Seth Rich
"Scenario"
by Jim Kunstler
"The scene: February of 2027, a federal courtroom in Stuart (Martin County), Florida, the third day of trial in the RussiaGate matter. Defendants seated on the right (from the judge’s vantage) are so numerous they require two tables, including John Brennan, James Comey, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, Strzok & Page, Bruce Ohr, Lisa Monaco, Mary McCord, Christopher Wray, Marc Elias, and seven other former federal officials.
Former President Barack Obama and former Sec’y of State Hillary Clinton, named as “unindicted co-conspirators,” are not present in the courtroom for the sake of decorum. Former MI6 agent, the slippery Christopher Steele, purveyor of the infamous “dossier,” is on-the-lam, whereabouts unknown. The charges against the bunch are Seditious Conspiracy (18 U.S. Code § 2384), Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice (18 U.S.C. §§ 1503, 1512, 1519), Conspiracy Against Rights / Deprivation of Rights Under Color of Law (18 U.S.C. §§ 241, 242), Perjury (18 U.S.C. § 1621), Concealment (18 U.S.C. § 1001).
At 10:00 a.m., a “surprise” witness is ushered into the room. Gasps erupt from all angles. The witness is immediately identified by his snow-white hair and beard. Everybody sees it is Julian Assange. He is a surprise witness for security reasons. He has been flown from Sydney to New Delhi to Frankfurt, and finally to Miami in a US government airplane, the lone passenger.
Recall: in June 2024, Assange reached a plea deal with the US DOJ: guilty on one count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defense information. He was sentenced to sixty-two months (time served), crediting the approximately five years he had already spent in Britain’s Belmarsh prison while fighting extradition - but not counting the six years and ten months he was holed-up before that in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. There was no additional jail time, supervision, or financial penalty.
Assange is sworn and seated, led through preliminary questions as to his identity, place of residence, his former occupation running the news service known as Wikileaks, blah blah. The prosecuting federal attorney will now turn to the subject of one Seth Rich - remember him? The twenty-seven-year-old was working for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016 as Voter Expansion Data Director. At 4:00 a.m. July 10, 2016, Rich was found dead, shot twice in the back, on Flagler Place NW, in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., in what police called “a botched robbery.”
Rather bizarrely from a police procedural standpoint, Rich’s wallet, stuffed with money, his watch, and his cell phone remained on his person. Only his laptop was taken in the “robbery.” It has been a “cold,” unsolved case all these years.
Sometime before the murder, as early as Spring 2016, well before the Democratic party’s nominating convention, Assange’s Wikileaks received a large packet of information containing as many as 58,000 emails hacked out of the account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. The emails detailed many curious machinations inside the DNC that year, including sketchy efforts underway to derail Clinton’s rival, Bernie Sanders, excerpts from Clinton’s paid private Wall Street speeches (e.g., to Goldman Sachs), references to Clinton’s health problems, her private email server issue, various Clinton foundation dealings, and a lot of strange chatter about “pizza” and other mundane food items that would eventually spawn the “PizzaGate” story alluding to alleged child sex cult activities centered around John Podesta and his brother Tony.
It was quite a juicy load. But Wikileaks sat on it until just before the election. That spring and summer, Hillary was already laboring under the scandal about the private email server she had set up in her suburban Chappaqua, NY, home. She had apparently used it casually when she ran the State Department to conduct official government business, including classified information, instead of her official government email address. That itself was against the law, apart from what else the content of the Podesta email trove revealed. The FBI had been working the server case that spring, and just weeks before the convention, FBI Director Jim Comey made a big public show of exonerating Hillary, declaring incorrectly that he declined to prosecute — since it is not the FBI’s job to prosecute, only investigate, and for the DOJ to actually decide whether to prosecute. But he did add for the record that her doings had been “extremely careless.”
Anyway, Comey’s blunder became a low-grade scandal unto itself, colored by the suspicious meeting a month earlier between Bill Clinton and then Attorney General Loretta Lynch in her official airplane parked on the tarmac of the Phoenix airport. Both claimed they just talked about their grandchildren. Hence, Comey letting Hillary off the hook in July had the odor of a set-up. She was duly nominated July 26, 2016.
In October, 2016, Wikileaks began dribbling out the hacked Podesta emails they had obtained earlier that year, just in time for the election. To complicate things, the FBI and the New York City police were just then investigating former Rep. Anthony Weiner, husband of Clinton’s closest aide Huma Abedin, for sending sexually explicit messages to a minor. In the course of things, they obtained Weiner’s laptop, which was stuffed with 140,000 additional emails between Ms. Abedin and Hillary. Yikes!
On October 28, 2016 (eleven days before the election), Comey sent a letter to Congress notifying them that the FBI was reviewing these newly discovered emails to determine if they contained classified information (they did), in effect re-opening Hillary’s private server case. Comey later testified he felt obligated to inform Congress to avoid accusations of a cover-up close to the election. He called it a “no-win situation.” On November 6, 2016 (two days before Election Day), Comey announced the review found no new evidence warranting charges, reaffirming the July conclusion.
All of this intrigue revolved around the question of who, exactly, hacked those DNC emails. In June 2016, a cyber-security outfit called CrowdStrike, run by former FBI agent Shawn Henry, identified two Russian intelligence-linked groups - Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear as responsible for the DNC hack. By that time, the Steele Dossier was already circulating between the CIA, the FBI, and the White House. The Russia collusion story (the RussiaGate hoax) was busy being born. Russia Russia Russia !!! It was all the people of the USA heard the whole four years of the first Trump term.
Which brings us forward to the courtroom scene, February, 2027, Julian Assange in the witness chair. The young lead federal prosecutor (one of several) in the room, finishes his preliminary questions and asks Assange: “Are you willing to tell the court now, who exactly was your source for the DNC emails?” Assange has kept it secret for all these years. But he had been very badly abused by some of the very US government officials who are sitting at the two defendant’s tables, and he is rather sore about all the years he had to hide out in the Ecuadorean embassy in London before the Americans induced the British authorities to stuff him in Belmarsh prison for another five.
“Yes,” he says placidly. “It was a young man named Seth Rich. He copied it onto a thumb-drive directly from the DNC.” And that is how all the bullshit about RussiaGate finally dissolves into a rancid cloud of sedition for the folks slumped in their seats on the defendants’ side of the courtroom."
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