Assange: Because we have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States and that our sources, you know, face serious risks. That's why they come to us so we can protect their anonymity.
Rosenthal: But it's quite something to suggest a murder. That's basically what you're doing.
This was as close as Assange could come to confirming that Rich was tied up with the leak without actually saying it. Hours later, WikiLeaks tweeted about the $20k reward.
Four months after that, Craig Murray told the Libertarian Institute's Scott Horton: "Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that he [Rich] was the source of the leaks. What I'm saying is that it's probably not an unfair indication to draw that WikiLeaks believe[s] that he may have been killed by someone who thought he was the source of the leaks." (Quote begins at 11:20.)
Thanks to such foggy rhetoric, it was all but inevitable that conspiracy theories would ignite. Two months after the killing, an ultra-conservative talk-radio host named Jack Burkman best known for organizing a protest campaign against the Dallas Cowboys' hiring of an openly gay football player named Michael Sam approached members of the Rich family and offered to launch an investigation in their behalf.
The family said yes, but then backed off when Burkman grandly announced that the murder was a Kremlin hit. Things turned even more bizarre a year later when Kevin Doherty, an ex-Marine whom Burkman had hired to look into the case, lured his ex-boss to a Marriott hotel in Arlington, Virgina, where he shot him twice in the buttocks and then tried to run him down with a rented SUV. Doherty received a nine-year sentence last December.
The right-wing Washington Times meanwhile reported that WikiLeaks had paid Seth and Aaron Rich an undisclosed sum, a story it was forced to retract, and Fox News named Seth as the source as well. (A sympathetic judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Rich family on technical grounds.) But still the speculation bubbled on, with conservative nuts blaming everyone from ex-DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to acting DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and Bill and Hillary themselves.
All of which plays into the hands of a corporate press happy to write off any and all suspicion as a product of alt-right paranoia.
But if speculation refuses to die, it's for a simple reason. If the DNC email disclosure was a hack, then Rich clearly had nothing to do with it, which means his death was no more than a robbery gone awry. But if it was a leak, then based on broad hints dropped by Assange and Murray it looks like the story could well be more complicated. This proves nothing in and of itself. But it guarantees that questions will grow as long as the Washington police make zero progress in its investigation and the Mueller report continues to fall apart.
And that's just what's happening. Mueller's account of how Russian intelligence supposedly supplied WikiLeaks with stolen data makes no sense because, according to the report's chronology, the transfer left WikiLeaks with just four days to review some 28,000 emails and other electronic documents to make sure that they were genuine and unaltered a clear impossibility. (See "The 'Guccifer 2.0' Gaps in Mueller's Full Report," April 18.)
The FBI assessment that Paul Manafort associate Konstantin Kilimnik "has ties to Russian intelligence" which Mueller cites (vol. 1, p. 133) in order to justify holding Manafort in solitary confinement during the Russia-gate investigation is similarly disintegrating amid reports that Kilimnik actually served as an important State Department intelligence source.
So the idea of a hack makes less and less sense and an inside leak seems more and more plausible, which is why questions about the Rich case will not go away. Bottom line: you don't have to be a loony rightist to suspect that there is more to the murder than Robert Mueller would like us to believe.
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