Who Was Seth Rich?

[Iamwhomiam]

Of course it is and it's why it is so effective, buying your silence with the life of your loved one(s). Or yours. I have been intimidated, though never had my life threatened verbally for any political organizing I've engaged in. But I never played at such a high level of engagement as Rich's from the inside, as he did. I did have more than a few outstanding engagements, though.

As in, I'd be left out, standing.

[MacCruiskeen]

There's a shockingly obvious point here that I think none of us has yet mentioned (and I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere else either):

Crime Watch Daily, Sept. 2016:

"The officers who were there and they said 'Yeah, he was quite talkative, he did not realize he had been shot,'" said Joel Rich, Seth's father.

https://crimewatchdaily.com/2016/09/30/ ... -straight/

WaPo, January 2017:

Officials told the Riches that their son, who died at a nearby hospital less than two hours after being shot, didn’t know he’d been hit in the back by two bullets. He wasn’t in pain, they were told. But he was confused. When Seth Rich was asked where he lived, he gave a previous address, Joel Rich said.

“They were very surprised he didn’t make it,” Aaron Rich said emergency responders told him. “He was very aware, very talkative. Yep, that was 100 percent my brother.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyl ... b0e0030530

So, in two separate interviews with two separate journalists, months apart, two different members of the Rich family confirm that Seth was wide awake and talkative when the first responders arrived (and for how long afterwards?)

Yet not one of these ace reporters has ever even thought to ask the family (or the cops, or the emergency medics) the ballsachingly obvious question: SO, WHAT DID SETH SAY ABOUT THE ATTACK AND THE ATTACKER[S]?

And as a result:

- We still don't even know if there was one attacker or more than one.

- We still don't even know if Seth knew his assailant[s] or whether they were strangers to him.

- We still don't even know if Seth gave a physical description of the assailant[s]. (Tall? Short? Black? White? Poor? Well-dressed? Male? Female? Etc.)

- We still don't even know if the assailant[s] were masked.

- We still don't even know how Seth got those bruises on his face and hands.

- We still don't even know if a discussion preceded the attack, and if so, what was discussed and how the assailant[s] sounded. (Educated? Rough? Native speakers? Local accent? Etc.)

- Etc., etc., etc.

This is Journalism 101. It is elementary stuff. Seth was alive, conscious, talkative, and not in pain? So what did he SAY about the attack and the attacker(s)? A child would think to ask that question, out of normal and natural curiosity. The cops must also surely have done the obvious, as soon as they got there (ON EDIT: one minute after the shots were fired) and saw that he was still conscious: "So what happened, sir? Who did this to you? Can you describe them? Which way did they go?" (If they failed to do so, then they should be fired for gross incompetence and charged with obstruction of justice.)

Yet not one of these trained, professional journalists has ever even bothered to ask.

What the hell is going on here?

[MacCruiskeen]

Further obvious questions the fine gentlemen of the press never once think to raise:

Why weren't his family informed immediately? Their son and brother had two bullets in his back! He remained alive for another two hours. They might have had their last-ever conversation with him in that hospital, had anyone bothered to let them know. Why the unconscionable delay? Talk about disrespect for the family (including Seth himself).

And exactly when were the Rich family -- finally, belatedly -- informed? At what time the following day? Not a single hack bothers to ask them or to tell us.

[Grizzly]

Have any RI's been following this George Webb character? Supposedly on the hunt for the SR killers?
His videos are frenetic and bizarre, yet interesting. I haven't followed many but have noticed this gonzo style of citizen journalism, which has become a thing. However with this guy, it's near believable. Believable that it's a psyop ...



Pay attention especially to the last few minutes of this vid...

At 4:57 he says

I think a quiet bridge network of drugs and organ harvesting and compromise...uh, child compromise of the members is where we need to get back to. We're in this kind of Sodom and Gomorrah now and even the Hillocrats want to get back to subtle compromise, subtle rat lines, and subtle, uh, organ donation..."

da FUCK?!

[liminalOyster]

I see Seth Rich as having been an intolerable loose-end; a witness of potentially devastating impact. It became necessary to eliminate that potential.

But there can't be that many of those sitting around, can there - star witnesses? Isn't it more likely he had a rote level of clearance that made him one among thousands whose existence is always supposed to be proof big conspiracies don't happen - because *someone* would come forward? Was Rich one low-level sorta do-gooder who got made an example of because so much that is so damning is just such common knowledge among the currently climbing crop of digital-native insiders?

Really liked your post overall btw. Thank you.

[km artlu]

Isn't it more likely he had a rote level of clearance that made him one among thousands...(?)

A valid question liminal.
If Seth Rich, as Assange has obliquely acknowledged, was the source of the "Russian hack" materials, and had he testified to that in court or in Congress, the whole ornate edifice of bullshit could have collapsed.

Maybe not for the hardcore delusional, but I think it would have had that effect on the general population.

