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February 2, 2024

Not surprisingly, our media have ignored the Rich story. As I sat at Starbucks, I showed twelve random people a recent news photograph of FBI Director Christopher Wray. Most were under thirty and primarily female. None could identify Wray by name or position. I blame our media for the absence of objective reporting, censoring information, and publishing propaganda without question, i.e., false war porn and casualty counts of Hamas. Small wonder, then, that so many people don’t know about Seth Rich and his sad death, yet continuous trickles of new information make it increasingly clear that the FBI is hiding something.

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Most American Thinker readers are familiar with the fact that Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee employee, was murdered on D.C.’s streets in 2016. Inconsistencies in reports about his death, combined with its timing vis-à-vis the Russia Hoax, have made it easy to believe that this was no mere street crime. What’s been most suspicious is the FBI’s desperate efforts to keep secret information about its investigation into Rich’s death, and it’s the FBI’s conduct that is the subject of this post.

(For those new to this story, please read the earlier AT article, “Who is Seth Rich? Who Murdered Him? And What’s The Deep State Hiding?”)

The FBI apparently obtained Rich’s laptop after his murder. However, the FBI has refused to comply with FOIA requests asking for it to release the laptop’s contents. This refusal continues even though a federal district court twice ordered it to do so. The first court order was on September 29, 2022 (Order and Opinion), and, more recently, on November 28, 2023 (Memorandum Opinion and Order). See Epoch Times, “FBI Seeks Another Delay in Seth Rich Case as Plaintiff Urges Production Before 2024 Election.” See the FBI response dated January 11, 2024 (Response to Nov 28, 2023, Memorandum and Opinion).

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I’ve read the most recent filings in the FOIA case, Brian Huddleston vs. Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Department of Justice (PACER Case 4:20-cv-00447-ALM), and can share their contents here. Huddleston has tried to get information from Rich’s computer since 2017. The FBI initially claimed it had no responsive records but, “little by little the FBI was forced to admit that it had thousands of pages of responsive documents…[including] his [Rich’s] work laptop, a copy of his personal laptop contents.”

Image: Seth Rich by AI.

In the past, the FBI has argued, among other things, that the information on the laptop was not an agency record, was personal, and or other creative exceptions to FOIA. At one point, the FBI said it would produce the contents and then estimated that it would take approximately sixty-six years to do so!

In the latest round, the FBI gave a several-paragraph response requesting reconsideration. It then insisted that Huddleston’s position “is irrelevant to this FOIA case,” an Orwellian-Alice in Wonderland wormhole. After all, as long as the FBI refuses to release the information, there’s no way to know what is or is not relevant. The DOJ and FBI are playing games with the court.

As Huddleston argued in his brief,

After more than six years of delays and denials, it is time for the FBI to come clean. A Presidential election is fast approaching, and voters have the right to know (1)whether the FBI knowingly framed one of the frontrunners, i.e., former President Trump, and (2) whether the FBI is still trying to cover up its partisan political activities” Ibid.

If you’re wondering why this matters, those looking at the government’s continuing efforts to bury the case and the information connected with it believe that Rich’s laptop might expose that the DOJ, the FBI, the CIA, and other agencies were involved in creating the Russian Collusion narrative. The Russia Hoax disinformation operation began before the 2016 election and continued through the 2020 election. Special Counsel John Durham debunked this narrative during Attorney Michael Sussman’s trial. The Russian Collusion narrative “was created, paid for, and leaked to the media at the behest of Hillary Clinton…aided by the FBI and CIA.”