RedHanded - Episode 316 - Seth Rich: Murder in the Age of Conspiracy

Episode Date: September 21, 2023

If Seth Rich had had any other job – or if it had been any other year – his tragic death would likely have joined the 65 other unsolved murders in his part of Washington DC that year. But Seth worked for the Democratic Party – and this was the summer of 2016.And while his family tried to grieve, Seth’s story was co-opted by every side. Through social media echo-chambering and shameless self-promotion, it grew to include accusations of bloodthirsty politicians; allegations of foreign powers destabilising US elections; and a secretive, high-powered paedophile ring that went all the way to the top.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi guys.

Given the content of today's episode, I have a very fitting announcement for everybody. If you would like to listen to me and Hannah on AmeriCast, you can do that today. Today, the day you are listening to this, the 21st of September. I would highly recommend that you head on over wherever you listen to your podcasts and look up AmeriCast. They're a fantastic BBC radio podcast.

And this week, Hannah and I feature as the special guests talking all about TikTok and how it is completely transforming the conversation when it comes to true crime. The host, Marianne, is amazing. We had such a great time talking to her about TikTok, diving into the Idaho student murders, and how the US media sort of had a complete frenzy around that case, and how it also spilled into TikTok with people turning up at the house, doing all sorts of crazy things, and how that sort of need for more and more extreme content on platforms like TikTok is a making creators behave in ways that are getting into the realm of being highly highly unethical and maybe interfering with investigations and also how that behavior by them is then

directly leading to more legacy or mainstream media platforms having to sort of keep up in order to maintain their ratings. It's a really fascinating conversation. We also dip our toes into the weird case that came out last month of Carly Russell, the woman who pretended she'd been kidnapped after seeing a toddler on the side of the road. It's a fascinating conversation. So if it sounds like something you're interested in and you just want a bit more of us this week, go check out AmeriCast wherever you listen to your podcasts and enjoy. I'm Hannah. I'm Saruti. And welcome to Upside Down Day. I know. Because we swapped sides of the studio. I hate it. And I feel like it's the worst thing we've ever done. I don't like it. I don't like it. I really don't like it at all. No, I'm sat in the wrong seat. I don't know what's going on. But it is still us. And it is still us. And if we are anything, it's adaptable. It is true. It is true. And we are here. We're ready. We're in the wrong place. But we are equipped.

Yes. To start this episode. Exactly that. Allegedly. So let's do it. When Seth Rich was in the ninth grade, he wrote an essay about himself. I just want to be known for something. I don't care what for, but I just want to be famous. Classic ninth grade shenanigans. I am sure I wrote something very similar.

And I did it, so suck it everyone who laughed at me. And when Seth Rich grew up, it looked as if he was going to get his wish. Seth's great love of politics from a young age, his interpersonal skills and his infectious enthusiasm all meant that he was on the road to make something of himself in the US capital. Little did he know that by the age of just 27,

his name would hit the headlines of every major news outlet in the country. But, tragically, it wasn't his political achievements that made his name. It was his murder. While walking home from his favourite bar one night in 2016, Seth Ridge was shot twice in the back.

And what at first sight was assumed to be a tragic but uncomplicated botched robbery spiralled into one of the nation's most talked about crimes. Because Seth worked for the Democratic Party, and this was the time of the Trump-Hillary grudge match, the ugliest presidential race in recent memory. And due to its unique place in history, Seth's death was co-opted by every side and used as proof of ever bigger and more extreme conspiracies. At a time when sensationalism was at an all-time high, when anything could shoot into the public eye if it was extreme enough, everyone wanted a piece. Fame-hungry public figures scrambled to be associated with the case.

And while Seth's family tried to grieve, the conspiracies spiralled out of control. So with accusations of bloodthirsty politicians, allegations of foreign powers destabilising US elections, and a secretive,

high-powered paedophile ring that went all the way to the top, the story only became more clouded. But what really happened? and a secretive, high-powered paedophile ring that went all the way to the top, the story only became more clouded. But what really happened? Let's wade through the insanity and find out. Seth Conrad Rich loved politics from the start. Even as a kid, he watched C-SPAN in his spare time.

Would you be worried? Look, more power to you, Seth. I mean, I feel like it's something you would do. I was going to say. I probably wasn't far off. But parents, if you come home and your child is watching C-SPAN, what are your thoughts? I think I would be like,

are you sure you don't want to watch Ed, Edd n Eddy? Are you sure you don't want to watch A Muppet's Christmas Carol? I think I would intervene because you've got your whole life to watch a muppet's christmas carol i think i would intervene because you've got your whole life to watch c-span exactly you have got your whole life to watch c-span but i also think you know parents if your child is showing some sort of very intense interest in something maybe try be like what about this but if they're like no let them do it let them do it i'm not here to make you do something kid you want to want to watch C-SPAN? Guess we're watching C-SPAN. The Muppets C-SPAN? Why not?

I saw this amazing tweet that was like, when I die, I do want to be cremated, but I want a Muppet version of myself at my open casket funeral. Nice. We can make that happen. Great. Sign me up. Very early on in his life, little Seth knew the name of every senator and how they tended to vote. Whilst he was still in high school, he volunteered for the Nebraska Democratic Party and encouraged everyone at school to sign up to vote as soon as they could. And if he's starting to sound like that stuffy, precocious, briefcase-toting kid

who wore a tie to make him look more grown up, that actually couldn't be further from the truth. I think that's the important thing about Seth and what you have to understand about him, is that he's really fucking obsessed with politics from a very young age, but he's by no means some weirdo. That is not even close to the fact. No, quite the opposite. He made friends very easily everywhere he went.

He loved to make people laugh and he loved to talk, which was something he put down to his Jewish and Irish heritage. His parents, Joel and Mary Rich, were mystified as to where his political obsession came from. Joel ran a family business printing menus for local restaurants and Seth's mum worked in sales for the Yellow Pages, remember them. And perhaps that's why Seth always mixed the political with the personable. He was a star on the debate team and twice won national competitions. But he also sang in an a cappella group, performed in school musicals and did a bit of modelling too. Still though, despite all of his auxiliary activities, when Seth graduated high school,

there was absolutely no doubt as to where he was headed next. Washington DC. He arrived in 2012, in the middle of Barack Obama's re-election campaign. Seth was one of thousands of young 20-somethings descending on the Capitol for a shot at making it big in politics. Just like wannabe actors tend to gravitate towards LA, every young American who dreamed of making a difference soon found themselves in Washington DC. And Seth applied for every

vaguely political job going, and eventually landed himself a role at the democratic polling and strategy firm, Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner. If this was LA, Seth would have just landed himself a bit part in his first Hollywood movie. He might have a line if he's lucky. Yeah. And if he impressed the right people, this could be his shot at the big time. And just like a film set, everyone at GQR was vying for the attention of the top brass. Luckily for Seth, getting attention was something that came very naturally to him.

