DJRich Loc: Western Pa

Because trump himself and his entire administration are the "swamp creatures" they complain about.

Corrupt, liars, inept, self-serving, deceitful and treacherous, are the cornerstones of trump and his administration.

Carol Kelly

Simple! He hasn't pulled the right plug, OBAMA. It's easy for radicals to demean our country and our leader because you, like OBAMA, hate America. Just saying! Bythe way, you just described the entire Democrat party from top to bottom.

PRM2014

Correct you are, Obama the worst o called president in my life of 60+ years. He is an arrogant worthless snake in the grass.

DJRich Loc: Western Pa

Wrong, this is all about trump, who was, is and will always be nothing more than pond scum.

And get over it, you people keep yapping about "winning" the election, so accept the fact that your slug is in office, and President Obama is a private citizen, who has every right to voice his opinion about what trump and family keep screwing up

S. Maturin

Were I a radical left-wing moron (God forbid), Obama's lavish lifestyle, showing him the consummate hypocrite, would embarrass me into becoming a clean-living, honest, moral, thoughtful, tolerant, America-loving conservative.

nwtk2007 Loc: Texas

Was it pond scum who killed Seth Rich??

permafrost Loc: Minnesota

No, it was a neighborhood thug..

You on the right who love the orange cyst so much need to examine what he has done for you.. every day to see progress..

He has given you the SC justice of your dreams, That put the old balance back in the court. We have had a conservative court for decades and have that fact to thank for citizens united, the endless money dumped on our elected representatives. You all may wish we could go back to the Field court, but that will not happen..

You talk the talk of Americas value but elect the poster boy for everything that you claim to oppose. Globalism- who is more qualified then trump?

Lies... Every day, the administration utters more then we can count..

Do you think his sons comments and emails today will matter??

No ethics, no pride, no self control, no organization, no plan, no idea for helping the working class which elected the fool..

sleep well on what your judgement is bringing you..

PRM2014

Yeah; Barack HUSSEIN Obama is a worthless private citizen. As I see it after eight long years of Oblowhard, he accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!!!!!!. He is nothing, just an arrogant low life snake in the grass, he still is putting his big nose into President Donald J Trump's
Business, Oblowhard has NOTHING at all to do with the Government Business. Oblowhard just needs to fade away and stay away from the Country, if all he wants to do is tell LIES he MUST stay away. "Period"

padremike Loc: Phenix City, Al

Been overdosing on your stupid pills again haven't you? But I will agree with you, it is going to be practically impossible to drain the swamp. I suggest he go "Clintonian" and just have the bastards assassinated. It's going to make a serious dent in all that Obama cached ammo that he squirreled away for the civilian army he was hoping to create.

nwtk2007 Loc: Texas

LOL! If you say so! Wink! Wink!!

A robber who shot his victim in the back, twice and left without taking a thing?? Yep, nothing there! And coincidentally, he worked for the DNC and they just happened to have a bunch of their emails go missing and turn up with damning evidence of DNC cheating candidate Bernie Sanders out of the nomination.

Yes, I'd not think a thing about that one! LOLOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Get real!

Oh yes, Trump is a globalist as he seems to alienate the rest of the G20, by your own party's claim, and was shunned by them??? LOLOL!!!!!

There are just not enough LOL's for that one.

No ethics? Did you forget the DNC and Hillary Clinton? The ding dong who couldn't even qualify for security clearance due to her ignorance and negligent handling of classified information?? Remember that one??

permafrost Loc: Minnesota

read all of this wapost... I will post more in the next box...

When Seth Rich’s Gmail account received an alert this week from Mega.com, attempting to start a new account on a website created by the New Zealand-based Internet businessman and convicted hacker Kim Dotcom, his family knew that something was off.

Over seven frenzied days, Dotcom had become a leading purveyor of the theory that Rich, a staffer at the Democratic National Committee who was shot dead near his home in Northeast Washington last summer, had supplied DNC documents to WikiLeaks and was killed as a result. Multiple security analysts and an FBI investigation have tied the release to hackers with ties to Russia. D.C. police have said repeatedly that they think Rich was slain in a random robbery attempt.

According to experts and Rich’s family, the emailed invitation from welcome@mega.nz appeared to be an attempt to gain access to Rich’s email. Joel Rich, who monitors his late son’s Gmail account when new emails come in, did not click the link. Dotcom had not worked at Mega itself for years, but he was promising on Twitter to prove that the younger Rich had been in contact with WikiLeaks — and Fox News host Sean Hannity was telling his 2.37 million Twitter followers to be ready for a ­revelation.


Hannity had invited Dotcom to appear on his show for what he said on Twitter would be a “#GameChanger” interview. The implication: that Dotcom would finally offer evidence of his claim that Rich had sent internal DNC documents to WikiLeaks before his death.