[MacCruiskeen]

I'm increasingly inclined to agree with Cordelia that no serious police investigation of Seth Rich's murder has ever taken place. The sheer awfulness of the reporting,the failure to ask even the most basic and obvious questions, is a major red flag. The media's lockstep, unisono vilification of anyone who does ask those questions is another.

Imagine this had happened to someone investigating Trump's business ties to Russia. Do you think WaPo, the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the rest of those spook hacks and careerists would be insisting, with one voice, that he must have been the victim of "a botched robbery" by some smalltime crook with no political agenda? Do you think they would be dismissing all questions as "conspiracy theories" or "rightwing memes"? Like hell they would.

Like hell.

[Elvis]

Imagine for a moment that Trump's or the GOP's emails were leaked, and a young, idealistic GOP party computer specialist was then murdered in mysterious circumstances.

The "left" would be screaming for investigations.

[liminalOyster]

Isn't it more likely he had a rote level of clearance that made him one among thousands...(?)

A valid question liminal.
If Seth Rich, as Assange has obliquely acknowledged, was the source of the "Russian hack" materials, and had he testified to that in court or in Congress, the whole ornate edifice of bullshit could have collapsed.

Maybe not for the hardcore delusional, but I think it would have had that effect on the general population.

Our biases align for sure and so I tend to agree. But almost too much - I think I am a little wary of my own mind at this point and have started to feel like I am (personally) at risk of unconsciously turning Rich into a bit of an ideological fetish object a la Building 7 or a smoking gun MK doc. I don't want to do that. One way or another he was murdered and it's tragic.

[MacCruiskeen]

One other thing about this corporate-media meltdown, this "IT'S ALL A CRAZY RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY THEORY!!!" hysteria, this unanimous and near-tearful insistence that it was, it can only have been, "a botched robbery":

They are desperately trying to discredit the very idea that political assassinations ever take place -- or if they do, those crimes can only ever have been committed by a lone nut.

I said in another thread that the USA is now back in the Fifties. It's actually looking more and more like November 1963, minus the living patsy and the free press.

[Cordelia]

Let’s not forget JFK’s lover, Mary Pinchot Meyer, also murdered in what was reported (and a scapegoat was tried & acquitted) as a “robbery”. From the WaPo archives:

Murder on the Canal

October 13, 1999

Excerpts from "the first rough draft of history" as reported in The Washington Post on this date in the 20th century.

The Post gave banner coverage to the seemingly random killing of Georgetown socialite Mary Meyer along the C&O Canal in 1964. She was later identified as a paramour of President Kennedy, and her diary, found the day after her death, contained brief details of her liaisons with JFK. The diary was eventually destroyed in accordance with her wishes. Ray Crump, the man arrested for the murder, was later acquitted, and Meyer's death remains a mystery. An excerpt from The Post of Oct. 13, 1964:

“Dressed casually in slacks and tennis sneakers, Mrs. Meyer was strolling along the towpath in yesterday's bright, sunny weather. At about 12:45 p.m. at the 4400 block of Canal rd., nw., she was shot twice by an attacker whose apparent motive was robbery.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ ... a748662cc2

[MacCruiskeen]

^^ Yes, thanks for reminding me of her. And hers wasn't the only suspicious death after Dealey Plaza. (The killing of Oswald himself i police custody (!) was the most obvious spook murder of all.)

Then there was RFK's assassination in '68. Who was that cop who verbally terrorised the young eyewitness Sandra Serrano until she was in tears? One of the creepiest things I ever heard. (It's in "RFK Must Die"somewhere.) For minutes on end he harangued her, trying in vain to make her withdraw her assertion that she had seen a woman in a polka-dot dress fleeing the scene, shouting “We shot him! We shot him!”

Brave girl, Sandra Serrano; she resisted that bastard to the end. The corporate media's deranged browbeating of the public increasingly reminds me of him.

[Harvey]

One other thing about this corporate-media meltdown, this "IT'S ALL A CRAZY RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY THEORY!!!" hysteria, this unanimous and near-tearful insistence that it was, it can only have been, "a botched robbery":

They are desperately trying to discredit the very idea that political assassinations ever take place -- or if they do, those crimes can only ever have been committed by a lone nut.

I said in another thread that the USA is now back in the Fifties. It's actually looking more and more like November 1963, minus the living patsy and the free press.

We're on the eve of several new and lucrative and potentially civilisation threatening wars, all of them entirely arbitrary.

[American Dream]

Sorry if this is not from your preferred echo chamber...

Right-wing provocateurs say they are being silenced. Cry me a river
Christian Christensen


‘Let’s remember that they are suffering the consequences of a system they so gleefully championed.’

There is a delicious irony when free market zealots become victims of the very system they celebrate. When those who pontificated about the evils of the “nanny state” and the genius of consumer choice and the “invisible hand” suddenly realize that consumers don’t like them any more, and that the invisible hand is about to yank them out of their position of power. When the market tells them: “You know what? You’re losing us money. We couldn’t care less what you did or how much you made for us yesterday. Get lost.”

