There Is No Statute of Limitations on Murder

New Evidence Puts Seth Rich Case Back in Spotlight

Recent revelations from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard have undermined the Deep State party line that Seth Rich’s murder was a botched robbery. This assumption hinged on the nearly universal acceptance that it was the Russians who hacked the DNC and DCCC servers in 2016. That assumption has collapsed.

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. The most honest assessment of what happened to Rich came from his mother. On the day after the shooting, Mary Rich, told local TV news that her son struggled with his attackers: “His hands were bruised, his knees are bruised, his face is bruised, and yet he had two shots to his back, and yet they never took anything….They took his life for literally no reason. They didn’t finish robbing him, they just took his life.”

In fact, they did not start robbing him. They left without taking his cellphone, his wallet, or his watch. The dying Rich told the police only that his assailants spoke Spanish (as, curiously, did the operatives who broke into the Watergate). Against the backdrop of the very public Hillary email scandal, the inexplicable murder of a Bernie Sanders-supporting DNC data analyst should have been catnip for every red blooded journalist in DC.

It wasn’t. From this point on, Democrats and their media allies aggressively suppressed any suggestion that Rich’s death was something other than a “botched robbery.” As FOX News learned the hard way, to question whether Rich may have been the source of the emails leaked to Julian Assange and Wikileaks was to invite scorn and crippling law suits.

For Democrats, the one silver lining in the April 2019 release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference was the belief that, if nothing else, Team Mueller put the kibosh on the various “conspiracy theories” around Rich’s murder. Said the leftist Daily Beast at the time, “Julian Assange repeatedly blamed Seth Rich, the murdered DNC staffer, for Russia’s leaks. The Mueller report shows that Assange was lying from the start.”

Far from “blaming” Rich, Assange offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to Rich’s killers. Team Mueller acknowledged that Assange had strongly suggested Rich was his source but dismissed Assange’s comments, claiming they were “designed to obscure the source of the materials that WikiLeaks was releasing.“ This was nuts. Assange had far less reason to protect the Russians than Mueller did to indict them.

Team Mueller expressed shock that even after the now infamous Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) was released on January 6, 2017, “Assange continued to deny that the Clinton materials released by WikiLeaks had come from Russian hacking.” According to Mueller, Assange reportedly told a U.S. congressman “that the DNC hack was an ‘inside job,’ and purported to have ‘physical proof’ that Russians did not give materials to Assange.”

It would have helped, of course, if Mueller and his team had spoken with Assange, but his first hand evidence would have spoiled the second hand narrative they established at the top of the report—”The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” This unfounded assumption dictated all conclusions that followed. Assange was “lying” because he challenged those conclusions.

In tracing the “evidence of Russian government operations,” the Mueller report cites as Exhibit A the fact that “in June [2016], the Democratic National Committee and its cyber response team publicly announced that Russian hackers had compromised its computer network.”

The “cyber response team” in question was CrowdStrike, an outfit recommended by Perkins Coie, the same law firm responsible for the Steele dossier. The FBI had been shut out of the review. On January 5, 2017, a “senior law enforcement official” admitted as much, telling CNN, “The FBI repeatedly stressed to DNC officials the necessity of obtaining direct access to servers and data, only to be rebuffed until well after the initial compromise had been mitigated.” CNN reported this a day before the ICA was released.

The fact that its agents were denied access to the DNC servers may explain why, as Tulsi Gabbard reported, “the FBI and NSA had ‘low confidence’ in attributing the data leaks from these entities to Russia.” In its October 7, 2016 press release on Russian interference the Director of National Intelligence and the Director of Homeland Security chose to suppress this exculpatory bit of information.

Even CrowdStrike president Shawn Henry had doubts about Russia hacking the DNC servers. In closed door testimony before the House Intelligence Community in 2017, he conceded, "There’s not evidence that [the data] were actually exfiltrated. There's circumstantial evidence but no evidence that they were actually exfiltrated."

Leonard Benardo was less concerned about whether Russians hacked the DNC servers than he was about how Hillary Clinton could exploit the rumor that they had. Benardo, senior vice president for George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, was planted deep in the Clinton campaign. Of note, he began his work with the Open Society Foundations at the Soros Foundation Moscow.

Leonard Benardo

Clinton’s schemes, laid out in a pair of emails, were unearthed by the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) John Durham and shared by Gabbard this week. In a July 25, 2016, email, Bernardo wrote, "The media analysis on the DNC hacking appears solid...Julie says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later the FBI will put more oil into the fire."

“Julie” refers to Clinton campaign official Julia Smith. In the two days that followed Smith appears to have run her plans by Hillary Clinton. On July 27, 2016, Benardo wrote, “HRC approved Julia’s idea about Trump and Russia hampering U.S. elections. This should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level." When questioned by Durham’s staff, Benardo lamely asserted that “to the best of his knowledge, he did not draft the emails.”

None of this proves people close to Hillary Clinton had Seth Rich killed, but it does show that Assange is a more credible source than the conspirators who framed Donald Trump. The Rich murder deserves the attention it was denied from day one. There can be no surer way to pierce the fog in which the legacy media have shrouded this scandal than to find Rich’s killers.

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