All that began to unravel Tuesday afternoon when Fox News retracted a story that had claimed the same Rich-WikiLeaks connection, telling readers that the article was “not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting.” Fox News did not respond to a request for comment, but Dotcom wrote on his website that he would not speak further about his allegations.


The latest revelation — that someone may have been trying to hack into Rich’s email — offered fresh evidence that the conspiracy theory is false. The family worried that Dotcom, or someone eager to prove him right, may have been willing to create a fake archive of emails from Rich, or crack a password to see whether Rich had passed on documents with a Mega account.


“It looks like someone set up a fake Gmail account, then used that Gmail account to create the Mega account,” said James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert and a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This part is pretty standard. Mega then checks with Gmail to see if the account exists, which is Mega’s somewhat cheesy way of authenticating identity. You then get to set up the Mega account. It’s a system designed to enable pseudonyms and fake identities.”

Mega.nz, a data security company that Dotcom founded, did not respond to a request for comment.

The episode also demonstrated how fake news can be flung from fringe media to the mainstream. A conspiracy theory that began on pro-President Trump message boards — a theory that Rich was actually a mole who wanted to expose corruption at the DNC — was fed by Russian news outlets including RT and Sputnik. The Daily Mail, Fox News’s website and several other mainstream outlets with large audiences churned through false information and leading questions, sowing confusion that Rich’s family struggled to combat. In addition to Hannity, former House speaker Newt Gingrich on Sunday said on “Fox and Friends” that the story was worth investigating, a sentiment he repeated in a short interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday.


“I don’t know anything about it,” Gingrich said. “I know exactly what has been said on the various blog sites . . . I think it is worth looking at.”

[Gingrich spreads conspiracy theory about slain DNC staffer]

In a statement, Rich’s family told The Post that they were investigating whether someone attempted to gain access to Rich’s email account. “We are outraged that certain individuals continue to try to use Seth’s name and memory to advance their political and ideological agendas,” they said. “We hope people will think twice the next time someone makes an outlandish claim to have discovered new evidence in this case.”

A family spokesman went further, criticizing Fox News for fanning the flames.

“We are hopeful that in the future that Fox News will work with the family to ensure the highest degree of professionalism and scrutiny is followed so that only accurate facts are reported surrounding this case,” said Brad Bauman, a progressive communications strategist working with the Rich family.


Dotcom did not respond to an emailed question about the Mega account, but his story about Rich has altered since some attention-grabbing tweets. On May 16, he mentioned Rich for the first time after a follower asked what he thought of the conspiracy theory that Rich was tied to the release of thousands of internal DNC documents.

On May 19, Dotcom asked for Google to release the contents of Rich’s Gmail account, as well as two accounts that online sleuths had claimed belonged to him. Later that day, Dotcom said that he was willing to “give written testimony with evidence” that Rich had passed the DNC documents to WikiLeaks.

That attracted the interest of Hannity, who had devoted several segments of his radio and TV show to the conspiracy theory. Dotcom then claimed that he would be able to reveal what he knew after talking to lawyers.

But in a Tuesday message that Dotcom posted on his website, he claimed to know only that “Seth Rich was involved” in the DNC hack and that he would give his full statement after a “guarantee from Special Counsel [Robert S.] Mueller, on behalf of the United States, of safe passage from New Zealand to the United States and back.”

“I know this because in late 2014 a person contacted me about helping me to start a branch of the Internet Party in the United States,” Dotcom said. “He called himself Panda. I now know that Panda was Seth Rich. Panda advised me that he was working on voter analytics tools and other technologies that the Internet Party may find helpful.”

[The Seth Rich conspiracy shows how fake news still works]

Dotcom provided no evidence to corroborate this. “We are unaware of any contact between Seth and Kim Dotcom and are not aware of Seth ever discussing the need for an ‘Internet Party,’ ” Rich’s family said in a statement.

Dotcom had made similarly grandiose claims before. In 2014, Dotcom claimed to have email evidence that motion-picture industry executives conspired with New Zealand’s government to send him to the United States, where he could be charged with several crimes. He organized a high-profile event, “the Moment of Truth,” days ahead of the New Zealand election. His guests talked about government spying; Dotcom drew attention to the email, which the studio decried as fake.

There would be another shot at the spotlight when Hannity and other conservative media figures asked whether Rich could be linked to WikiLeaks, thereby proving that there had been no Russia-linked hacking of the DNC. On Hannity’s show, a private investigator named Rod Wheeler, who had been paid by a conservative donor to investigate the murder, retracted his claim that Rich’s laptop was in FBI custody and contained evidence of a WikiLeaks connection. Neither allegation was true, according to Rich’s family.

