Mining a Murder How DNC staffer Seth Rich became a martyr for the Trump-supporting alt-right. By Will Sommer While DonalD Trump defied almost every prediction by winning the presidential election last week, his diehard supporters rejoiced on Trump-friendly forums like Reddit’s “The_Donald” page. They thanked the obvious people—Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, Breitbart News president turned Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon. They praised Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who published Democratic National Committee emails suspected to have been obtained by Russian hackers. But some of the most effusive praise went to a Democrat. Seth Rich, a 27-year-old DNC employee whose July murder in D.C.’s Bloomingdale neighborhood remains unsolved, has taken on a surprising martyrdom among Trump supporters. In their telling—based on zero evidence—mysterious forces allied with Hillary Clinton killed Rich as payback for leaking DNC emails to Wikileaks. “I know we’re in the middle of celebrating, but it’s important to remember: His name was Seth Rich,” wrote one Reddit user. As Trump’s lead grew, his supporters continued celebrating Rich with the slogan they’ve attached to him: “His name was Seth Rich.” Reddit threads posted about Rich earned hundreds of comments and thousands of positive “votes,” as users imagined Rich cheering Trump’s 290 electoral votes from heaven. “I know your (sic) looking down at us,” wrote another poster. “Love you bro.” What at first looked like a tragic robberygone-bad has attracted attention across the globe. It’s been discussed in Assange’s London embassy hideout and within the Chinese Communist Party. Even for a campaign plagued by fake online news and rumors, the ideas about Rich’s murder stand out. The Snopes page debunking the rumors about his death has been shared more than 40,000 times. A Google search for Rich’s
name and “Clinton” returns 186,000 results. People across the right, from former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to conspiracy theorist godfather (and Trump ally) Alex Jones, champion “solving” the murder. This is what happens when a murder victim becomes a pro-Trump meme. ShoTSpoTTer, The high-Tech listening devices that are installed across the city to alert police to gunfire, first detected Rich’s shooting. A system alert sent police racing to the 2100 block of Flagler Pl. NW. It also recorded the exact time Rich was shot: Sunday, July 10, at 4:19 a.m. By the time police officers reached Rich less than four minutes later, he was on the ground with bruises on his hands and face and a bullet lodged in his spine. The killer was gone. Rich survived long enough to make it to a hospital, but died less than two hours later. “Everybody was surprised that he didn’t make it,” says Seth’s father Joel Rich. By 6 a.m. that morning, Seth Rich had become the District’s 68th murder victim of 2016. The killing of the enthusiastic DNC voting data director from Omaha, Nebraska, looked set to become just another high-profile example of the random violence touching the District’s professional class—like the 2006 murder of British activist Alan Senitt in Georgetown, the 2015 Shaw shooting of Deloitte analyst Matt Shlonsky, or the 2015 still-unsolved murder of reporter Charnice Milton. There had already been a string of armed robberies in Bloomingdale leading up to Rich’s murder. In fact, police officers reached the scene so quickly in part because they had been posted nearby after the robberies. “Over the last weeks before [the murder], they had just been on a steady incline,” Bloomingdale Civic Association president Teri Janine Quinn says.
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All that lends credence to the theory that Rich’s murder was just an armed robbery that went too far. Instead, his death has become perhaps the most intensely watched D.C. murder since the 2001 killing of congressional intern Chandra Levy. That’s because no other recent murder in the District could be tied, however tenuously, to the “Clinton Death List”—the lengthy, decades-old list of casualties attributed to Bill or Hillary Clinton that has become right-wing folklore. Within two days of Rich’s murder, Your News Wire—a website that typically traffics in “scoops” about the Illuminati—vaguely declared that Rich was a “campaign fraud whistleblower.” A month after Rich’s death, far-right website World Net Daily added Rich to its “Clinton Death List” alongside the likes of Vince Foster, the Clinton administration deputy counsel who committed suicide—or “suicide,” depending on which sites you believe—in 1993. There is still no evidence that the Clintons or anyone else in politics was involved in Rich’s murder. According to the Metropolitan Police Department, there’s no proof Rich’s tragic demise was linked to his job. Still, there was enough to get conspiracyhungry minds rolling. If Rich had been murdered in a botched robbery—the only theory MPD has publicized—why did his murderer leave behind his phone, wallet, and watch? There was a timeline question, too. An investigation of the hours before Rich’s death by Britain’s right-wing Daily Mail tabloid found that he had spent much of the night at Columbia Heights’ Lou’s City Bar, which he visited frequently. Bar employees told the Daily Mail that Rich had left around closing time at 1:45 a.m., leaving questions about where he had been in the nearly three hours between then and the shooting just one block from his Bloomingdale house. The employees said Rich
had possibly planned to go to another bar— the nearby Wonderland Ballroom—but it was all enough to raise questions in the internet’s most fevered minds. Joel rich puT his son to rest three days after the murder, following a packed service in their Nebraska synagogue. The mourners at the service included Seth’s friends and professors from his alma mater Creighton University, and former Nebraska Sen. Bill Nelson, for whom Rich had campaigned. For Joel Rich, it was a crushing end for the big-hearted son who regularly watched CSPAN for fun and never met a stranger he didn’t treat as a friend. “He was a special kind of person who people wanted to be around, because they knew he would treat everybody fairly,” he says. Clinton mentioned Rich’s death in a speech on gun violence. The DNC would later include him in the “In Memoriam” part of its convention. Interim DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile, who says she cried for hours after hearing of Rich’s death, remembers him as a “cheerleader” for the DNC’s voter registration efforts. “Everyone around here loved Seth,” Brazile says. “His ideals, his commitment.” Still, Joel Rich and his wife Mary Rich began to notice the theories surrounding their son’s murder build just days after his death. On July 13, the same day as Rich’s funeral, conspiracy theory website Whatdoesitmean.com claimed Rich had been murdered by a Clinton “hit team.” Joel Rich soon saw acquaintances complaining on Facebook about the budding conspiracy theories surrounding his death. He told them to just ignore it. Then came Wikileaks. On July 22, 12 days after Rich’s murder, Assange and Wikileaks began publishing emails obtained from DNC email accounts. The revelations in the emails, which showed some op-