At the company's regular all-staff lunches, Seth would engage in heated debates with senior partners and could always hold his own. More than that, he was what we can sympathetically refer to as an office character. He had a toy panda, boo, that he kept on his desk. And one day, he came in in a full panda outfit to work

at a political strategy firm. If anyone needs a round-up of why I'm sniggering, yeah. Struti hates pandas. Look, I don't hate pandas. This has been grossly misunderstood. I believe the question started with, what is your most controversial opinion? Yes, I believe you are correct.

So I decided to scroll down my brain and look for one that wouldn't get me immediately cancelled. And I said that I think we should just leave pandas alone. They don't want to be here anymore. They don't want to exist. They want to die. When you have a penis the size of a button and you are, what, fertile for like a day a year and you have no interest in fucking

and you have to be held together by zookeepers until you procreate. In panda costumes. Leave them alone. Yeah. And when we were in Mexico, bizarrely, there were pandas absolutely everywhere. There was a giant panda in the park. So many pandas.

Panda hats. Panda rucksacks. I can't. I can't cope. Also, CCP used pandas as, what would you call it, as like weird little ambassadors. So every panda in the world, whether it's in San Diego Zoo or not, is owned by the CCP. Doesn't that just fucking blow your mind? Yeah.

It's like the swans and the queen. Does the king now own all the swans? I would think so. He probably talks to them like he talks to his plants. Yes. Well, the less said about that, the better. And the whole tampon incident, well, I can't even bring myself to remember that. Anyway, real Britannia.

But what I was saying is, pandas, problematic. Anyway, not judging Seth. You want to dress up like a panda? I'm here for it. But,

pandas, leave them alone. Seth, like I said, he was definitely not like a wallflower. That is for sure. And he was very,

very politically engaged, like we've been making obvious. In fact, when gay marriage was voted into law, Seth even came into work dressed head to toe in stars and stripes. It's kind of backwards, though. Like, there's way more stars than there should be. Like, his whole trousers are stars and then half his shirt.

But I feel like the most of the flag is the stripes. Look, man. Yeah, I mean, there are other issues. There are other problems here. What I think you need to focus on. we'll share this picture on social media, because I think it really sums Seth up like a guy who took his job very, very seriously, who really cared about democracy, who really cared about politics, but could still have a laugh. Yeah.

He's not a boring guy who's just droning on at you on and on and preaching to you to do this, that and the other. He's got fun outfits. He does have fun outfits. And I'm here for it. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983, there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs,

a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either, until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows,

uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness. And inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada, as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favourite podcasts. And he was a character outside of work as well. In a city bursting with young people wanting to make it in politics, Seth was in his element. He soon got himself a girlfriend called Kelsey Mulker,

who worked at Greenberg. And he played softball on Wednesday nights and football. Yes, real football, soccer football, not handball, at the weekend. Hand egg. Sorry. I can't even remember my own fucking jokes. And most nights in between his various sports fixtures, Seth could be found at Luz City Bar, a sports pub in Columbia Heights. Seth was a regular at Loo's,

in the way that everyone dreams of being a regular at their local sundae. The staff all knew his drink, a Bell's Two-Hearted Ale, and if he ordered wings, they'd shout into the kitchen to make them Seth-style, which meant no blue cheese sauce. Again, I think it just sums up how charismatic and likeable Seth is, that this bar, that must get, you know,

hundreds and thousands of patrons coming through their doors every single day, they loved Seth. And when the bar manager, Joe Capone, said his daughter was struggling with her college application, Seth helped her out with the wording. He would sit in his regular corner seat and chat politics with anyone who would listen, friends, staff, regulars, for hours and hours on end. He was a lifelong Democrat, but if anyone pressed him to reveal his favourite candidate,

he refused, point blank. To Seth, the most important thing of all was that every American citizen should practice their right to vote. Now back at Greenberg, all that charm and political nous paid off when a senior exec left to build a data team at the Democratic National Committee. He chose Seth as his voter expansion data director. So before we get into what exactly a voter expansion data director is, just what is the Democratic National Committee?

Uh-oh. Well, I'm glad you asked. It's high time we had another red-handed rundown. Now, as you probably know, the US is a two-party system. And while the lawmaking takes place between the Senate, House, and Capitol, the day-to-day management of each party is done by three congressional committees. And the Democratic National Committee is the formal governing body of the Democratic Party. It's in charge of the party brand, as well as managing research, polling and funding. But most importantly, its job is to oversee the nomination and election of Democrats,

everyone from state officials all the way up to the party's presidential candidate crucially it has to stay strictly neutral and not favor any particular candidate you can't see and hopefully you can tell through my excellent audio narration skills that I have put that all in capitals because well there are obviously a lot of allegations that they don't actually do that. And by that, I mean stay neutral. But we'll come on to that later. Essentially, what you need to know is that for the Democratic Party, the DNC organises fundraising for campaigns and works on the party's election strategy. So it's like the gristly bits. Yeah. And as voter expansion data director,

Seth was doing what he was passionate about, spreading the good word of good old democracy and getting ordinary Americans to the polling booth. Watching the West Wing on one screen, Seth would sort through survey data on the other. Still, work at the DNC was high pressured and stressful. Employees would regularly work 12 to 14 hour days and all the way through the other. Still, work at the DNC was high-pressured and stressful. Employees would regularly work 12 to 14-hour days and all the way through the holidays. Seth was the only non-lawyer on his team and once again provided some much-needed comic relief in what must have been a very tense workplace. By mid-2016, Seth had started work on a new voter expansion project, which would make it easier for people to find polling places. When Seth had started working for the DNC in 2014, Obama was halfway through his second term.

But over the next few years, Republicans, we all watched it happen, gained more power and influence. The crisis of fake news and organised misinformation was reaching fever pitch. And soon, US politics would descend into one of its dirtiest bouts of mudslinging in the nation's history. Before either side even had a candidate, the battle for the next presidency was fought dirty. Name-calling and wild accusations were an everyday feature of the news cycle. And it wasn't just donkeys versus elephants. These polarised feuds were happening within each party too. On the Democratic side, it was a grudge match between Hillary Clinton

and Bernie Sanders. It was seen by many as a fight for the identity and the future of the Democratic Party. The establishment versus revolutionary idealism. And the first half of 2016 was a tough one for the DNC. Bernie fans were convinced there was at least a bias, and at most an organised conspiracy, against their candidate. Even many on the Hillary side blasted the DNC for being antiquated and not serving the needs of the modern party. So things were rocky.