“We know that Seth’s personal email and his personal computer were both inspected by detectives early in the investigation and that the inspection revealed no evidence of any communications with anyone at WikiLeaks or anyone associated with WikiLeaks,” Rich’s parents wrote in a column published Tuesday evening by The Post.

Yet for days, Fox News declined to correct or remove a story claiming that Rich’s “emails are in possession of the FBI, while the stalled case is in the hands of the Washington Police Department.” The story, published May 16 by Fox reporter Malia Zimmerman, contained specific details of what had been done and what had been covered up, citing a “federal investigator” in reporting that Rich “made contact with WikiLeaks.”

WikiLeaks’s Julian Assange had persistently fed rumors of a connection with Rich without providing evidence. He has offered a $20,000 reward for information about Rich’s killer, and he has used an interview with Dutch television, an interview with Hannity and several tweets to suggest that Rich’s case showed why WikiLeaks sources tread carefully. He has never explicitly said whether Rich was a source.

Zimmerman did not answer emails or a phone call about her story, which Fox retracted in its entirety Tuesday.

It was not the only flimsy lead. Roger Stone, a Trump ally who according to NBC News is cooperating with an investigation into whether the 2016 Trump campaign coordinated with Russian contacts, said this week that Rich had clearly given the DNC documents to a third-party source “in a floppy disk form.” But the source in his theory, a British ex-diplomat, had told Sputnik that he had heard about the hack secondhand — then told the Daily Mail that he had gotten documents in September, months after Rich’s death.

According to Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Center For Cyber and Homeland Security at George Washington University, none of the “inside man” scenarios make sense. The FBI, he noted, had come to the DNC to report a data breach months before anything was published by WikiLeaks.

The collapse of the story came only after several conservative voices drew attention to it. On Monday, Rush Limbaugh told listeners that Dotcom was “renowned” and “world famous,” with a story to tell.

“This story is now starting to get legs, that Seth Rich was murdered, it was a contract hire killing because he was leaking to WikiLeaks,” Limbaugh said.

On Tuesday, Hannity told his radio listeners that he would keep fighting to disprove “this Russia collusion narrative” and be proven right.

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“I will do the mainstream media’s job like I have for most of my career,” Hannity said. “All you in the liberal media, I am not Fox.com or FoxNews.com. I retracted nothing.”

Then, on the Tuesday night episode of Hannity’s show — the one that conspiracy theorists hoped would showcase the “game-changer” interview with Dotcom — Hannity said he had exchanged letters which Rich’s family and would not discuss the story.

“Out of respect for the family, I am not discussing this matter at this time,” Hannity said. “But to the extent of my ability I am not going to stop trying to find the truth.”

Karen Tumulty contributed to this report.

permafrost Loc: Minnesota

Newsweek, back in may 2017,


It was closing time at Lou’s City Bar when Seth Rich drained the last of his Bell’s Two Hearted Ales and started walking into the muggy night in a trendy neighborhood of northwest Washington, D.C. At 2:30 a.m. on July 10, the torrid heat that had gripped the city for weeks had eased slightly, with temperatures slipping into the low 70s. Maybe it was the relative cool that prompted him to walk through several dark, dicey blocks to his apartment in Bloomingdale, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood a mile away. Or maybe he thought the walk would do him some good after venting to his longtime bartender about his unsuccessful efforts to reconcile his love life with his 12-hour days at the Democratic National Committee.
Whatever the reason, Rich, 27, a normally upbeat computer-voting specialist at the DNC, would soon leave family and friends grieving. And his decision to walk that night would become part of a wild election-year conspiracy theory that once again portrays Hillary Clinton and the Democrats as murderous criminals.Daily Emails and Alerts - Get the best of Newsweek delivered to your inboxAt 4:19 a.m., police patrolling nearby responded to the sound of gunfire in Bloomingdale and found Rich lying mortally wounded at a dark intersection a block and a half from a red-brick row house he shared with friends. He had multiple gunshot wounds in his back. About an hour and 40 minutes later, he died at a local hospital. Police have declined to say whether he was able to describe his assailants.The cops suspected Rich was a victim of an attempted robbery, one of many that plague the neighborhood. Strangely, however, they found his wallet, credit cards and cellphone on his body. The band of his wristwatch was torn but not broken.
sethrich
Seth Rich, a normally upbeat and much-loved 27-year-old computer-voting specialist at the DNC, was murdered in July near Bloomingdale, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in a once-blighted area of Washington, D.C.
SETH RICH

And that was enough to fire up the right-wing Twitterverse with yet another round of Clinton conspiracy theories, this one claiming that Rich was murdered—at dawn—as he was on his way to sing to the FBI about damning internal DNC emails.Such sinister notions might have evaporated had not Julian Assange hurled a thunderbolt into the affair a few weeks later. The WikiLeaks impresario, still penned up in Ecuador’s London embassy as he dodges a rape allegation in Sweden, announced he was offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in the Rich case. He hinted darkly that the slain man had been a source in his organization's recent publication of 30,000 internal DNC emails. The fallout from that embarrassment had led to the firing of several top Democratic Party officials.“What are you suggesting?” a startled interviewer from Dutch television asked him.

