Donna Brazile's new book reignites suspicions about the murder of Seth Rich.

Several times in her new book "Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House," Donna Brazile writes about Seth Rich, who, as she puts it on page 37, "had been walking home from a local bar—and barely a block away from his apartment in Washington’s Bloomingdale / LeDroit Park neighborhood—when he was shot in the back in what police said was a robbery attempt."

The police were there within minutes, and Seth was still alive and talking when they arrived, but he died later that morning at the hospital.

That seems at first glance like an uncomplicated acceptance of the idea that Rich was killed in an attempted robbery, but my lawyerly eye notices the unclarity. What did Rich say to the police? He "was alive and talking," but did he say this was a robbery attempt or something else? The police later said it was a robbery attempt, but why did they say that? Did they say that because the now-dead man knew or believed that? He was shot in the back. Can you picture an attempted robbery that leaves the victim shot in the back? Doesn't a robber confront you to your face and use the gun to threaten you into giving him money?

And we see that Brazile doesn't seem to accept that it was simply a robbery. On pages pp. xviii-xix, describing her first phone call with Hillary Clinton after the election, Brazile writes:

I had taken all the hits. Hearing [Hillary's] voice was the first moment I understood how tired I was of taking it. What about the Russians? They had tried to destroy us. Was she going to help? I wanted to file a lawsuit. We needed to sue those sons of bitches for what they did to us. I knew the campaign had over $3 million set aside in a legal fund. Could she help me get this lawsuit started? And don’t forget the murder of Seth Rich, I told her. Did she want to contribute to Seth’s reward fund? We still hadn’t found the person responsible for the tragic murder of this bright young DNC staffer.

Brazile is interested in getting her hands on Hillary's money, and she purports to need it to solve 2 mysteries, but it's interesting that she leaps directly from wanting to go after the Russians to finding "the person responsible" for killing Seth Rich. If Donna Brazile really believed that Seth Rich was killed by a common street robber, would she really have brought up the murder in this phone call with Hillary and demanded that campaign money be used to offer a reward? If it were a common robber, he'd have melted back into the population of Washington, D.C. long ago. Why would you think a reward would pull anything in?

Later, at pages 148-149, Brazile talks about the Assange interview (on August 9, 2016) that sparked theories that Rich was assassinated.

On the tape I saw of the interview... [h]e dropped his smirk and said, “Our sources take risks.” Assange was implying that Seth was a source for WikiLeaks! When the interviewer pressed him on his relationship with Seth, Assange left it vague, responding, “We do not comment on our sources. We have to understand how high the stakes are in this case.”

I had been saddened by the crazy conspiracy theories that ignited on Twitter and Reddit. They wounded Seth’s family. I knew this accusation was not true. 

She doesn't say how she knew. She just drops that into a description of an encounter with Bernie Sanders. Sanders showed concern about Rich and asked about his family, and Brazile talked about going to visit the family "and help them plan the memorial and scholarship fund."

The story devolves into praise for Sanders. He's "no-nonsense...  always very grateful to people who tell him the truth." And he sent his regards to the Seth Rich family. So Bernie's listening to the story is used to bolster the truth of the story. He likes people who tell the truth, and Brazile talked to him about the murder, so what she's telling us now must be true. And Bernie's a good man who cared about Rich's family, so we ought to be good and care only about the feelings of Seth Rich's family. That packaging of the Seth Rich mystery makes me suspicious.

Brazile also writes about fear that she might be a target of violence. At page 180:

As I was preparing to fly to Las Vegas for the last debate, Julie, Patrice, and Anne took me aside. They were worried about me traveling alone. The attacks on me had become so frequent and so vicious that they preferred that I have someone along who would watch out for me. What they did not know was how I had been cautioning my family that they should be extra careful now. Our name, Brazile, was distinctive, and it would have been easy for my many sisters and brothers and their children to become the target of some crazed person out to harm me. Several of my siblings said they wanted to come stay with me just until Election Night to make sure I was safe, but I told them no. All I could think about was Seth Rich. Had he been killed by someone who had it out for the Democrats? Likely not, but we still didn’t know. 

But you told Bernie you knew! Or, I mean, you told us that you told Bernie you knew. Why did you call the conspiracy theories "crazy" when you yourself were — in real life — afraid that someone might be coming after you?

If they came after me like that, I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt. This became a very heated conversation. I wanted to maintain my autonomy and not to cause anyone harm, but my colleagues were genuinely concerned for my well-being. Anne mentioned several people who had agreed to escort me, but I instructed her to thank those people and reaffirm that I would travel alone.

If they came after me like that.... Like what?!

ADDED: I looked up more details in the L.A. Times:

When police got to the scene, they found Rich had been shot multiple times, and his credit cards, wallet and watch were still on him. He was later pronounced dead at a hospital. Police ruled his death a homicide — an attempted robbery turned deadly. But questions loomed.

"There had been a struggle. 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," Rich's mother, Mary, told NBC shortly after his death.

It's possible that Rich was confronted and he resisted and was trying to get away when he was shot. The shooter might have chosen to flee at that point rather than to search the body for something to steal.

That's how you add it up to robbery.

A reason not to see assassination is that there was a struggle. An assassin would have come up from behind and delivered the kind of shot that would not have given him an opportunity to struggle and would not have left him in any condition to speak to the police before dying.

Brazile's book left out details that made me less suspicious of the "attempted robbery" theory. So I'm a little suspicious about why she did that!

"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.

"The Democratic National Committee staffer who was gunned down on July 10 on a Washington, D.C., street just steps from his home had leaked thousands of internal emails to WikiLeaks..."

"... investigative sources told Fox News."

A federal investigator who reviewed an FBI forensic report -- generated within 96 hours after DNC staffer Seth Rich's murder -- detailing the contents Rich’s computer said he made contact with WikiLeaks through Gavin MacFadyen, a now-deceased American investigative reporter, documentary filmmaker, and director of WikiLeaks who was living in London at the time....

The federal investigator, who requested anonymity, said 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments between Democratic National Committee leaders, spanning from January 2015 through late May 2016, were transferred from Rich to MacFadyen before May 21.

On July 22, just 12 days after Rich was killed, WikiLeaks published internal DNC emails that appeared to show top party officials conspired to stop Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont from becoming the party’s presidential nominee....

ADDED: I was surprised, writing this, to see I already had a tag for Seth Rich. I used it once before, on August 10, 2016: "Assange — seemingly bound by the Wikileaks rule against revealing sources — seems to say that the murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich was a source."

Assange — seemingly bound by the Wikileaks rule against revealing sources — seems to say that the murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich was a source.

"Whistle-blowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks... 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."



ADDED: Slate's Jeremy Stahl has this "WikiLeaks Is Fanning a Conspiracy Theory That Hillary Murdered a DNC Staffer":

There is of course absolutely zero evidence for this and Snopes has issued a comprehensive debunking of the premise itself (Rich is only 27 and has only worked at the DNC since 2014 so is unlikely to be in possession of information that might take down Clinton, he was on the phone with his girlfriend at the time of the shooting and she hasn’t reported any FBI meeting, there have been a string of robberies in the area, an FBI rendezvous at 4 a.m. only happens in movies, the whole thing is batshit crazy, etc.).

Why does Stahl flaunt his non-neutrality? You can't say "absolutely zero evidence" (unless you don't know the meaning of the word evidence). Assange's statement is evidence. And the leaking and Rich's place of employment are evidence. Even if you think that's not much, it is something. Why fall back on statements like "the whole thing is batshit crazy." People complain about Trump's style of speaking, but it seems to me that an awful lot of people have moved to that level or worse.