And I think you can argue, like, again, not like to actually get into the politics of it because I'm not trying to do that, but like Trump was a populist. Trump was a populist. And to fight a populist, I'm not saying I'm like, oh, yay, Bernie Sanders.

I'm just saying like to fight a populist, you need a populist candidate'm not saying i'm like oh yay bernie sanders i'm just saying like to fight a populist you need a populist candidate to fight against him to fight populism with establishment politics like hillary clinton doesn't work yeah we all saw it exactly doesn't work doesn't work so anyway all of this is going on things were very rocky but in june 2016 a month month before Seth would be killed, there was an explosion at the DNC. Not a real designated survivor explosion. But it was a pretty... Have you been watching that TV show, Designated Survivor? I watched it like ages ago.

Kiefer Sutherland is a terrible actor. I'm like, where does this man get all his hype from? I never actually watched 24, but I watched him in Designated Survivor, and all he does is squint and just sort of like mutter. I don't think I watched 24 either. He's terrible. It's actively terrible. I think the trailer was quite good, and that's why I was like, oh, Designated Survivor, I know what that is now.

Same. Oh, yeah, same. I watched like at least six episodes before I was like, wait a minute. This guy's fucking terrible. Anyway, so no, not a designated survivor, but it was a pretty fucking heavy time to be working at the DNC. On the morning of the 10th of June, every staff member was called to a meeting.

Hundreds of them gathered in the biggest conference room. And Chief Operating Officer Lindsay Reynolds stood up to speak. She informed all their present that what she was about to say could not leave the room. Employees couldn't even tell their partners or their parents what she was about to say. Lindsay Reynolds then asked everyone to hand over their laptops to IT, who proceeded to wipe every single one. No one was allowed to leave the building until their computers had been taken. Hundreds of people who were used to working at every waking hour

were suddenly just told to take the weekend off. Why? Because the DNC had been hacked. A company called CrowdStrike had been called in by the FBI to investigate a tip. A hacker had somehow gained access to thousands of chat messages, email accounts and research documents. All the inner workings of the Democrats' governing body could be laid bare. And it was decided that the only way to block the hackers, without letting on that they were wise to what was going on, was to destroy the entire network and rebuild it. But, in many ways, it was too late. Whoever had gained access to the system had almost free reign over the DNC servers for months.

It's a bit Y2K, isn't it? Yeah, it really is. Except it really is a thing that happened. Yeah. So things at the DNC offices were going from bad to worse. To much, much worse. And the rumours about who had carried out the attack, that is, foreign powers aiming to destabilise a fair election,

were getting to democracy-loving Seth. And on the night of the 9th of July, Seth went down to Luzbar to drown his sorrows. He had been sitting in his regular place. But that night, Seth wasn't his usual chatty self. He had a lot on his mind. For one, Seth had just been offered a job on the campaign of the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. It was his dream gig. Seth had even drafted an acceptance email. And the reason he was mulling it over was because the job was in New York, and his girlfriend was here in D.C. And things were serious between him and Kelsey.

They'd met each other's parents, they'd even talked about moving in together, but it was also a little bit frayed around the edges, shall we say. Because they'd been rocky for a while. And what's more, democracy was taking a beating. So Seth sat for a while, quieter than usual, thinking. The staff slid him a few bottles of Bell's Ale on the house. And at closing time, around 1.30am, Seth said goodbye to the staff and left the bar.

Seth lived in Bloomingdale, a gentrified neighbourhood that young politicos absolutely love because it's close to the capital and it's got loads of bars and restaurants as well. What was not so great about Bloomingdale was the gun crime. Robberies in Bloomingdale were four times higher than the national average and carjackings and muggings were just part of everyday life. What's more, Bloomingdale had major rainstorms earlier that same year, and huge sections of the road had been ripped up to work on new pipes. And the

temporary road lights that had been installed barely worked. There had been more than a dozen armed robberies that year so far. But all that didn't stop Seth Rich walking almost two miles home in the early hours of the 10th of July 2016. He made the walk home from Luz often. Since he had terrible signal in his flat, Seth used the opportunity to sit at Luz and make late-night catch-up calls with his friends and family. Now, personally, looking at Seth's call logs, he tended to call his friends and family at, like, 1 in the morning, 2 in the morning.

Personally, if someone calls me at 2 in the morning and it is not an emergency. Yeah, emergencies only. Like a snake has come out of the toilet and bitten you on the vagina. I don't want to know. I will be less than enthusiastic. But Seth's friends grew to look forward to these calls. He was always a little looser and a bit more open after he'd had a few drinks. And he asked them questions about their own lives,

so it was a chance for Seth to sort of talk to his friends on a more relaxed basis when he's outside of work. And often they'd chat for hours. A log of his phone calls that night account for a total of two hours and fifteen minutes worth of calls. I don't think I've spent two hours and fifteen minutes on the phone in my goddamn life. No, I've got nothing to say. I say it all here and then I go home and sleep. So Seth had

tried his dad twice, but Joel Rich was fast to see. So Seth had briefly spoken to his friends. But the bulk of his time that night, in those two hours and fifteen minutes worth of calls, was spent on the phone with his girlfriend, night, in those two hours and 15 minutes worth of calls, was spent on the phone with his girlfriend, Kelsey, hashing things out.

At this time, Kelsey was back home in Michigan, so they spoke for 89 minutes uninterrupted. The call dropped, and then they spoke again for another 43 minutes more. They've got a lot to talk about. Yeah, seems so. And at 4.19am, Seth told Kelsey that he was almost home. And they started to say their goodbyes. Kelsey then heard a few faint voices on the other end of the phone.

And then Seth hung up. And this is all about to get a bit sinister. The next morning, Joel and Mary Rich, Seth's parents, came back from breakfast to find a three-word note on their front door. And it read, Hate that. Yeah. Almost as much as pandas.

When Joel Rich got through to the police, he asked how bad it was and a voice on the other end said, Seriously? how bad it was and a voice on the other end said your son was murdered seriously i thought that in these situations and maybe i'm misunderstanding that the police would call local police and someone would go to the parents house to break the news to them that their son had been murdered like as far as i understand like unless it is completely unavoidable like you are stationed in the fucking Antarctic. That they cannot get a police officer to you, that they would actually come to your house and tell you.

