The Seth Rich Story: Hacking the Media and Suppressing a Leak

A Deep-state Conspiracy to Control a US Election and President

Dec 26, 2023

Published: 2023-12-26

Introduction

The Seth Rich story is the key to exposing the lie behind what the US Corporate media called RussiaGate and this newsletter immediately relabeled "RussiaGoat".

The scandal involves the US commercial narrative delivery mechanism better known as the MSM pumping the RussiaGoat hoax for 4+ years, and 24/7 for much of it. The motives for the undermining of a primary candidate and then a sitting President change as the target shifts.

An Establishment White Knight failed to slay the created dragon due to a palpable lack of evidence to support the fabricated allegations. Finally, actual evidence does emerges that the whole thing was cooked up from the outset by the Clinton mob.

The event that kicked off the scandal is the publication by Wikileaks of what become known as the DNC Leaks.

An FOI Case

There are plenty of weeds and heroes to get into.

The story features William Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA, a serious patriot who your author had the privilege to meet when Laura Poitras' film Citizen Four was touring Europe. Joining him in this political thriller are other members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) who we shall soon meet, veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, the indomitable Randy Credico, CIA torture program whistleblower Craig Murray and Wikileaks' Julian Assange. Presidential hope for US socialists, Bernie Sanders stars as the attention averse victim, and then candidate Trump as the ultimate target. On the shady side of the ledger are H. R. Clinton, her clique of power hungry establishment operatives and the US commercial media. For all "fake news" scandals in which spouting bullshit which supports the establishment and makes a profit, this one won the Oscar.

The event which resurrected this exquisite and obscure window into US power politics was that US Federal District Court Judge Amos L. Mazzant ordered the FBI and its lawyers to:

recommend to the court a timeline for the disclosure of information on Seth Rich's personnel laptop, Seth Rich's work laptop, the DVD and the tape drive within 14 days

in his ruling on 2023-11-28.

Whoooops!

The Seth Rich Story

Just three days before the Convention of the US Democratic Party for the 2016 primary from the 25th to 28th July, Wikileaks published email archives from the Democratic National Committee [the DNC Leaks]. These exposed the DNC's direct efforts on the part of Clinton to undermine Bernie Sanders' 2016 primary campaign, which is about as anti-democratic as one can get. It also demonstrates the reality and danger of "let me control the candidates and people can vote all they want".

The sole political fallout was that DNC President Debbie Wasserman Shultz had to resign. Hillary Rodham Clinton's Teflon lipstick left the wannabe presidential pig largely unaffected.

Just a few days before the Wikileaks release, on 9th July, Seth Rich was murdered in Washington D.C.

Rich was the source of at least some of the emails in the archives published by Wikileaks. Julian Assange mentioned Rich's death when Wikileaks offered a reward for information which would lead to a conviction of the murderer. The FBI impounded deceased Rich's electronics which they've been sitting on to this day. Judge Mazzant seems to be about to force the FBI to open some of that locked box of digital goodies.

Some weeds and a diversion

The Rich family hired a Texan lawyer, Ed Butowsky, to obtain some redress for their son's murder. The legal proceedings are somewhat unclear and not particularly important to the political drama for they do not establish any facts. The Rich family did receive some financial redress due to a settlement with Fox, among the various related legal actions.

Veteran reporter Sy Hersh, who possess a very well trained nose for scandals which expose political corruption, began investigating the Seth Rich case. Following a call to Butowsky a recording of it was leaked, obviously by Butowsky. The revelation that Hersh was investigating the case seems to have destroyed the story for him.

Meanwhile, a different lawyer with a wholly different attitude, Ty Clevenger, persisted digging at the core of the case via FOI requests. In the style of Daniel Sheehan, "cause lawyer" Clevenger is representing plaintiff Huddleston before Judge Mazzart. With assistance from Justice Mazzant, Clevenger has just forced the FBI to look long and hard at why the US' FOI legislation exists.

VIPS and SAA

The members and awardees of two civil organisations formed by Ray McGovern play key roles at critical moments throughout the Seth Rich saga.

