On the face of things, the July 2016 murder of Seth Rich had intrigue enough for a full season of House of Cards.
Unknown assailants gun down the young DNC data analyst at 4 A.M. on a Washington, D.C., street and take nothing. Two weeks later, international man of mystery Julian Assange strongly suggests on Dutch TV that Rich was his source for the purloined DNC emails then roiling the Democratic Party and offers a $20,000 reward to find the killer.
Three days before the November election, Assange reportedly tells liberal media analyst Ellen Ratner that Rich was indeed his source. Days after Trump’s inauguration, legendary investigative journalist Sy Hersh cites an FBI report confirming Assange’s claim. Later that year, DNC honcho Donna Brazile dedicates her book Hacks to Rich and wonders out loud whether the Russians had “played some part in his unsolved murder.”
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Despite the stakes — the Trump presidency hinged on the investigation’s outcome — there was to be no TV series about Rich’s life and death, no movie, no serious books, not even a single episode of Unsolved Mysteries or 48 Hours. Incredibly, no major publication or network save for Fox News has even attempted to resolve the still unsolved murder, and Fox execs rather wish they hadn’t.
To understand how a story this potentially explosive could be suppressed for so long, it is necessary to understand one basic fact of Washington life: Donald Trump received just 4.1 percent of the District’s vote in the 2016 election. Trump’s election disrupted short-term strategies and long-term expectations in every one of the capital’s major institutions, local and federal, public and private, the legal community among them.
According to Hersh, Trump was a “circuit breaker,” one who made a whole lot of enemies. Those enemies, as we have seen, would go to great lengths to discredit Trump and anyone associated with him. The pressure they can bring to bear on even those who want to tell the truth remains formidable.
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Instead of a serious investigation by either police or reporters, the Seth Rich case generated a dumpster-full of frivolous lawsuits. These suits have had the result, likely intended, of silencing those who would dare to investigate Rich’s demise. All too predictably, the media have heaped abuse on the investigators and cheered on the litigators.
Prominent among the private citizens who asked questions is Ed Butowsky, a Republican wealth manager from Texas. “It is horrible,” he told me. “I had no idea how big the other side is, and they are completely after me.” Once he started inquiring into Rich’s death, said Butowsky, “everything just turned to crap.”
Butowsky stumbled into his role as sleuth. Through his occasional TV appearances, Butowsky met Ellen Ratner, a friend of Assange. Her late brother Michael Ratner had been one of the American lawyers for the fugitive WikiLeaks founder. On the day after the election, Ratner lobbed a grenade into an otherwise banal panel discussion at Florida’s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
“I spent three hours with Julian Assange on Saturday at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London,” Ratner volunteered midway through the event. “One thing he did say was the leaks were not from, they were not from the Russians. They were an internal source from the Hillary campaign or from somebody that knew Hillary, an enemy.”
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If the grenade had detonated, Ratner would have blown a hole in a collusion plot that centered on the presumed Russian hack of the DNC. Fortunately for the plotters, Ratner’s self-involved fellow panelists skipped over her comments, and the video of the event passed into the ether all but unseen.
According to a complex, multi-party defamation suit Butowsky filed in 2019, Butowsky learned of the Assange revelation from Ratner herself. She contacted him after the meeting and added the critical detail that Seth Rich was Assange’s source.
On December 17, Butowsky contacted Rich’s parents, Joel and Mary Rich. He felt sorry for the Riches, sensing they would get no help from the D.C. Police or the FBI. In addition, as Ratner reportedly told him, Assange had requested that the parents be made aware of Seth’s role, a material fact in the search for their son’s killers.
According to Butowsky, Joel Rich told him he knew that Seth and his older brother Aaron were involved with the DNC email leak. Joel chose not to go public lest people think his sons were “responsible for getting Trump elected.” Although the Riches would later deny many of Butowsky’s claims, no one disputes his offer to hire a private investigator for the Riches or their acceptance of that offer.