But maybe I'm, like, you know, living in some sort of dreamland. Maybe. Seth Rich had been found by a neighbour just a block away from his front door. He was hunched over, face down, with two bullet holes in his back. There were signs of struggle. Seth's hands, knees and face were bruised.

EMTs arrived and rushed him to hospital, but less than two hours after he was found, Seth Rich was dead. Do you know what? I think this is the thing. People always ask us, like when we do our Q&A sessions, before live shows, etc. Has doing the show made you more scared?

And honestly, it hasn't made me more scared at the idea of like being murdered by a serial killer what it has made me is like realize how fragile life is like seth is just doing despite all the conspiracies that blossom out of his murder seth is just a normal guy working a normal job that he cared about he had his girlfriend he's going through a difficult time because he's deciding whether to take a job because he'd have to move away from her like ordinary life shit that people go through he just leaves a bar that he was going to all the time to walk home and he gets shot in the back it's that fear of like, in one second, boom, it's gone. I don't worry more about being abducted and tied up in a sex dungeon.

Like it's this kind of thing that terrifies me. And it is truly terrifying because there were no suspects, no witnesses, and absolutely no clue as to why Seth Rich had been shot. His wallet, his phone and his watch were all still left with his body. The same goes for an expensive Jewish pendant that he had around his neck, bearing the word ditto, which was an old family in-joke. His death was ruled a homicide and considered to have been a botched robbery where no one managed to rob anything. Officers told the Rich family that part of the attack had been captured on CCTV and it showed Seth falling to his knees and then the legs of two other people.

But this video never surfaced. A police spokesman refused to confirm its existence and said that any more detail could compromise an ongoing investigation. Here we go. These are the first horsemen of the conspiracy apocalypse beckon because this is what you have, right? When it's like, oh my God, it's a conspiracy. The police are covering it up.

And I'm like, they're incompetent. They've lost the fucking CCTV footage. And now it's making it seem immediately like somebody's covering something up. Shall I buy some coconut halves to make horseman noises when we do conspiracy cases? There you go. Perfect. Sorry, Mabel, please go back to sleep. Still, it was one of 65 similar unsolved cases in DC that year.

And if Seth had had any other job, or if this had been any other year, his death would have been exactly the same. But that wasn't the case. Seth Rich was a DNC staffer. And this was the summer of 2016. So the day after Seth's death, the Democratic Party chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz,

put out a statement. She called Seth a dedicated, selfless public servant who worked tirelessly to protect the most sacred right we share as Americans, the right to vote. And she called for any information

that might help the investigation. And the following day, Seth Rich's name even made it into a speech by Hillary Clinton herself. She was speaking to a crowd about the need for better gun laws. She listed a few recent mass shootings, then said, Just this past Saturday, a young man, Seth Rich, who worked for the Democratic National Committee to expand voting rights, was shot and killed in his neighborhood in Washington. He was just 27 years old. Surely we can agree that weapons of war have no place on the streets of America.

Now that sounds like pretty standard electioneering. But now, Seth's name was linked to Clinton. And the rumour mill started grinding away. Within hours of the DNC statement, the very first tweet appeared. And it started on the left from Bernie fans who thought the DNC were stuffy old dinosaurs who only existed to look after the corporate interests and quash the little guy. At first, the tweets merely hinted something fishy was going on. There was a suggestion flying around that Seth just knew too much. But soon, the implicit became very explicit. One tweet read

that Seth was murdered at 27 for the crime of ensuring fair elections And the hashtag I am Seth Rich spread like wildfire And started being taken on by all sides to support widely varying stories Some said that Seth was killed by the Clintons for leaking DNC emails Some said that he was assassinated by Russian agents Some said that he was ainated by Russian agents. Some said that he was a secret Bernie Sanders supporter or an undercover Republican, leaking secrets to Putin. And as the conspiracies brewed, Seth Rich was quickly mythologised too. In

these news stories, Seth was no longer just a pencil-pushing staffer working on voter expansion. He was now a senior figure preventing election fraud. And he didn't just use databases as part of his job. Seth became a technical whiz, a wannabe hacker, who coded rings around his colleagues. And where did the conspiracists go next? You guessed it. They burrowed down into the murky depths of Reddit and 4chan. Nothing good happens there. Nah. And by the

time it reached, how do you say it? R slash conspiracy? Do we say that? I don't know. Subreddit. Yes, yes, yes. There we go. The conspiracy subreddit. God, we're fucking old. Seth Rich's murder had become an assassination. Conspiracy theorists did what they do best, at a hefty dose of confirmation bias. Conspiracy thinking always tends to be most active at traumatic moments or times of great change. We've talked about this. Go listen to our two-parter where we talk about satanic panic and q anon like there is such an interesting way to which conspiracy theorism

has evolved over the years and obviously we know it was at its peak not that i would say it's not always been around because i think everybody wants to oh my god we're more polarizing yeah no we're not no we're not No, we're not. We've always been this way. We've always been this way. Literally the satanic panic. Like this has been going on as long as humans have been kicking about. But anyway, it's going on. People are looking for patterns to help them make sense of what's happening.

It's the same reason we look at clouds and see elephants or pandas and circus tents. And you also see a massive uptick in conspiracies after moments like Watergate or Iran-Contra. That, of course, makes sense. It's completely reasonable. After very real conspiracies about the state lying to people, it only makes sense that people are going to start looking for other things. After Jeffrey Epstein, I'm live, like we said. There is nothing I won't believe. Exactly, exactly.

Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection. Claudian Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime and there's much more to come. This is The Harvard Plan,

a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On The Media. To listen, subscribe to On The Media wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my

mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now exclusively on Wondery Plus. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti. It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan,

we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. So Reddit users poured through whatever they could find on Seth's life, looking for anything that could be consistent with their version of the story. And this is the thing, they were doing it on both sides. The left wanted it to be because the Democratic Party didn't want to support Bernie Sanders, and the right are doing it because, you know, the Democratic Party are corrupt. Like, everybody had their own reason and their own, like,

bias for what they wanted to find out of poor Seth Rich's murder. So let's have a look at what was going on. So Seth's LinkedIn showed that he worked for GQR. And who was the CEO of GQR? Stan Greenberg. And who did Stan Greenberg used to work for? Bill Clinton. Old blue- blue dress Bill.

So needless to say, it was thousands and thousands of words on Reddit of pure speculation based on absolutely zero evidence. Seth's name was also quickly added to a particularly tenacious theory called Clinton body count. Affectionately, if you can use that word, known as Arkanside. And this is a list of more than 350 people, the theory goes, that the Clintons had personally killed, including people who accused Kevin Spacey of sexual assault.

