By Philip Giraldi
March 02, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
The media is doing its best to make the Seth Rich
story go away, but it seems to have a life of its
own, possibly due to the fact that the accepted
narrative about how Rich died makes no sense. In its
Iatest manifestation, it provides an alternative
explanation for just how the information from the
Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer somehow
made its way to Wikileaks. If you believe that
Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide and that he
was just a nasty pedophile rather than an
Israeli intelligence agent, read no farther
because you will not be interested in Rich. But if
you appreciate that it was unlikely that the
Russians were behind the stealing of the DNC
information you will begin to understand that other
interested players must have been at work.
For those who are not
familiar with it, the backstory to the murder of
apparently disgruntled Democratic National Committee
staffer Seth Rich, who some days before may have
been the leaker of that organization’s confidential
emails to
Wikileaks, suggests that
a possibly motiveless crime might have been
anything but. The Washington D.C. police
investigated what they believed to be an attempted
robbery gone bad but that theory fails to explain
why Rich’s money, credit cards, cell phone and watch
were not taken. Wikileaks has never confirmed that
Rich was their source in the theft of the
proprietary emails that had hitherto been blamed on
Russia but it subsequently offered a $20,000 reward
for information leading to resolution of the case
and Julian Assange, perhaps tellingly, has never
publicly clarified whether Rich was or was not one
of his contacts, though there is at least one report
that he
confirmed the relationship during a private
meeting.
Answers to the question who
exactly stole the files from the DNC server and the
emails from John Podesta have led to what has been
called
Russiagate, a tale that has been embroidered
upon and which continues to resonate in American
politics. At this point, all that is clearly known
is that in the Summer of 2016 files and emails
pertaining to the election were copied and then made
their way to WikiLeaks, which published some of them
at a time that was damaging to the Clinton campaign.
Those who are blaming Russia believe that there was
a hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC)
server and also of John Podesta’s emails that was
carried out by a Russian surrogate or directly by
Moscow’s military intelligence arm. They base their
conclusion on
a statement issued by the Department of Homeland
Security on October 7, 2016, and on a
longer assessment prepared by the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence on January 6,
2017. Both government appraisals implied that there
was a U.S. government intelligence agency consensus
that there was a Russian hack, though they provided
little in the way of actual evidence that that was
the case and, in particular, failed to demonstrate
how the information was obtained and what the chain
of custody was as it moved from that point to the
office of WikiLeaks. The January report was
particularly criticized as unconvincing, rightly so,
because the most important one of its three key
contributors, the National Security Agency, had only
moderate confidence in its conclusions, suggesting
that whatever evidence existed was far from solid.
An alternative view that has
been circulating for several years suggests that it
was not a hack at all, that it was a deliberate
whistleblower-style leak of information carried
out by an as yet unknown party, possibly Rich, that
may have been provided to WikiLeaks for possible
political reasons, i.e. to express disgust with the
DNC manipulation of the nominating process to damage
Bernie Sanders and favor Hillary Clinton.
There are, of course, still
other equally non-mainstream explanations for how
the bundle of information got from point A to point
B, including that the intrusion into the DNC server
was
carried out by the CIA which then made it look
like it had been the Russians as perpetrators. And
then there is the hybrid point of view, which is
essentially that the Russians or a surrogate did
indeed intrude into the DNC computers but it was all
part of normal intelligence agency probing and did
not lead to anything. Meanwhile and independently,
someone else who had access to the server was
downloading the information, which in some fashion
made its way from there to WikiLeaks.