The first organisation is VIPS of whom the aforementioned William Binney and Ray McGovern are members, along with an extensive list of experienced and principled former intelligence professionals. The primary activity of VIPS has been to issue open letters, often to a sitting US President. The first VIPS memorandum was to President Bush, to warn him about the fabricated intelligence behind the WMD claims used to justify the illegal 2003 Iraq war. These memoranda have been published at Consortium News, created and run by now deceased editor and investigative journalist Robert Parry (of Iran-Contra fame) and thereafter by current Editor-in-Chief Joe Lauria.

The second group begun by McGovern and others is Sam Adams Associates. Its primary activity is to issue an annual award for Integrity in Intelligence, or the SAAII for short. Awardees which have been or are soon to be mentioned are Murray (2005), Assange (2010), Binney (2015), Hersh (2017) and John Kiriaku (2016).

Connecting with a Source

Seth Rich, while working in Washington D.C. for the DNC, had contacted Wikileaks, given them a taster of the email data and wanted money for the rest of the archive(s).

The 2016 SAAII Award was to be issued to John Kiriaku for his role in exposing the CIA Torture and Rendition program. It was natural for former awardee Craig Murray be invited to attend the ceremony for they both exposed different aspects of the same CIA program which yielded unreliable information to support political objectives, and in so doing continued the rot at the heart of the CIA's analytical arm. Mr. Murray's invitation provided a convenient cover for him to travel to the US capital and facilitate the delivery of at least some of the DNC email archives to Wikileaks. Exactly what this facilitation involved, for example verification of the source or assisting in data transfer by providing instructions for delivery, remains unclear. What Murray did is unimportant to either the political corruption which was exposed by the contents of the emails or the campaigns of political vilification which the Clinton mob ran to counter the contents of the DNC Leaks release.

Murray has told a tale of leading the FBI, who he knew would tail him, on a merry chase around the US capital visiting house of ill repute after house of ill repute. At some of these businesses he left USB sticks in the hands of the good ladies containing completely innocuous and probably rather humorous data. The tailing undercover FBI officers were forced to visit these premises to collect the data. This seems to have given Murray reason for considerable amusement. Can you imagine the Scottish Independence advocate, former UK diplomat and Wikileaks associate joyfully touring these businesses with undercover FBI agents in toe having to 'clean up' after him?

During Randy Credico's "Live on the Fly" WBAI radio program on 2016-10-25 Murray declares to Credico that the email data was a leak and that he knows from whence it came. This is after the CIA/Media 'hack' narrative and the "Guccifer 2.0" misdirections. On Credico's program, Mr. Murray is again taunting the FBI, this time to come and talk to him on British soil.

Later conclusive proof from Binney and others established that:

it was impossible to transfer the data from D.C to Europe in the time between the start and end datetimes of the files (not the emails) in the DNC archive delivered to Wikileaks
all of the datetime stamps on the data files are even round seconds, which is a signature of the FAT-32 file system which everybody (except "hackers", meaning people who like to play with these things, like your author) uses on USB sticks. Any proper file system records datetime stamps to the fraction of a millisecond. This is true for all modern operating systems. But, FAT-32, a shitty old Microsoft format, is the de-facto standard for USB sticks.

From these two points one could reliably conclude that the email dumps were leaks rather than a hack, without needing to rely on the source identity, exact transfer mechanism or Mr. Murray's testimony. At the time, the data volume required a faster network than the highest speed commercial networks available between the US and Europe. Instead, the much faster local in-office (LAN) network at the DNC would easily have sufficed. The files containg the email archives delivered to Wikileaks were stored on a USB device. The DNC Leaks were a locally copied leak, which left all the MSM rubbish and CIA/mil-intel psyop diversions laid to waste.

[You can safely skip this:

While we're on File Systems, Julian Assange wrote one called the Rubber Hose File System. It was designed to store data such that if one is being pressured to relinquish a password (with, perhaps, the use of a rubber hose) one can supply a chosen, selected password which, if used, the file system will show a curated set of files, rather than the normal operative set of files. More generally, an incorrect password yields a set of "public" files, whereas the correct one reveals the "private" files.]