But it's not just them. It's ex-lawyers, bodyguards, mistresses. And this list even grew to include people who had interned at the White House as tour guides. So the fact that Seth worked for the DNC was plenty proof to suggest that he belonged on the Clinton body count list. And as if the fire needed any more fuel, the DNC hack was about to become very public indeed. On the 22nd of July 2016, 12 days after Seth had died, Wikileaks announced that it had obtained 20,000 internal DNC emails from an anonymous source. And all 20,000 were published as a searchable database on the Wikileaks website. You have probably heard of Wikileaks and its creator

and his white hair is probably burned into your retina forever. Julian Assange, obviously, is the creator and you probably don't know as much about Wikileaks or Julian Assange as you would like to, but it is too much to get into today. So if you haven't already, check out our shorthand on Julian Assange that went out this week on Amazon Music. But the even shorter version of the shorthand is WikiLeaks is a website that publishes leaks of classified documents

leaked by anonymous sources to uncover corruption. And speaking truth to power is a very noble aim. Now, obviously, the questions start when people make accusations that you are leaking documents, leaking classified information, not just to speak truth to power, but to further your own political views. Now Assange made no secret of his dislike of Clinton. He called her a bright, well-connected, sadistic sociopath. Now for him, Hillary Clinton was the personification of everything that was wrong with US politics.

And he said, quite plainly, quote, So Julian Assange made it a priority for WikiLeaks to get any dirt it could on Clinton. And when a hacker proved to him that they could easily access the DNC servers, Assange jumped at the chance. And he timed the leak

for the day before the Democratic National Convention to cause maximum disruption. News outlets had already reserved column inches for Democrat stories. And the event had been intended to be a step forward for the party. Because remember, there's all that infighting between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton,

and it was at this event that Bernie was going to officially endorse Clinton and call on all his Bernie bros to stop the infighting and unite against Trump. So it's a very like a pivotal moment in the election campaign for the Democrats. And Julian Assange gathers all this information and he's ready to leak it right before it. So obviously, instead of anybody focusing on Bernie and Hillary bridging the gap, the country was reeling from the email leak. The inner workings of an entire political party were laid bare. Now, we will come back to the question of who exactly was behind this hack. But for now, let's focus on the email's contents,

which doesn't seem to have been particularly spectacular. It's one of those things where, kind of like the Princess Anastasia, you hear about it and you're like, oh, that sounds really interesting and potentially awful. And then you look into it and you're like, eh. Yeah. I'm like, look, Julian Assange had an agenda. He didn't like Hillary Clinton, and he used his platform in order to do this. Do I think that's the reason Hillary Clinton lost? No.

Clinton's enemies, Assange included, have painted her and her party as everything from tax-dodging bureaucrats to much worse. Those who bought into the Pizzagate conspiracy, for example, believed Hillary to be the ringleader of a Satan-loving child-trafficking sex ring run from a pizza restaurant. We know the Democratic Party has its critics. All parties do, unless you are in a dictatorship. But the vast majority of the emails that were leaked from the DNC just showed the mere day-to-day workings of a bureaucratic political party. It mostly showed routine campaign planning

and the very occasional bit of quite tame office banter. But this was a feeding frenzy for journalists who dove in headfirst in their never-ending search for a hot take. One cloud of controversy was around journalist Kenneth Vogel, who was shown to have agreed to run his story by the DNC before publishing. Which rang a lot of journalistic ethical alarm bells. Another was around an email by the company's chief financial officer, Brad Marshall. He seemed to be suggesting that they expose an unnamed person's religious beliefs to the media. And it was thought that he was talking about Bernie Sanders.

This email read, Can we get someone to ask his belief? Does he believe in a God? He had skated on saying that he had a Jewish heritage. If they were talking about Bernie, it does suggest a bias, looking for ways to destabilize his campaign because there's nothing worse in the States by being like, yeah, I'm not really. We did this in the most hated women in America episode. There are, I think there was one atheist in the Senate. Yeah, mean all of the polling and this might be grossly out of date but the polling I remember looking at years ago was like they would vote in someone who was not white who was a woman who was gay before they would vote in somebody who was an atheist an out

and proud atheist but yeah I mean that's the story for another day like Hannah said go listen to our episode on the most hated women in America for more but what i would say is again obviously what they're saying is trying to happen here is they're trying to show that the dnc were actively working with a bias against bernie sanders in order to split the vote and stop those who were supporting bernie sanders voting for hillary clinton to make it more likely that trump would win so apart from the bias conversation everything that could be a headline was and this definitely was the time of just like pick into every nonsense like absolute non-story and turn it into a headline just to confuse people it's like when we talk about cases when there's jury trials right

if you can't defend or you can't prosecute the defendant, well, just bore the jury with loads of information. Confuse them to the point that they just want to get out of there. I'm not saying that's good practice, but it does happen. And this is kind of similar. What happened here is kind of similar. So one headline showed a staffer asking, is there a fuck you emoji? Referring to a reporter's probing questions. That was apparently a news story.

Another showed the White House vetoing That was apparently a news story. Another showed the White House vetoing Ariana Grande for a presidential dinner. I remember reading that. Because of a video showing her, quote, licking other people's donuts while saying she hated America. I've seen that video. She does do that. But like, it's Ariana Grande.

Who cares? Exactly. But apparently this was newsworthy. There was also evidence that the party was rewarding some donors with appointments to boards and commissions, which is absolutely obviously corrupt. Kind of to be expected. But again, here you go. Show me a political institution that doesn't do that. Of course.

And the party was also shown to be sloppy with donors' private information and not following some data privacy protocols. But yeah, again, like hardly the juiciest of the juicy. And there are plenty more of these supposed revelations. But honestly, I'm boring myself already, so let's just say there were no real

bombshells. Still however, news of a healed party was quickly scrapped, in favour of yet more speculation over whether the rotten DNC had it in for Bernie all along. On the 9th of August, Julian Assange threw another grenade into this story. He appeared on the Dutch news programme, Newshaw,

for an interview about WikiLeaks. The host, Eelco Bosch van Rosenthal, asked him a pretty pointed question, which was this. How could Assange say that he was flying the flag for democracy while accepting emails from what appeared to be Russian hackers to further the shared goal of destabilising a political party that they didn't like? Assange said that blaming everything on Russia was just modern-day McCarthyism. He said that the Russian link had been imagined up by Democrats. Van Rosenthal then said that Trump would need a miracle to win. And let's listen to Assange's answer. Donald Trump has had a disastrous few weeks. If you look at the polls, he needs a miracle. In the American political lexicon,

there's such a thing as the October surprise. The stuff that you're sitting on, is an October surprise in there? Do you even know what you're sitting on? WikiLeaks never sits on material. Our whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. There's a 27-year-old that works for the DNC who was shot in the back, murdered just two weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington. That was just a robbery, I believe, wasn't it? No, there's no finding. So that's the sort of...

