Murder of Seth Rich
[19] In response, the Rich family sued Fox News in March 2018 for having engaged in "extreme and outrageous conduct" by fabricating the story defaming their son and thereby intentionally inflicting emotional distress on them.
[24][25][26] He volunteered for the Nebraska Democratic Party, interned for Senator Ben Nelson, was active in Jewish outreach,[27] and worked with the United States Census Bureau.
[44] On the day after the shooting, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz issued a statement mourning his loss and praising Rich's work to support voter rights.
[25][31] In September 2016, Rich's parents and girlfriend appeared on the syndicated television show Crime Watch Daily to speak about the murder case.
[45] In February 2017, the Beth El Synagogue in Omaha named after Rich an existing scholarship that helps Jewish children attend summer camps.
[53] On March 19, 2017, Rich's brother, Aaron, started a GoFundMe campaign to try to raise $200,000 for private investigation, public outreach activities, and a reward fund.
[4] Wheeler then sued Fox News on August 1, 2017, for mental anguish and emotional distress, alleging that he had been misquoted in a story that was then published on the urging of Trump.
[66][67] Within days, right-wing conspiracy theories began circulating,[68][69][70] including false claims that his murder was connected to the DNC email leak of 2016[4] or the FBI's investigation of the Clinton Foundation.
[68] Subsequently, the conspiracy theory was spread on the subreddit /r/The Donald, and on July 29, 2016, the website Heat Street reported on these Reddit posts.
[68] According to British journalist Duncan Campbell, the Russian intelligence agency, GRU, tried to implicate Rich as the source of the stolen DNC emails in order to draw attention away from themselves as the real perpetrators of the theft.
[31] According to the Mueller Report, WikiLeaks had received an email containing an encrypted file named "wk dnc link I .txt.gpg" from the Guccifer 2.0 GRU persona on July 14, which was four days after Seth Rich died.
At the same time he was publicly working to shift blame onto the slain staffer “to obscure the source of the materials he was releasing,” Special Counsel Robert Mueller asserts in his final report on Russia's role in the 2016 presidential election.
[79]The conspiracy theories were promoted by Mike Cernovich, Sean Hannity, Geraldo Rivera, Kim Dotcom, Paul Joseph Watson, Newt Gingrich, Jack Posobiec, Tim Pool,[82] and others.
News article stated that an alleged Russian Foreign Intelligence Service bulletin dated July 13, 2016 was the original source of the conspiracy theory.
[100] An analysis by the Washington Post disputed the conclusion while crediting the report for highlighting the roles played by InfoWars, Fox News, and Hannity in promoting the misinformation.
The Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia described the murder as related to a bungled attempted robbery,[5] and said "the assertions put forward by Mr. Wheeler are unfounded.
"[10] People who worked with Rich said he didn't have access to the emails on the DNC server and was not an expert computer hacker helping to leak information to foreigners.
[13] The Washington Post further found that the proliferation of fake news via Facebook had decreased, but remained powerful on Twitter due to spread via online bots.
[13] They found that the conspiracy theories with the largest potential to spread on the Internet were those that held attraction for both the alt-right movements and the political left wing.
"[96] The Washington Post's Callum Borchers noted Fox News chose to lead with this story at a time when most other media outlets were covering Donald Trump's disclosure of classified information to Russia.
[4][110][112] The Washington Post noted it is "rare for a news organization to have such a close relationship with the people it is covering", as Wheeler was "playing three roles at once: as a Fox source, as a paid contributor to the network and as a supposedly independent investigator of the murder".
"[110] Bauman criticized Fox News for its reporting, saying he believed that the outlet was motivated by a desire to deflect attention from the Trump-Russia story: "I think there's a very special place in hell for people that would use the memory of a murder victim in order to pursue a political agenda.
[115][116][117] Hannity had on his program Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, who said the organization filed Freedom of Information Act requests for documents from Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel E. Bowser, and from the Metropolitan Police.
"[132] Several advertisers including Crowne Plaza Hotels, Cars.com, Leesa Mattress, USAA, Peloton and Casper Sleep pulled their marketing from his program on Fox News.
He also instructed Wheeler that "[T]he narrative in the interviews you might use is that you and [Zimmerman's] work prove that the Russians didn't hack into the DNC and steal the emails and impact our elections ...
[14]In March 2018, Aaron Rich sued Butowsky, Couch, America First Media, and The Washington Times for suggesting he had played a role in the purported theft of emails from the DNC.
Judge Daniels ruled that, although it was reasonable for plaintiffs to believe their son's death was being used for political purposes, the plaintiffs failed to allege "intentional infliction" of emotional distress on the part of defendants, as that standard is determined under New York state law: "defamatory statements to news outlets 'fall well short of meeting the high standards for extreme and outrageous conduct.'
"[148] The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned the dismissal in September 2019 saying, "the Riches plausibly alleged what amounted to a campaign of emotional torture.
Among that information included the level of involvement that Butowsky had in preparing and coaching the Fox News hosts in the days before they broke their version of the Seth Rich story, his hiring of Wheeler, and his meeting with Spicer.
[152] In May 2022, an episode of the Netflix documentary series Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies and the Internet examined the murder of Seth Rich, the unfounded conspiracy theories and his family.