Ray McGovern has known all along that the DNC Leaks were a leak because Murray would have told him. Its a nice game keeping the CIA guessing, though there are likely to be other more important reasons for their careful management of what they knew, and how the above information based on timing and datetime stamps were used to disprove the CIA and media misdirections.

The Cold Case Resurfaces

At this point one can watch the Judging Freedom episode (linked below) and understand what's going on. The topic is raised because of the order by the Federal judge quoted above. One learns at the end of the show that McGovern had raised the issue when Napolitano states:

Particular thanks to Ray for pointing this out to me. I was unaware of the judge's decision.

So, what's new or how may this development be of interest?

Pakistani intelligence (ISI) operative Imran Awan was controlling the DNC server and those of several members of congress at the time of Seth's murder. During the program Larry Johnson connects a piece of little known information with the case and suggests that the ISI had motive to kill Seth to prevent the potential exposure of Awan. Johnson also alleges that Awan served as a double agent for the ISI against the FBI.

The Rich family, and potentially the FBI, may be interested in seeing a trial held to identify Seth's murderer. Wikileaks and Assange certainly would like to know who was guilty, which we know because of the reward they offered. However, for the purposes of understanding the RussiaGoat shitshow, all one really needs to understand is that it was a targeted murder, rather than a robbery in which nothing was stolen that ended in his death. The later hardly believable narrative was rolled out at the time by the usual suspects to 'explain' Seth's death.

There are two useful understandings to connect with the Rich assassination. The first is that the CIA and the FBI essentially run a turf war. The CIA likes to allow various nasties onto US soil for their own purposes, which may be legitimate. For example, a known foreign agent may be allowed in to identifying local collaborators. In the "legitimate" sense, having identified related individuals the CIA could then alert the FBI about the original person so that the FBI can do their thing, law enforcement. The FBI may also stumble upon the collaborators and then the CIA need to choose whether to assist the accomplices in avoiding being caught so that the CIA can continue to use them as sources to further investigate the network or whether they just leave the low hanging fruit for the FBI. Contained even within this legitimate approach is the superiority which the CIA feel over the goody-two-shoes FBI who they condescending view as a bit too stupid to understand the finer points of intelligence operations.

A more sinister understanding is that the Pakistani ISI itself is heavily influenced by the CIA. This is prudent because Pakistan is a nuclear power. Even this does not reveal the depth of the relationship. The CIA sees ISI operatives as theirs at one arm's length removed. Thus, if Awan was spying on the DNC and members of Congress this is all fine by the CIA so long as they get the data and can ensure that anything too alarming is denied to the ISI, or at least that the ISI can be made to understand that certain data is to be destroyed. One can think of this as a CIA 'NODIST' (no distribution) akin to the "NOFORN" (no foreign) mark attached to highly classified information.

The other thing to recall is that the CIA bugged the hell out of the Senate committee investigating their torture program. The CIA has no qualms whatsoever about Congress critters being bugged up the wazoo so long as they control the data. This is one of the crucial understandings of secret military intelligence organizations. They immediately start assuming that everything except express, direct orders from the President is subservient to their missions of data gathering and influence over their foreign counterparts' operatives. The aforementioned Iran-Contra scandal can also be viewed in this light. If one ignores the geoeconomic political objectives of regime changes in central America, behind it is the “Off the Shelf” program, which was a totally illegal funding source for the CIA, independent of Congress. It was not only illegal but subverted the US consitutional intention of Congress controling funding of the executive branch. The gun running and cocaine smuggling components of the scheme were run out of Mena Arkansas while Bill & Hillary Clinton were the state Governor and wife.

Fixing Elections

It is irrelevant who killed Rich once one understands that it was an assassination. What we know is that the RussiaGoat false-narrative, the false-flag emotional-manipulation operation, was pumped 24/7 by the compliant US commercial media. The purpose was to ensure that Clinton won the 2016 election by muddying the waters and directing attention away from the content of the leaked emails and instead placing focus of the fabricated source. This fueled RussiaGoat and placed Wikileaks under suspicion which McGovern succinctly summarized as a "two-fer" because it also targeted the Ruskies. The brainless US corporate media and thunk-tankers fell for the whole thing due to being paid handsomely for it and not having a shred of intelligence or integrity.