What are you suggesting? I'm suggesting that our sources take risks and they become concerned to see things occurring like that. But was he one of your sources then? I mean... We don't comment on who our sources are. But why make the suggestion about a young guy being shot in the streets of Washington? Because we have to understand

how high the stakes are in the United States and that our sources are, you know, our sources face serious risks. That's why they come to us, so we can protect their anonymity. But it's quite something to suggest a murder. That's basically what you're doing. Well, others have suggested that. We are investigating to understand what happened in that situation with Seth Rich. I think it is a concerning situation. There's not a conclusion yet.

We wouldn't be willing to state a conclusion, but we are concerned about it. And more importantly, a variety of WikiLeaks sources are concerned when that kind of thing happens. First of all, I love you, Van Rosenthal. Like, he's just like, it's not really what he's saying, though saying though is it i love how blunt dutch people are it's my favorite yeah like just that's how you interview julian assange right you can't be like but you are saying that though

you literally just said that so you know i am but a humble servant to my dog who i am hand feeding her lunch so she'll be quiet. I don't know what you guys think, but that interview sounds pretty heavily like Julian Assange is saying that Seth Rich was a WikiLeaks informant. And not long after this interview, Assange announced a $20,000 award on Twitter for information about Seth's murder. So, why? What's Julian Assange got to get out of all of this? It's the story, right? Everybody's tweeting about it.

Everybody's talking about it. Both sides are jumping all over it. And it's Julian Assange, you know, again, like so many other people were doing, using the murder of Seth Rich to promote his narrative I do not think that Seth Rich was a WikiLeaks informant I think all of this like we said earlier sort of propelled Seth's importance in what he was doing to epic proportions I think it's exactly what we said earlier like if it had been any other year, you know, it just would have been another very tragic but reasonably frequent gun death

in a high-crime neighbourhood. Yeah. So whatever Julian Assange's intention, rumours about Seth's murder obviously after this interview went into overdrive. All the previous conspiracy talk had been just that,

baseless conspiracy based on evidence that was flimsy at best. But now you had a respected public figure appearing on a national broadcaster who seemed to be laying out a very clear story. And again, look, we can point the finger at Julian Assange, we can point the finger at whoever to be like, look at what they've done. They're exploiting this murder. And they did. But it was enabled to happen because of how many times the public have been lied to by the government, by political parties of every ilk constantly. Absolutely. of distrust for your politicians, which is fair enough based on everything that has ever gone on,

ever, then you leave open the door for people like us and people like everybody to say, well, now I'll believe anything. So anyway, this clear story that Julian Assange was laying out was, of course, that Seth was the source of the DNC leak and that he was killed because of it. The far right took cues from Assange and ran with this version of events. Not only did it satisfy their hatred of Hillary Clinton's Democrats, but it also countered the suggestion that Russia was to blame for the hack.

With Trump's buddying up to Putin, it was a vote of confidence that Russia was nothing to worry about. Remember that? Wasn't that a weird time in history? Oh my God. I mean, again, the whole Russia thing. We'll talk about it later.

But, like, yes, Russia probably did get involved. Like, but the Mueller report, everything that people dug so deep into this. Did they find anything was like, oh, that really changed the election? I think, again, I cannot help but feel like all of these things were, again, sort of like stories that the Democrats had to tell themselves as to why they lost that election. And there isn't enough soul searching as to why and that might you know piss some people off that are listening but i really think yeah russia probably did do something they probably did hack a bunch of shit but did it fundamentally change the course of that election i think running hillary clinton is probably what did that for you i know you agree mabel i know you agree

but anyway with the story that was being propagated by the far right, Seth Rich was this American patriot calling out corruption who was gunned down by Clinton's cronies for his bravery. Within hours of that news short interview, the hashtag Seth Rich was used 80,000 times. Those kind of numbers soon find their way into the mainstream. And remember, all the while, while all of this crazy shit is going on, you've got people like Julian Assange talking about Seth Rich.

His family are just trying to grieve their murdered 27-year-old son. At the time, boundaries between far-right and far-left fringes in the mainstream news were blurred to say the least this is the thing wasn't it was like whatever was going on on the sort of fringes of the far right and the far left it really did feel like the mainstream media got sucked into like talking about everything and it was like what happened to doing your due diligence but it was clickbait it was clickbait right when you saw in 2016 in the years leading up to that, was when you really saw people again lose trust in mainstream media, not wanting to watch or get their information from there. And they left it wide open. Instead of doing decent, honest journalism, they left it open to people coming in from independent news outlets to start. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. But then obviously, who's holding them to account? Then you also have the propagation of like these far left, far right ones that are just spreading bullshit. And it spreads into everybody's

consciousness, because I won't say that we're more polarised than we've ever been. But we've never had social media, which is the game changer. I think that is, that's the nail on the head there. It is mostly social media, And how news aggregators worked. If an accusation was dramatic enough, by a public enough figure, it was thrust into the news, regardless of truth. The thrillingly named Drudge Report, a far-right-leaning news aggregator and one of the most visited English-language sites

on the entirety of the internet, straight-up reported that Seth Rich's murder was an inside job. Roger Stone, a friend of Trump, tweeted pictures of Rich and three others saying, four more dead bodies in the Clintons' wake. Coincidence? I think not. And then, as it always does, the story hit Fox News. Fox ran a full day of rolling coverage on Assange's interview in the Netherlands.

And here is Eric Bolling covering Bill O'Reilly's primetime slot on what is supposed to be a news channel. It clearly was not a robbery. There wasn't a robbery. They weren't even trying to get his information. This was a hit. So now, this was all getting

quite impossible to ignore. And the FBI started to internally discuss how they should respond to this shitstorm. Ugh, yeah. Because, look, I'm not letting

mainstream news outlets off the hook because they should be doing better, even the likes of fox news but it's them being like making the very calculated decision if we don't report this kind of thing and get these people on who are saying batshit crazy things we lose all of our ratings we lose all of our viewers because they're gonna go get it they can they want these stories they're gonna

go get them somewhere else like on the internet so let's just say it let's just say whatever fucking crazy shit is being said and report it as if it's new yeah and then we can all go home and watch the country burn exactly so like we said while again all of this is going on your son's murder is being dragged into a conspiracy that is now being talked about on mainstream news the rich family looked on in stunned horror. As Joel Rich, Seth's father, has said, how hurtful this is to think that you're getting ready to go to the next

phase of grieving, and now they're going through the legacy and integrity of our son. There, Seth was not this genius hacker. A friend had only just taught him how to use Twitter, and they remembered Seth constantly locking himself out of his own emails. And secondly, Seth was not the whistleblowing type. It really doesn't seem so. He's not even saying who his candidate is.