Of course, it is “leftists” and “liberals” who are most often accused of not being tough enough to survive in the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism. Lefty “snowflakes” need the warm embrace of the state to compensate for their inability to cut it in the real world. They need “entitlements” and welfare. They need laws to protect them.

Yet when arch-capitalists such as Bill O’Reilly, Katie Hopkins and Sean Hannity find themselves at the receiving end of corporate savagery, their reactions speak volumes. Sermons about the reign of the consumer disappear, replaced by hysterical accusations of conspiracies, political correctness gone wild and cowardly corporate censorship.

In response to O’Reilly’s release from Fox after a slew of sexual harassment cases, Alex Marlow, editor in chief at Breitbart News, said that the decision created “an America where corporations decide what can and can’t be said, and I don’t like the idea where the corporations have so much control.”

After Fox News put the hammer down on Sean Hannity after his pushing the discredited Seth Rich conspiracy theory, Hannity tweeted: “Spoke to many advertisers. They are being inundated with Emails to stop advertising on my show. This is Soros/Clinton/Brock liberal fascism.”

When it was announced Katie Hopkins was leaving LBC immediately – after a tweet, later deleted, in which Hopkins called for a “final solution” for Muslims – chat rooms and websites claimed mob rule and thought-policing. Even Julian Assange weighed in on Hannity, tweeting: “On @SeanHannity: regardless of the politics no one should be cheering advertisers controlling the parameters of acceptable debate.”

For critics and scholars who have for decades pointed to the acute dangers connected to corporate control of the media, howling from the far-right over O’Reilly, Hopkins and Hannity rings hollow for a couple of reasons.

First, an individual who invokes Nazi ethnic cleaning terminology in relation to Muslims, or was involved in so many sexual harassment lawsuits that his employer had to pay $13m in settlement deals, are hardly poster children for journalistic free speech. At the broader level, however, these are people who have served a political ideology that has pushed deregulated markets conducive to the concentration of corporate control – which in the case of media also means excessive advertiser influence.

It is worth remembering that O’Reilly, Hopkins and Hannity are three individuals. They are not the sum total of the far right, and thus the argument that what we are seeing is tantamount to the eradication of their worldview from the media is a sad joke.

Breitbart, Fox News, the Daily Mail and Daily Express are all alive and well. Bill O’Reilly wasn’t replaced by Noam Chomsky. He was replaced by Tucker Carlson, who provides a very similar brand of far-right vitriol … just without the sexual harassment accusations. And will LBC now be bereft of far-right anti-immigration voices? Fear not. You can always tune in to Nigel Farage’s show on the same station.

So when senior people at Breitbart and on-air talent at Fox News start saying they are only now realizing the extent of corporate and advertiser power? Cry me a river. They are liars, naïve or have been in a coma for the last 50 years.

Ask the other end of the political spectrum about the impact of corporate control. Truly leftist, progressive voices have been essentially frozen out of the US and UK commercial public spheres. And by “leftist” I don’t mean the Wall Street friendly, Coke-sponsored, pseudosocial democracy of Hillary Clinton.

Critiques of consumption are rarities. When wars rage, most media will cheerlead the battles and interview former generals while anti-war protests, sometimes enormous in size, are either ignored or sidelined as nothing more than PC slacker culture. When truly progressive candidates emerge, they are belittled as at best anomalies and at worst pie-in-the-sky dreamers who will destroy the economy.

Unfettered corporate and advertiser control of the media are real and are bad for democracy. But when people like Bill O’Reilly, Katie Hopkins and Sean Hannity claim victim status after advertiser pressure, let’s remember that they are suffering the consequences of a system they so gleefully championed.

[Cordelia]

fwiw, P.I. Rod Wheeler’s credentials debunked

Now-Notorious 'Private Investigator' in Seth Rich Case is Unlicensed in D.C.

And Rod Wheeler, the Fox talking head, was fired from MPD.

Jim McElhatton

May 31, 2017 1 PM

Rod Wheeler, the now-notorious Fox News commentator who characterizes himself as a private investigator and whose recent comments fueled conspiracy theories about the murder of former DNC staffer Seth Rich, isn’t even licensed to practice in D.C., and the website for his investigative firm has disappeared from the Internet.

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news ... nsed-in-dc

I looked at Wheeler’s website a couple of weeks ago but there wasn’t much information; pretty generic; home page a stock photo of a law library. There were two other ‘investigators’ listed, along w/phone numbers to reach them.

Again, who are any of the ‘major’ Washingtonian participants playing the Rich case?

(About Mary Pinchot Meyer’s 1964 murder in D.C.; the WAPO 1999 article lists it as unsolved; yet she doesn’t appear on the MPDC Major Case/Unsolved Homicides very short list for that time period https://mpdc.dc.gov/node/218252 so should one assume it’s closed, though never solved--she, who was from a politically powerful, well-connected family and also the WAPO’s future Executive Editor Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law? A code of silence has a long history in Washington, even when it's applied to a murdered loved one lost to the well established elite.)