This was a power play by the Clintonites with the collusion of very senior members of both the CIA and FBI. So, who gives a damn who assassinated Rich, after we know it was a targeted killing? The ISI, the CIA, the FBI, some local Mafia hoodlum at the instruction of someone more powerful; anyone could have done it and the chances of discovering who instructed them is next to non-existent. Case closed.

Well, almost. That which can be learned is more of the network which was behind the whole RussiaGoat psyop, or at least Seth Rich's murder. We're extremely unlikely to learn of senior members of the team behind the killing. Maybe we'll get the crumbs, the operatives, or useful idiots depending on which type of 'resource' was used to perform the operation to keep RussiaGoat alive, Trump out of office and all of the goodies to be had on the table once Billary became the first female US president.

But the buxom bimbo got busted. Couldn't have happened to a more evil and corrupt woman.

Leading a Murray Chase

To return to the later taunting of the FBI by Murray, he has never been questioned about his publicly declared knowledge of the DNC Leaks source by the FBI. This in itself is very informative.

It implies that either the FBI are completely incompetent or they were uninterested in discovering how the DNC Leaks were obtained by Wikileaks. The natural answer is, yes.

One could re-express this as: The FBI were trying to frame President Trump via finding evidence of "Russian hackers" and that no information of that sort would have been provided by Murray, so they didn't contact him. One could also surmize that the white knight, former FBI director Comey, played the lead role in continuing to spin the RussiaGoat narrative. He must have known of Murray's statements and thus chose not to question him else as soon as the results of that hit the official internal record there is a serious risk that some goody-two-shoes will leak it. This would have killed the golden goose, the bimbo's lies. Some things are better understood and not known.

Were I Napolitano, I would have asked McGovern a planted question:

Ray, what about the DNC server? Does the FBI have that too? Wasn't there a Senate investigation into that?

The reason to ask the question is to enable Ray to roll out one of his favourite paragraphs which would go something like this:

No and Yes, Judge. The DNC handed the server over to Crowdstrike to determine if there had been intrusion or exfiltration, which are remote access to and remote removal of data from it, respectively. This is extremely curious in itself, because the FBI have skilled digital forensics personnel. Why let a commercial outfit do their job? But, they did, and curiously they accepted CrowdStrike's report. However, given the severity of the allegations against a sitting President, the Senate did hold hearings. Shaun Henry, the CEO of Crowdstrike testified under oath before the committee that Crowdstrike found no evidence of data exfiltration from the server, which is to say, no evidence of a "hack". Interestingly, the New York Times have yet to report this interesting fact even though it is now 6 years old.

Throwing One's Marbles Out the Pram

Perhaps Napolitano would follow up:

But, Ray, Crowdstrike still maintains that there were signs of Russian hacking on the DNC server even if there was no transfer of data!

[Oh, thank you, Judge!, thinks McGovern]

Well, Judge, this is where the story gets interesting. You may recall that Wikileaks released Vault 7. It was this release which prompted then CIA Director "We lie, we cheat, we steal" Pompeo to describe Wikileaks as a "non-state hostile intelligence service". A component of Vault 7, the largest CIA leak in its history, was a toolkit called Marble Framework. Marble Framework allowed those using it to leave behind telltale signs of intrusion in any of 5 languages: Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi. Making the reasonable assumption that this toolkit had been developed by the summer of 2016, and knowing as we do now that the CIA has no qualms of hacking a Senate committee, they would have had even less concern about hacking the DNC. With this toolkit they could have implicated any number of nations in the hacking. No data was exfiltrated. Any attribution of hacking would be unreliable and could equally implicate the CIA. Had this been investigated by the FBI who knows what could have been learned and potentially leaked?

[To be clear, your author is putting words in McGovern's mouth above. This is based on McGovern having repeately said words to this effect since 2016.]

