By Erik Wemple
October 1, 2018
In July 2016, Seth Rich, a 27-year-old staffer with the Democratic National Committee, was fatally shot on a D.C. street, the victim of an apparent botched robbery. But conspiracy theorists seized on his place of employment, postulating that his murder was somehow related to his involvement in helping WikiLeaks to acquire the emails it disseminated during the 2016 presidential campaign. Such an insane possibility would let the Trump campaign off the hook: If the email leaks had been an inside job, how could people blame the Trump campaign for colluding with Russia to surface the correspondence? ...
Fox News paid the price for dabbling in this poppycock ... The retraction embarrassed Fox News, and touched off a round of lawsuits.
... other defendants named in the civil action are Matt Couch and his America First Media Group, an outlet that has promoted its own investigation into the killing of Seth Rich. According to the site’s “about” page, Couch “joined the fight for Donald Trump working to help get the 45th President of the United States Elected. America First Media came about when some very passionate individuals came together to do the right thing, not always the easy thing!”
As stated in Aaron Rich’s complaint, Couch cited information from Butowsky to shore up his claim that Aaron Rich profited from the leak of DNC documents to WikiLeaks. “Ed and I have had a couple of phone calls, where we had a couple of great talks, and Ed just put it out there — Aaron Rich accepted money. Aaron Rich had money from WikiLeaks go into his personal account. Think about that. Aaron Rich had WikiLeaks money go into his personal account. Ok?” noted Couch in a Periscope chat on Aug. 15, 2017 ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/10/01/will-seth-richs-family-ever-get-a-break-from-conspiracy-theorists/?utm_term=.317a20d374d2
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