Donna Brazile, Bernie Sanders, and the Murder of Seth Rich

Trump Puts the Deep State Diva Back in the News

“Why does Fake News ABC’S This Week With George Slopadopolus have Low IQ ‘commentator’ Donna Brazile on the show?” President Trump asked in a Truth Social posting Sunday night. “Wasn’t she totally discredited when she gave Crooked Hillary Clinton the questions to a Debate??? Wasn’t she FIRED by Fake News CNN for so doing???”

Right on both counts. Hacked emails posted by WikiLeaks in October 2016 revealed that Brazile had shared questions with the Clinton campaign before a debate and a town hall in March 2016. Saying it was “completely uncomfortable” with Brazile’s actions, CNN severed ties with Brazile, a frequent CNN commentator and, at the time, the interim Democratic National Committee chairwoman.

For most people, this behavior would have been a career killer. Not for Brazile. On September 1, DataRepublican assembled an impressive thread documenting Brazile’s long and shadowy career beginning with her work on the Jimmy Carter campaign as a teenager to her ascendancy to DNC chair 40 years later. Her CNN disgrace has scarcely slowed her down. She serves on the board of the influential National Democratic Institute, teaches at Georgetown and at Harvard, and is a Fox News contributor.

“In conclusion,” writes DataRepublican, “Brazile isn't fired from ABC News because she has been born and bred since college to be an integral part of Deep State machinations.” There is, however, one thread in Brazile’s career that runs counter to the seam, her outspoken affection for “my DNC colleague and patriot, Seth Rich.” In the entire Democrat-media complex, Brazile is the only person of note who has kept Rich’s memory alive, the only one who has expressed any interest in solving his murder. That interest may well be driven by guilt for her role in sabotaging the 2016 candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

In the early morning hours of July 10, 2016, unknown assailants beat and then shot to death the 27-year-old DNC data analyst. This much is not in question. Everything else about Rich’s murder is. DataRepublican was unable to substantiate the rumors that Brazile visited with Rich at the hospital in the few hours he lived after the shooting. Nor was I, but the fact that she dedicated her 2017 book Hacks to “patriot” Seth Rich has given that rumor legs.

“All I could think about was Seth Rich,” Brazile wrote, “Had he been killed by someone who had it out for Democrats?” She kept a picture of the young man on her wall as well as a reward poster for the killers.

On July 22, three days before the Democrat National Convention, Wikileaks dumped nearly 20,000 emails gathered from seven key DNC staffers, the gist of which was that the DNC rigged the primary process to deny Sanders the nomination. This revelation led to the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the ascent of Brazile to that vacated seat.

By all accounts, Rich was a Bernie supporter. He did not create the Pandas4Bernie site as rumored, but the Pandas saw him as one of their own. “We may not be Seth Rich,” they wrote, “but we can do justice to his life by extending the effects of his work, by honoring the courage of whistleblowers who put their lives on the line to expose the truths that animate our demands for justice.” Like Brazile, the Pandas saw Rich as a patriot. In fact, the theory that Rich was murdered for what he knew, says Andy Kroll, “was almost immediate on Twitter, on Reddit, anywhere where there were sort of congregations of Sanders and [Jill] Stein supporters.”

Kroll is the author of A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, a book written to squash all rumors that Rich’s death was something other than the “botched robbery” proposed by the DC police and embraced by the Democrat establishment. Kroll’s extended interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes drips with contempt for anyone who has wandered off script.

The interview is also awash in obvious misinformation. Hayes, for instance, claimed that the “the first posting” from Wikileaks occurred just before the Democrat National Convention, “right when Trump is facing the worst crisis of his campaign which is the leaked Access Hollywood tape.” In fact, the Washington Post dropped the Access Hollywood bombshell on October 7, 2016, more than two months after the Democrat National Convention.

October 7, 2016, was a busy day. It began, as NPR reported, with the DHS and DNI announcing publicly for the first time that the DNC hacks not only “bore the earmarks” of Russian intervention, but they also “must have been OK'd by the very top levels of the Russian government”—both empty speculations, still unproven. The Access Hollywood drop followed, and that was countered later that same day by the Wikileaks release of the John Podesta emails. The timing suggests that the DHS and DNI tried to soften the Wikileaks blow in advance.