No, no. Seth liked everything to be done above board and he believed in political institutions. People who would be inclined to whistleblow are people that are feeling disenfranchised disengaged disillusioned by political institutions Seth was the opposite he fundamentally believed in it and the riches were approached by a host of people offering to counter WikiLeaks accusations and clear Seth's name among those people was Jack Berkman now you might know Berkman as a leader of a campaign to ban gay men from the NFL. A Republican lobbyist and political strategist by trade, Berkman is also the host of the cable news program Newsmax. He formed a conservative organization, American Decency, to represent Christian American values. It just shoots me straight back to being at Lake Garda and listening to a podcast made

by Texas Right to Life. Oh, yeah. And just despair. Yeah. When the St. Louis Rams signed the NFL's first openly gay player, Michael Sam, Berkman did everything he could to keep homosexuality out of American football. He said that the idea of NFL players sharing a shower with a gay man was a horrifying prospect.

Anyway, needless to say, the Riches were confused to hear from him. But they couldn't argue with that cash. Berkman offered $105,000 of his own dollars as a reward for information about Seth's murder. And that was on top of the $25,000 already offered by DC police and the $20,000 offered from Wikileaks. But if you're in any way convinced that he was doing it out of some kind of righteous outrage

for the poor 27-year-old, think again. Jack Berkman cares about one thing and one thing only, courting public attention. People like him have been referred to as conspiracy entrepreneurs, people who attach themselves to a disaster with the aim of subverting truth and elevating their voice in the process. It's a smart game if you have absolutely no morals or an ethical compass. So Jack Berkman started appearing with the Rich family on national news. And you can see him physically elbow them out of the way to get to a microphone. And Berkman put together an 80-page profile on Seth.

And he made a frankly astounding recreation video of the murder. And if you guys go watch it, it's kind of like an 80s B-movie. In which an actor playing Seth is approached by two goons saying, you exposed us. In another scene, Seth is shown

going to his bosses at the DNC to express his concerns. But when they're ignored, he picks up the phone and says, Mr Assange, thank you for taking my call. Oh for God's sake. They're basically rigging the primary. So in response to accusations, it sounds like an episode of Designated Survivor and Keep Us Otherland is playing Settleridge. And Julian Assange. Yes, playing savage and julie nassange yes yes squinting so much squinting so in response to accusations that this obviously staged and biased attempt to push one unproven version of events jack burkman says quote it is a work of literature designed to call attention to the issue. Shameless. I know. And then, as if to rest his case,

Jack Burtman says, there are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics. That I've made up. But also, like, that is true, but how does that make any sense in this context? I don't get it. I don't.

Like, it's a completely irrelevant phase and not applicable at all. But I think in this world of conspiracy, people are so confused and so desperate to feel like I'm not going to be lied to anymore. Which I understand. I understand where that feeling comes from. But people like this propagating it for kudos, for clout and for money. They are dangerous, shameless charlatans.

Absolutely. But everyone was fucking in on Seth Rich's murder. And the second vulture at the feast that we're going to tell you about was someone called Ed Botowski. Botowski is an investment manager from Texas with a similar love for the limelight. He acted as a spokesperson on Republican economic issues for news outlets. And he got a good taste for attaching himself to hot-button issues. He posted on his Facebook, because this is 2016,

asking if anyone knew the Rich family and whether they could put him in touch. And when he got through, he offered to pay for a private detective to look into the case. And he found former DC homicide detective and full-time knucklehead, Rod Wheeler, who I feel like... Have we dealt with you before, Mr. Wheeler? It's been six and a half years. We well could have.

And Wheeler's whole investigation was engineered to prove one specific version of events. Exactly how you want a good investigation to run. Yes, right. Confirmation bias who? And this was the version that they wanted to prove, that Seth Rich was behind the leak at the DNC and he was murdered because of it. And Botowski courted reporters at Fox while he waited on the scoop. Then, in January 2017, Botowski was introduced to journalist

Seymour Hersh. Hersh is a massively respected figure in journalism. He won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking the news of the Mealy massacre in Vietnam and of its extensive cover-up operation. Hersh also covered Watergate for the New York Times and detailed the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib for the New Yorker. So he's no stranger to anti-government rhetoric. and detailed the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib for the New Yorker. So he's no stranger to anti-government rhetoric.

And in a call with Patowski, Hirsch appeared to drop a bombshell. Hirsch said that he'd seen an FBI report that showed in black and white that Seth had leaked the DNC emails. He said that the FBI had gained access to Rich's computers and discovered evidence that Seth had been in contact with WikiLeaks, then shared a massive cache of emails through a protected Dropbox. Hirsch has later said that this was a canny journalistic tactic and that he made the whole thing up to get information. He says his mantra is, judge me by what I publish.

But, you know, obviously some people will accuse this of being a very dicey strategy, and I do have to say at the time it did backfire in a big way. Because Botowski had been recording the entire conversation, and he took that recording all the way to the fucking bank. Or more specifically, he took it to Fox News. The favourite bank. The most trusted bank in the United States of America. Citing new information from the family's private investigator, Fox News reported to the entire

country that there was now tangible evidence confirming Seth Rich was communicating with WikiLeaks. Rod Wheeler, the private detective, despite signing a contract with the Rich family to never discuss the case publicly, jumped at the chance to appear on Fox News. He said he wholeheartedly believed there was a cover-up. He said he'd spoken to ex-colleagues at DC Police who told him that they had been instructed in no uncertain terms to leave the case alone.

He said that a report would soon come out featuring proof of the correspondence. So what started as a conspiracy on Reddit was now being reported as fact. And Fox op-eds were completely unrestrained and predicted one of the biggest scandals in American history. To be clear, it is unfathomable that news at this level would put something this explosive out into the world with so little credibility, no credibility at all. There are no words in the English language or any other to properly express how irresponsible this reporting was. And the Rich family wrote in an article that was published in the Washington Post about how they felt.