Why is RussiaGoat important?

The US Corporate media were as confident as everyone else that Billary would win, so they made a killing promoting Trump, as admitted by the head of one of the cable channels. Ironically, this profit driven motive lead directly to Trump's victory exactly as he expected it would. Trump may be a misogynist, uncouth, corrupt, con-man, but he knows how to play the media, and he played them like a fiddle. The media were shocked that their influence and the US population's derision towards the establishment outweighed all of the Wikileaks/Russia BS being fabricated by the Clinton mob.

Probably because the US media felt guilty for electing President Trump they teamed up with the also disappointed members of the 'establishment' who didn't get their rewards from bitter loser Billary and ran a new 24/7 campaign undermining anything that Trump did. One can say what one wishes about President Trump, but he didn't start any new wars and thus out-scored Saint Obama 7-0. The social turmoil which the media created with the "Trump is a Putin Apologist" rubbish eventually became known as "Trump Derangement Syndrome" irrespective of from which side of the false divide one was waving one's finger.

To atone for their sin of electing Trump, and to ensure that Obama sanctified Biden would replace him, the old media (except the New York Post) and the entire new "social" media suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story so hard that Glenn Greenwald even left the news organization he's set up with Poitras (remember her) and Jeremy Scahill based on money from information-control-benefactor for the wealthy, Pierre Omidyar.

The Rich story is a loose threat which one can pull and the whole cloth of corruption and influence unravels before one's eyes. We now know that the entire hoax was a baby of the Clinton campaign using lawyers to deliver unreliable information to the FBI to encourage an investigation. Once the campaign got under way the media carried the sewage water and accidentally flushed the bimbo with it.

Complicity for media dominance

The Seth Rich story occurred at a time which may historically be seen as a key phase in US media history. It was during the Democratic primaries, late in Obama's era and through the Trump presidency that the new "social" media took control. The fact that the US government sat down with one new media leader after the next to get them to agree to various arm's length censorship policies is the signal of the change in where media power lies, or at least the that old media have no reach into the extremely important younger demographic .

The old CIA planted stories still appear. The new Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security came, went and is being re-tried via insanely silly things like "NewsGuard". Alphabet, Meta and X are the new gatekeepers. The recent renaming of Twitter allows us to now rename Matt Taibbi's investigation of the government's channels into Twitter's censorship system as the "X-Files" which should amuse no end of the middle aged demographic.

Media control is extremely important, as evidenced by the amount of money that Israel has thrown down the tube to somehow soften its image while it is murdering children. The battle for control of the new media landscape is still under way, and fascinating to watch.

While one can read articles here espousing the potential value of the emerging multi-polar world, the US still possess one of the most important principles of an enlightened society embedded in its first amendment.

The US' Freedom of Information Act is the enabling legislation which provided the avenue for McGovern's discussion with Napolitano and Johnson, and for us independent analysts to comment upon it.

A young man succumbed to hubris from the heady mix of information access and profit. He was killed by operatives of an information control machine which he did not yet understand.

or you can support this work via Buy Me A Coffee or Patreon.

Sources

DNC Emails, Wikileaks

FBI ordered to release evidence on Seth Rich’s alleged connection to DNC email leak, Egbe Ogu, County Local News, 2023-11-29

Texas Linday

A Tribute to Robert Parry: Independent Journalism at Its Best, Jim Naureckas, Fair and Accuracy in Reporting [FAIR], 2018-01-29

Craig Murray Says He Knows Who Leaked The DNC and Podesta Emails, italk youbored, 2017-12-19

US Intel Vets Dispute Russia Hacking Claims, VIPS, Consortium News, 2016-12-12

VIPS concludes by Dec 12th 2016 that the DNC Leaks were a leak, not a hack, based on NSA/5-EYES surveillance capabilities, the scale of which was made public by the Edward Snowden leaks.