Kroll knew Hayes had botched the timeline, and he quietly set it back on track. “The really critical moment in the Seth Rich story,” Kroll claimed accurately, was the interview Julian Assange did on Dutch TV four weeks after the murder.

Assange had said, unprompted, “Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. There’s a twenty-seven-year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington.”

The show host tried to head off Assange’s line of thought, countering, “That was just a robbery, I believe. Wasn’t it?” Assange would not be reined in. Said he, accurately, “No. There’s no finding.” After the increasingly restive host intervened again, Assange asserted, “I’m suggesting that our sources take risks.” Although Assange evaded the question of whether Rich was a source, his offer of a $20,000 reward to find Rich’s killer raised the possibility that Rich was one. Kroll called Assange’s comments “disingenuous.” Hayes called them “unbelievably despicable.”

“In terms of why millions still believe this,” said Hayes, summing up the evidence for a political hit, “so there's the Assange drama and then there's the internet and then there's Fox.” But there is considerably more than that, including, first and foremost, an unsolved murder. Kroll argued that Rich’s neighborhood had seen a rash of hold-ups that featured two men “robbing people for their valuables, especially their iPhones.” He failed to mention that the robbers did not take Rich’s phone, watch, or wallet.

Then there is the Ratner revelation. On the day after the 2016 election former White House correspondent Ellen Ratner participated in a recorded symposium at Embry Riddle University. “I spent three hours with Julian Assange on Saturday at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London,” said Ratner. “One thing he did say was the leaks were not from, they were not from the Russians. They were an internal source from the Hillary Campaign.”

An admitted Hillary Clinton supporter, Ratner had no reason to make this up. She had access to Assange through her brother Michael Ratner, a left wing civil rights attorney who defended WikiLeaks before his death in May 2016. The media let Ratner’s blockbuster remark pass without comment.

This much is in the public record. Kroll should have addressed it but did not. Unaddressed, too, was the testimony of Ed Butowsky, a high profile financial adviser who befriended Ratner in a TV news green room. “Seth Rich and his brother, Aaron, were responsible for releasing the DNC emails to Wikileaks,” Assange reportedly told Ratner, and she in turn told Butowsky. Butowsky made this claim in a complex, multi-party defamation lawsuit filed in July 2019.

On December 17, 2016, at Ratner’s request, Butowsky informed Rich’s parents of Assange’s comments. He later referred the Rich family to a Fox News contributor and former D.C. homicide detective named Rod Wheeler. The well-intentioned Butowsky had no idea how ferocious was the Hydra-headed monster he had just prodded. For the next three years and counting he was slandered, defamed, physically threatened, had his property vandalized, and was dragged into court for his indirect involvement with the Seth Rich saga.

That Fox would look into Rich’s murder Hayes found “appalling and shocking.” To the great satisfaction of Kroll and Hayes, the Rich family sued Fox into submission for daring to investigate the unsolved murder of their son.

Not surprisingly, Kroll also failed to mention Donna Brazile. To avoid saying her name he—or MSNBC editors—twisted his remarks into a semantic pretzel. The transcript reads as follows, “Seth's old colleague, the DNC, thought to themselves, well hey, wouldn't it be great if Hillary said something at this event to remember Seth.” Huh? The person who asked Hillary was “Seth’s old colleague,” Donna Brazile. Her name seems to have been edited out of the transcript and an awkward “themselves” edited in.

Brazile was burdened by guilt. Upon taking over the DNC right after the convention, she sensed that the DNC rigged the primary process against Sanders, but she needed proof. When she found inarguable evidence of the same, she called Sanders. “I explained that the cancer was that [Hillary] had exerted this control of the party long before she became its nominee,” Brazile wrote in Hacks of Clinton’s devious coup. “When I hung up the call to Bernie, I started to cry, not out of guilt, but out of anger. We would go forward. We had to.”

No, guilt was more like it. Brazile had played her own role in sabotaging Sanders’s campaign. “By stealing all the DNC’s emails and then selectively releasing those few, the Russians made it look like I was in the tank for Secretary Clinton,” wrote Brazile. Well, she was. When she fed the CNN debate and town hall questions to the Clinton campaign in March 2016, she betrayed not only Bernie Sanders, Hillary’s still viable opponent, but she also betrayed “my DNC colleague and patriot, Seth Rich.”

A party capable of this much skullduggery is capable of anything.