And this is a quote. The amount of pain and anguish this has caused us is unbearable. With every conspiratorial flare-up, we are forced to relive Seth's murder, and a small piece of us dies as a small piece of Seth's memory is torn away from us. And then Seth's family raised a libel case against Fox News and Ed Batowski. Good. Texts from Batowski to Wheeler show him saying that the president himself had read the story and was pressuring him to put it out. Because yes, spoiler alert, Trump won the election after all, and by this point had been inaugurated. So if these texts were accurate, it would show a sitting president deliberately

pushing fake news to distract from his own wheelings and dealings. So that's the state controlling and deliberately destabilising the media. Now after all this, Wheeler got back on the news and U turned hard. He said it was all false and that DC police had given him no such information. Seymour Hersh said publicly that Botowski, quote, took two and two and made 45 out of it. On the 24th of May 2017, the Fox News website retracted the story, and Botowski said the text about the president was tongue-in-cheek. Again,

a phrase that doesn't make sense. No, I don't think you know what that means. Do you mean a lie? So in November 2020, Fox News settled for an undisclosed seven-figure sum. So that just leaves us with two big questions at the heart of this story that we haven't managed to answer. Firstly, obviously, who killed Seth Rich? And secondly, who hacked the DNC? Well, for the latter, we're going to go back to our boy, Occam, for this his pesky razor. Because realistically, it probably was Russia. Various reports over the years have failed to find enough evidence to conclude for sure that Russia deliberately interfered in the US election, but CrowdStrike, the company brought in to stop the hack at the DNC, looked at forensic evidence

and quote-unquote fingerprints from the attacks and concluded that the hackers used the same techniques that were known to be employed by Russian intelligence. Not long after the leak, a user named Guccifer 2.0 claimed sole responsibility. He claimed to be a lone hacker from Romania, but security experts were immediately sceptical. Motherboard, Vice's tech arm, even got an interview with Guccifer 2.0 in 2016, and in this interview he calls himself a hacker, manager, philosopher, woman lover,

I also like Gucci, I bring the light to people, I'm a freedom fighter, so you can choose what you like. And he denied any link to Russia. So why do most of the world's press and security agencies think he's lying? Well, firstly, his Romanian wasn't that good. And secondly, we know for sure that Russian government hackers had already accessed the DNC computer network. They broke in a few years before to access its database of research on Donald Trump. Guccifer 2.0 also had no online activity before the day of the hack. And security forces have said that the activity was far too smooth to be the work of one lone hacker.

There was the sophistication of the attack itself, but also the coordination of its leak in the media. And there are also linguistic cues. For example, he types a series of brackets in messages in place of smiley faces, which is only used in Russia, because colons

are hard on a Cyrillic keyboard. That's really interesting. And there's also plenty of metadata showing that the documents were opened on multiple Cyrillic keyboard. That's really interesting. And there's also plenty of metadata showing that the documents were opened on multiple machines before being leaked. And many were set to Russian language. It was also processed on a cracked version of Office 2007,

which is weirdly also a hallmark of Russian hackers. And finally, it is completely something that Russian intelligence would do. A string of cyber attacks, made by groups calling themselves things like Fancy Bear, Pawnstorm and Voodoo Bear, have all been revealed to actually have been carried out by Russian intelligence. That includes an attack on the German parliament server with the express aim

of destabilising an election and getting the candidate they wanted elected. And as recently as early August 2023, the UK's Electoral Commission reported a cyber attack on its electoral register, affecting tens of millions of British voters. And in late 2016, the famous Mueller report into Russian interference in the US election, found definitively that Seth Rich was not the source of the emails. Which I'm thoroughly glad they did find that. Not that, you know, everybody who was jumping on the conspiracy about it is going to believe it, but to say that Seth was not the source of that is important. Unfortunately, foreign powers using cyber attacks to influence other countries' elections.

Absolutely nothing new. The Chinese government is known to have hacked the Obama campaign in 2008 and in 2012. What's novel here is how comprehensively it worked. The leak was made as public as humanly possible and it seriously damaged Clinton's campaign. And at the centre of it all, inexplicably, was poor old Seth Rich. Yeah, I think that's the key thing. Because look, the CCP did it before,

and yes, it wasn't leaked by the likes of Julian Assange on WikiLeaks, but Barack Obama still won. Two terms in a row after the CCP had hacked them. Russia hacking, yes, some people say that it damaged Clinton beyond belief, and maybe the propagation of the news did. But I can't see many people that have voted for Hillary Clinton not voting because some boring emails got leaked.

Yes, my sort of anecdotal understanding from speaking to Trump voting Americans that I know, or people who just spoiled their ballot, was I was never going to vote for Hillary Clinton. And again, maybe people will be like, oh, I did. And again, that's anecdotal evidence. On a grand enough scale that Hillary Clinton lost the elections because some boring emails got leaked. I don't know. I think the issues are far deeper than that. But yeah, I think the more telling thing,

and the reason this episode is about Seth Rich is because this highlights the fact of one man's murder at the hands of what was probably a botched robbery, despite the fact that nothing was taken from him, turned into this shitstorm. So who did kill Seth Rich?

I'm afraid we can't tell you, because we have no idea. Thanks to an army of self-interested parties derailing Seth's murder investigation to get themselves into the limelight, the real killers will probably never be found. Seth Rich is still just one of 65 unsolved murders in that same area, that same year. And it probably is just as simple as that. So that's it, guys. That is the case of the murder of Seth Rich

and how that turned into this worldwide, calamitous nightmare for his family. We'll see you next time. And we did record an episode on Julian Assange to release as the shorthand. It's either out, it's coming out, or, well, it's only one of those two. Or it's out.

I don't know. What did I say? Whatever. Bye! Bye! Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery Show American Scandal. We bring to light some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history. Presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, NASA embarks on an ambitious program to reinvent space exploration

with the launch of its first reusable vehicle, the Space Shuttle. And in 1985, they announced they're sending teacher Krista McAuliffe into space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger, along with six other astronauts. But less than two minutes after liftoff, the Challenger explodes. And in the tragedy's aftermath, investigators uncover a series of preventable failures by NASA and its contractors that led to the disaster. Follow American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery Plus. You can join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today.

He was hip-hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune, and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sean Diddy Cone. Diddy built an empire and lived a life most people only dream about. Everybody know ain't no party like a Diddy party, so. Yeah, that's what's up. But just as quickly as his empire rose, it came crashing down. Today, I'm announcing the unsealing of a three-count indictment, charging Sean Combs with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, interstate transportation for

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