Craig Murray is Released: The UK Scores an Own Goal, YesXorNo, 2012-11-30

Vaulting Cablegate to the 7 Corners of the Revenge Cube : 30 Anonymous Officials Admit ... Stuff [updated], YesXorNo, 2021-09-30

Ex-congressional IT staffer reaches plea deal that debunks conspiracy theories about illegal information access, Shawn Boburg & Spencer S. Hsu, The Washington Post, 2018-07-03

Federal probe into House technology worker Imran Awan yields intrigue, no evidence of espionage, Shawn Boburg, The Washington Post, 2017-09-16

Murder of Seth Rich, Wikipedia

The story of what you are allowed to know and meant to believe ...

Closing in on the truth regarding Seth Rich murder - Seymour Hersh conversation with Ed Butowsky., the "released" phone conversation between Hersh and Butowsky, Rikske Patat, 2017-08-07

Ep 314 Attorney Ty Clevenger on the Assassination of Seth Rich, Slow News Day, Internet Archive, (Added 2021-08-03) originally published 2021-05-30

MP4 (use a browser to resolve to one of IA's download servers; good practice)
MP4 direct

Seth Rich, FBI Records: The Valut, FBI, no date of publication

Hey, Ty, make sure they update this. 😂

Memos by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, Consortium News

Wasserman Schultz steps down as DNC chair, Marc Caputo & Daniel Strauss, Politico, 2016-07-24

Debbie Wasserman Schultz Resigns As Democratic Party Chair, Marina Fang, Huffington Post, 2016-07-24

John Kiriakou (2016 awardee for the Integrity Award), Sam Adams Associates

2016 United States election leaks, Wikipedia (as opposed to Wikileaks ;)

Completely misleading load of horseshit

Pro-Israel Trolls Mob Social Media, Alan MacLeod, Consortium News, 2023-11-29

Wealthy Republican Conspiracy Theorist Settles Lawsuit Over Seth Rich Claims, Will Sommer, The Daily Beast, 2021-03-24

Seth Rich's killing was exploited on Fox News and online. His parents are fed up, David Folkenflik, NPR, 2022-06-15

Former Fox Business Guest Commentator Files $118 Million Defamation Lawsuit, Matt Clibanoff, Law & Crime, 2019-08-02

Quick, Someone Tell NY Times: Under Oath CrowdStrike Corrects Its Lies, Ray McGovern, his website, 2020-09-14

CrowdStrike’s work with the Democratic National Committee: Setting the record straight, Editorial Team, Crowdstrike, 2020-06-05

Ha, ha, ha

Memo to the President Ahead of Monday’s Summit, Ray McGovern and Bill Binney, Consortium News, 2018-07-15

FBI wants even more time to produce Seth Rich laptop records, Ty Clevenger, LawFlog.com, 2022-11-30

Wikileaks DNC Email List, archive.org, 2016-07-28 (when the archive.org page is published)

Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence, VIPS, Consortium News, 2017-07-24

WHY THE DNC WAS NOT HACKED BY THE RUSSIANS, William Binney (former Technical Director NSA) & Larry Johnson (former State CT and CIA)

"The emails posted on Wikileaks were saved using the File Allocation Table (aka FAT) computer file system architecture.
An examination of the Wikileaks DNC files shows they were created on 23, 25 and 26 May respectively. The fact that they appear in a FAT system format indicates the data was transfered to a storage device, such as a thumb drive.
How do we know? The truth lies in the “last modified” time stamps on the Wikileaks files. Every single one of these time stamps end in even numbers. If you are not familiar with the FAT file system, you need to understand that when a date is stored under this system the data rounds the time to the nearest even numbered second."

[It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Binney.]

‘Too Big to Fail’: Russia-gate One Year After VIPS Showed a Leak, Not a Hack, Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News, 2018-08-13

A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack, Patrick Lawrence, The Nation, 2017-08-09

'Day X Is Here': Assange Granted Hearing That May Be Last Opportunity To Stop Extradition, Kevin Gozstola, The Dissenter, 2023-12-19

Judge Rules Assange Visitors May Sue CIA For Allegedly Violating Privacy, Kevin Gozstola, The Dissenter, 2023-12-19

We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim, Lawrence Lessig, TED, uploaded 2013-04-03