is what actually happened, then I now think that the Pakistani IT employees were not necessarily involved. The latter were not needed by the CIA/NSA operatives.

https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/

-----

No matter what, it all will be covered up by Robert "The FBI White-Washer" Mueller for as long as he can do so. As long as Mueller can remove President Trump from office, it does not matter if the truth about the DNC server is revealed many years in the future.; 8/2/17, 11:39 AM
CStanley said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 8/2/17, 11:51 AM
CStanley said...: @CStanley, thank you for the link, however you do need to refresh your understanding of the word "debunked." If it was, indeed, a party for DNC IT staffers, doesn't that make it more likely than not that both were present?

I have no idea, really. Assuming the fact of such a party that night is correct, I don't know who would have been invited. Awan and his cohorts were hirees of Democrat Congressional members, but I'm pretty sure I've seen it stipulated that they weren't DNC employees. This was supposed to mean that they couldn't have been involved in the whole DNC hack by Russia Dustin, even though having access to DWS' devices and passwords meant they had access to DNC stuff, so I'm not buying that the distinction was meaningful in that regard.

But in this situation, would a person have been invited to a DNC IT party if not an employee of DNC? Seems unlikely though I suppose not impossible. I'm just saying I don't know.

And really my point here is that faking stuff just makes the underlying claim seem more dubious. I know I'd have been more likely to believe there was some monkey business with GW Bush avoiding military duty if Dan Rather hadn't resorted to a "fake but accurate" piece of evidence. It's always of course possible that the thing that was faked really was true, but it increases skepticism.; 8/2/17, 11:52 AM
readering said...: They keep reporting additions to the Mueller team . . . .; 8/2/17, 12:06 PM
cubanbob said...: The only known knowns are the Seth Rich is dead and incontrovertibly murdered, Assange the head of Wikileaks's has stated a DNC staffer gave Wikileaks's the information. Seth Rich was a DNC staffer. Does this prove the murder was a political murder? No. Does it look like that angle needs to be investigated? Yes.; 8/2/17, 12:10 PM
David said...: Anything is possible in this matter but virtually nothing is known, by the public and public sources at least. There are so many powerful sources with interests in variable but particular truths that we are highly unlikely ever to have a trustworthy answer.

That is the state of our nation today.; 8/2/17, 12:26 PM
Birches said...: It is more likely than not that Seth Rich's murder was random violence, but let's compare the media reaction to this murder to Chandra Levy's disappearance. The media usually loves a good mystery, why aren't they engaging with this one?; 8/2/17, 12:41 PM
Fernandinande said...: Todd said...
But this story is "baseless"?

The proof of that baselessness meets the same exacting reporting standards to which the fNYT holds itself:

"Some far-right sites believe", "One prominent pro-Trump voice told" and "video from an anonymous source".

What more could you want?; 8/2/17, 12:44 PM
Lewis Wetzel said...: The incompetents in the intelligence services are actually going to do a decent job and kill the correct person instead of the wrong guy or a bunch of bystanders? This is as crazy as the idea that Trump colluded with Putin to steal the election.
"Elite" in a government context denotes socio-economic status, not intelligence or even competence. Look at how stupid experts in the hard sciences get when they try to do public policy.; 8/2/17, 12:47 PM
hombre said...: readering wrote: "They keep reporting additions to the Mueller team . . . ."

Correction: They keep reporting additions [of Democrat political hacks] to the Mueller [political] team.; 8/2/17, 2:15 PM
traditionalguy said...: The Dems just did a pre-emptive strike to create the impression that the Seth Rich investigation is Fake News. That was a nifty move. I wonder who ordered it done. Probably it was Clapper.

PsyOps skills will prepare a biased response to the disclosures they expect to see used against them. So this must be blowing up fast. The next usual tactic is declaring an FBI Investigation that forbids all disclosures from coming out...for years and years and years.; 8/2/17, 3:36 PM
SukieTawdry said...: I'm not given to conspiracy theories, but some things just smell bad. One of them was Vince Foster's suicide. And another is Seth Richard's botched-robbery, non-robbery, execution-style murder.; 8/2/17, 3:43 PM
mockturtle said...: Sukie, I don't believe the above-mentioned incidents are objects of conspiracy theories at all but simply crimes that remain un-investigated due to the parties involved.; 8/2/17, 4:45 PM
mockturtle said...: To be more clear, no one has conspired to keep any investigation results quiet. There has BEEN no investigation [of substance] on either case. Which leads me to believe that people may be genuinely fearful of their lives and who can blame them? Why would Seth Rich's family be so vehemently opposed to an investigation if not for fear?; 8/2/17, 7:38 PM
Fabi said...: "Why would Seth Rich's family be so vehemently opposed to an investigation if not for fear?"

For the same reason Lewenski's father came out and defended Bill Clinton's behavior -- you don't screw around with that kind of power and ever live in peace.; 8/2/17, 8:23 PM
Michael K said...: The question I have is why DWS put herself so far out on a limb to protect Awan. I think he and his family have something on her and maybe others.

What could it be that was enough to cause her to risk serious consequences?

Fingered Seth Rich ?; 8/2/17, 8:26 PM
Oso Negro said...: Blogger Todd said...
They both share the very same amount of "actual proof"

8/2/17, 8:42 AM

Not exactly. In one story, there is the dead body of Seth Rich.; 8/2/17, 8:52 PM
RB Glennie said...: ... and meanwhile the legacy news media that have been promoting for months the baseless conspiracy theory of `Russian collusion' have yet to acknowledge that pretty much every assertion they have made is - excuse the colloquialism - full of shit.; 8/3/17, 6:04 AM