The story of how drumpf and Fox News tried to turn the tragedy of Seth Rich’s murder into a false narrative to refute Russia’s involvement (and our of Intelligence Community’s assessment of it) in the pilfering and publication of the DNC’s emails last summer has been discussed here before, but John Schindler (with an able assist from Heather Digby Parton at Salon) provide an helpful and convincing chronologies of how this lie, along with the ones disseminated about Don Jr’s meeting in Trump Tower were manufactured in conjunction by Team Trump and the Kremlin.
In the first linked article, Schindler calls the Seth Rich cover story a Russian “active measure”, which is defined by Wiki as…
“actions of political warfare conducted by the Soviet and Russian security services (Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB, FSB) to influence the course of world events, in addition to collecting intelligence and producing "politically correct" assessment of it.”
To understand how this “active measure” was deployed, it is important to keep in mind the dates of three events:
June, 22, 2016 — Wikileaks publishes the DNC Email leaks.
July 10, 2016 — Seth Rich is murdered in Washington, D.C.
July 14, 2016 — a “shadowy conspiracy website called Sorcha Faal, which regularly posts flagrant lies from a Russian viewpoint”, posts an article alleging that Rich was murdered by the Clinton campaign for disseminating the leak.
As Schindler sums up the post…
“According to Sorcha Faal, the young man had been assassinated by a Clintonian “hit team,” which was captured a few days later “after a running gun battle with U.S. federal police forces just blocks from the White House.” In this sensational story, Rich was lured to his death by Hillary’s assassins, who posed as FBI agents to gain the DNC employee’s trust. As the source of the stolen emails, Rich had to be liquidated to protect the Democratic presidential nominee and her family, which, Sorcha Faal reported, has been behind numerous murders.”
If that claim seems fantastical, it’s because it is. The idea that the Clinton campaign, in the middle of a Presidential election, and which was completely unaware that the emails were going to end up published on the internet, could, in a matter of two weeks, investigate the leak, assign blame to Rich and arrange a hit job on him that could never be traced back to them, is not fantastical in is nonsensical.
As is the idea that in a matter of four days, a pro Russian conspiracy site could manufacture, from whole cloth, the lie that Rich was responsible for the leak and had been murdered for it, incredible.
If however, Rich was a victim of an “active measure” , as Schindler alleges, the planning and execution of his murder (and the implanting of the lie) could have been sussed out in advance and not restricted to the timing of the events. I believe, but am not certain, that this is the basis for Schindler’s “active measure” accusation.
Schindler continues by sketching in on how Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, Trump confidant Roger Stone, Sean Hannity and even the Russian Embassy in London backed up the lie, seeking to drag it into the end zone, as well as pointing to evidence of the White House’s involvement:
It didn’t take long for Kremlin mouthpieces to jump on the bandwagon. By early August 2016, Wikileaks, led by Julian Assange, was implying that Rich was the source of the stolen DNC emails that the “privacy advocates” dumped online less than two weeks after his murder. On August 9, Wikileaks announced on Twitter a $20,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Rich’s killer.
On the very same day, Trump’s dirty-trickster pal Roger Stone tweeted that Seth Rich was the “4th mysterious death connected to the DNC in less than a month” and suggested Hillary was behind the killings. Perhaps not coincidentally, Stone has admitted he possesses a “back-channel” to Assange, who’s been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy for more than five years.
Once Assange and Stone co-tweeted about Seth Rich, pro-Trump social media went wild with the unsubstantiated accusations, making it a standard far-right trope. It eventually culminated in the quickly discredited mid-May 2017 Sean Hannity “bombshell” on Fox News, which the White House allegedly had a direct hand in.
Schindler then segues into an explanation of how some of the same resources and methods are being brought into the power play against Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster.
Digby Parton expands on how collusion was also at work in trying to explain away the Trump Tower meeting at Salon…
“July 7th: On or before Friday July 7th Trump advisors and lawyers begin discussing how to respond to press inquiries about Don Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer who an intermediary told Trump Jr. had information tied to the Russian government’s support for Trump’s candidacy.
July 7th: Presidents Trump and Putin meet for first meeting.
July 8th: Presidents Trump and Putin meet for a second, unreported meeting, at which they discussed Russian adoptions, according to President Trump [in his July 19th interview with The New York Times.]
July 8th: Late evening, President Trump overrules advisers and lawyers to dictate a statement for his son in which he claims that the topic of the June 2016 meeting was Russian adoptions.
Piecing together this timeline and based on President Trump’s own account, we can say that he knew his advisers were discussing how to respond to a press story about the June 2016 meeting. He had a secret conversation with President Putin at which they discussed the issue of Russian adoptions. Then hours later he dictated a false statement to be released in the name of his son in which he claimed that Russian adoptions were the topic of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting. That is a highly troubling chain of events to put it mildly.”
Digby notes that coincidence is not a sure indicator of guilt, but we can be sure that Bob Mueller is looking for substantial evidence of cooperation.
At any rate the Seth Rich saga can provide a useful template for his investigation.