“I am suggesting,” Assange said, “that our sources, ah, take risks, and they, they become concerned to see things occurring like that.” His organization later “clarified” on Twitter that “this should not be taken to imply that Seth Rich was a source for WikiLeaks or to imply that his murder is connected to our publications.”But Assange had already lit the fire. No matter that the Metropolitan Police Department issued a statement saying there was "no indication that Seth Rich's death is connected to his employment at the DNC.” Right-wing media outlets continued to churn up sludge from the tragedy. Police Chief Cathy Lanier, normally cautious, may have inadvertently aided their cause during a crime-scene press conference on August 5, when she said, “Right now, we have more questions than answers.” No suspects have been arrested, despite the MPD’s $25,000 reward for information.The slain man’s parents, Mary and Joel Rich of Omaha, Nebraska, are distressed by the apparent political exploitation of their son’s death by Clinton’s opponents. Seth Rich had just accepted a promotion from the DNC to a position in her campaign, they say, and he was devoted to getting her elected. “It’s unfortunate and hurtful,” his parents say, in a statement to Newsweek, “that at the moment a murderer remains at large, there remains unfounded press speculation about the activities of our son that night. We should be focusing on the perpetrator at large.”

Terror in the NeighborhoodResidents of Bloomingdale, which is about 20 blocks north of D.C.’s Union Station, had long been complaining about a surge in crime. One area resident tells Newsweek her house had been burgled a few years ago while she and her husband were inside. Two other residents who would volunteer only their first names, Jonathan and Kevin, say there were “definitely a lot of muggings and robberies” in the area. Another resident complained on the neighborhood blog about “a small group of guys with a silver handgun terrorizing this neighborhood for weeks with minimal response from public officials.” Residents were particularly incensed about a deterioration in security over the past two years related to a massive D.C. water department tunnel construction project just steps from where Rich was slain. High fences around it left the street occluded, with “hiding places for criminals and [no] sight lines for neighbors,” one resident wrote.Meanwhile, sources involved with the DNC’s investigation of a foreign hack of its files last year rule out the notion that Seth Rich had any role in the affair. “There was no indication that any insider was involved in this,” says one source, demanding anonymity in exchange for discussing the sensitive and ongoing investigation. “Every indication is this was a remote attack from a foreign government—the Russians. There is no indication that…there was any nefarious action taken by any employees in that environment.”Nor is there any evidence Rich downloaded and printed out the DNC’s internal emails, the source says: “This is a very sophisticated actor. This is not some kid coming in and downloading documents and handing them to somebody.”The Kremlin has denied any involvement in the DNC hack. Assange has declined to discuss who gave him the material. He has also threatened to release far more material in the coming weeks and months.Assange has an agenda here, the source adds: to damage Hillary Clinton, which tracks with Moscow’s apparent desire to see Donald Trump elected. “This is a match made in heaven,” he says. “Assange has the vehicle to leak it, and the Russians have the vehicle by which to provide him with the data.”‘I Never Saw Him Drunk’In the weeks since Rich’s killing, the police presence in Bloomingdale has been beefed up “a lot more,” a local resident tells Newsweek, asking that her name not be used because she is a reporter herself. But “the biggest difference” in the improved security situation, she adds, was the addition of lights along the D.C. water department tunnel construction site.All of that is too late, of course, for Rich, his family, his colleagues and his friends, who gathered August 3 at Lou’s City Place to honor his memory.“We had a microphone,” Joe Capone, the general manager, said at Lou’s. “His parents were here. They brought a video that we played. People got up and said some words about Seth and what a great guy he was and how they missed him.”Capone pointed to Rich’s usual seat at the corner of the L-shaped bar. “He was a great guy,” he said. “Just a couple-of-beers kind of guy.” One news account describing Rich as despondent and drunk the night he was killed, penned by an avowed right-wing journalist in the conservative London Daily Mail, missed the mark, he said. “That was just not Seth. I never saw him drunk or even tipsy.”As he spoke, Capone gazed at the corner seat and smiled sadly. It was now occupied by somebody else.

nwtk2007 Loc: Texas

There are a thousand ways to make a fake story look real, or a real storey look fake, or a real storey look fake by trying to make it look real, with the appearance of being actually fake.

Get the picture?

Ultimately, you have a guy shot twice in the back by a robber who took nothing, with little to no investigation.

Dr. Evil Loc: In Your Face

A little water boarding for Bill and Hillary would end the rumors-followed by public humiliation and then a proper public hanging, then watch the rest of the vermin scurry.

Carol Kelly

K

good response!