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BUCKLE UP: Judicial Ruling Over Laptop Brings Seth Rich Controversy Back Into Public Spotlight

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Remember the Seth Rich case? This is exactly the kind of controversy that we can expect more of now that federal law enforcement has become openly partisan.

Authorities and the media had made it perfectly clear that there was only one possible explanation to what happened in the Seth Rich case — his murder was a random act of violence. Questioning the official explanation was enough to brand someone a ‘conspiracy theorist’.

The short version of the basic known facts have been summarized here:

Rich was 27 years old when he was gunned down in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C. at 4:20 a.m. July 10, 2016. The case remains unsolved. His murder quickly drew speculation from conspiracy theorists following vague comments from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Internet conspiracy theorists speculated it was Rich, not Russia, who leaked internal DNC documents to WikiLeaks. The case gained traction after misstated information was reported by Fox News. -Heavy

Asking questions about this has had significant consequences for anyone daring to do so. The same can be said of anyone speculating about potential political motivation behind the murder of Seth Rich. Fact-checkers come out in force to blast anyone contradicting the official narrative as misinformation.

Advertisers get chased away. Google downranks those sites in its search results. Social media attaches warning labels or actively blocks their links.

You know the drill. It’s exactly what they do to whoever questions so many other Democrat talking points… nor does it ever seem to matter how valid or absurd those talking points might be. It’s an Orwellian exile for all producers of ‘wrongthink’ … without warning and without possibility of appeal. Even the truth is no defence.

If positions for which the exiled were punished later become mainstream — for example, questing the efficacy or side effects of a certain mandatory medical product, or the point of origin of a certain worldwide illness — nothing changes. Expect no apology or reinstatement of scattered advertisers if you are vindicated. It’s a clue suggesting that the real goal was never really about journalistic accuracy in the first place.

Here’s a sample of NPR’s ‘impartial’ reporting of the legal settlement between his parents and Fox News just a few months ago. Note their ‘nonpartisan’ use of adjectives calling out people who believed the Seth Rich claims as conspiracy theorists in the same breath in which they were trying to revive a long-since discredited Trump-Russian collusion narrative.

After Seth’s death, figures friendly to former President Donald Trump portrayed him as a disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporter. They peddled false claims that he had secretly stolen thousands of emails and given them to WikiLeaks to try to stop Hillary Clinton from winning the presidency. They suggested Clinton and the Democrats had arranged his killing. And that the Riches themselves were in on some kind of cover-up. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange fueled the suspicions, aided by such extremist blogs as Gateway Pundit.
None of this was true. As intelligence agencies in the Obama and Trump administrations, the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee and special counsel Robert Mueller concluded, hackers were deployed by the Russian government to disrupt U.S. elections. But the falsehoods helped deflect growing evidence that the Russians had interfered in Trump’s election win.
…Fox stars including Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Eric Bolling, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Fox News contributor, were among those who baselessly suggested that Seth Rich had been the leaker and that he was murdered because of those leaks. Fox aired the claims without providing any evidence and ominously warned that Democrats might have been behind his death. (Bolling said Seth’s killing stemmed from “not a robbery” but “a hit.”)
— NPR

In case you had any doubt about NPR’s objectivity here, we’ll offer this 2019 story as context.

A federal judge rejected a bid by National Public Radio to dismiss a Texas investment adviser’s libel suit over news reports about conspiracy theories surrounding the death of a Democratic National Committee staffer during the 2016 campaign. A Texas judge ruled Wednesday that the $57 million suit brought by Ed Butowsky makes plausible claims that the network may be liable for defamation.
..In his 37-page ruling, Judge Amos Mazzant of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas said that Butowsky’s suit against NPR, Folkenflik and top NPR editors met the legal standard to proceed: “Plaintiff has alleged sufficient facts which plausibly show the Reports were not fair, true and impartial accounts of the Wheeler complaint,” Mazzant wrote, according to the Politico story. “Additionally, even if the statements are considered a true report of the Wheeler complaint, as Defendants argue, the organization of the comments combined with the speculative commentary imply wrongdoing.”
–InsiderRadio, Aug 9, 2019

That’s the official Seth Rich narrative we were operating under to date. It might even be a reasonably accurate interpretation of the facts.

In a world as it existed only 20 years ago, we might accept the feds’ assertion without question. But 20 years ago we lived in a world with a very different federal law enforcement agency.

Back then, the FBI was not seen to be actively SWATing their political enemies, providing falsified evidence to take down General Flynn, swearing to the authenticity of bogus evidence to justify secret FISA warrants, or serving as a personal bodyguard protecting powerful liberals from negative legal consequences. (Think: Hunter Biden, among others)

If we still lived in the world of yesteryear we might accept their explanation at face value. Unfortunately, Federal law enforcement has spent years working very hard to set their own credibility on fire.

In a situation where there is no longer consensus in which ‘official’ sources can be trusted, the public is left to grope in the dark. Publicly known facts must be sifted and weighed against each other as private citizens make up their own minds about which claims can and cannot be believed.

Such a loss of credibility has real-world consequences.

For Seth Rich’s family, the consequences of having a politicized federal law enforcement agency will be painful and non-trivial. With a single judicial ruling, the 5-year-old Seth Rich case, and all the controversy that came with it, has come rushing back into the national conversation.

This week’s Seth Rich ruling

Since back in 2017, there have been FOIA requests into the FBI’s investigation of the Seth Rich case. The first time FOIA requests were sent out, the FBI claimed that the FOIA request had produced ‘no responsive documents’.

That was contested as the plaintiff knew they must have something about the Seth Rich Case. So they went back to court. This time the FBI was able to find 20,000 pages of potentially relevant material.

If that, by itself, isn’t a significant red flag for government credibility in this case, it’s hard to imagine what more it might take to raise one.

Anonymous blogger, Technofog, who has been incredibly well-sourced in legal issues going at least as far back as the Crossfire Hurricane debacle has been explaining the ruling and its significance on his personal Substack space ‘The Reactionary’.

The FBI also withheld the contents of Seth Rich’s personal laptop, which it possesses, in its entirety, alleging the privacy of Rich’s family in “preventing the public release of this information” outweighs the public interest in disclosure.
The court rejected that argument, stating “the FBI has not satisfied its burden of showing more than a de minimis privacy interest that would justify withholding information from Seth Rich’s laptop.”
–Technofog

He added a screenshot of the ruling with the following line highlighted: ‘Accordingly the court finds the FBI improperly withheld information under FOIA and the court is thus authorized to produce its production.

God alone knows what sort of can of worms the information on his laptop might — or might not — open up.

Whatever the case may be about the actual contents of that laptop, don’t expect the FBI, especially under Director Wray, to produce any of this information without a protracted legal knife-fight. They’ve tipped their hand for how partisan they are and they have already shown an interest in locking down information in this case.

Why?

That question is harder to answer. Had they not set fire to their credibility we might take their explanations at face value.

Now that their word is about as trustworthy as the Partisan Press, other explanations will rush in to fill the vacuum left behind in the space that would have been filled by their official explanation.

The problem is, that opens up a whole world of speculation ranging from honest questions to outright tin-foil hat explanations.

And, as one of the featured products from the ClashDaily store reminds us so succinctly, the Feds have nobody to blame for this distrust but themselves.


The best way to fight ‘misinformation’ is to be honest with the public in the first place. But increasingly, we no longer have government officials who know how to do that.

From Fauci’s army of lying labcoats, to the Military bragging about success in Kabul, to federal law enforcement using police state tactics against a sitting administration’s enemies list, the one thing our government has NOT been is honest with the people whose interests they supposedly represent.

Dear Christian: Your Fear Is Full of Crap

by Doug Giles

Beginning in March 2020, many Christians went into lockdown-freak-out mode. Uncut, irrational, unbiblical, and not to mention, unconstitutional, fear gripped many churches and church leaders. Forced to choose between obeying the Word of God or the edict of man, most Western Churches buckled. We even saw it here in First Amendment-protected America.

The Apostle Peter buckled to fear on the night of Christ’s crucifixion. But he learned his lesson and lived the rest of his life bold as a lion. How can the church ‘go and do likewise’?

Read the book and find out!

Get your copy of Dear Christian: Your Fear Is Full of Crap now. Better yet, grab an extra copy for any petrified pastor who dutifully put obedience to the unconstitutional edicts of Mayor McCheese ahead of obedience to the explicit commandments of the LORD God Almighty.

Wes Walker

Wes Walker is the author of "Blueprint For a Government that Doesn't Suck". He has been lighting up Clashdaily.com since its inception in July of 2012. Follow on twitter: @Republicanuck

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