Seth Rich Files to be Released in 66 Years

FBI "Fast-Tracks" 2016 Murder and Says It Will Report Back to Us in 2091

Almost nine years ago, a 27-year-old man was shot in the back in Washington, D.C. and rushed to the hospital where he died a few hours later. The death certificate says it was July 10, 2016, at 4:20 in the morning when Seth Rich died in what authorities called a “botched robbery.” It was absolutely botched—if it was a robbery at all—since the perpetrator(s) did not bother to remove Seth’s expensive wristwatch or take his wallet. Or take anything. The individual or group just shot him in the back and ran away.

Despite his surname, Seth was far from rich. He was part of the army of youthful volunteers who make the pilgrimage from the heartland to D.C. to work for a political candidate for next to no money but some great fodder for their resume and a few letters of recommendation. That being said, poor people get robbed every day in D.C. but somebody just gunned down in the street for no apparent reason is rare.

By all accounts, Seth Rich was a devout Bernie supporter working for the Democratic National Committee (DNC). His murder has never been solved and his parents, curiously, do not want any investigation and regularly threaten to sue any news outlet that seeks answers in the tragic death of their son. Maybe they are just tired of the media circus. But if a person I loved was murdered in the street, I’d like to see the murderer brought to justice. They sound almost like people who have been credibly threatened. It reminds me of the woman who died after taking a ride with Ted Kennedy back in 1969. Mary Jo Kopechne’s parents did not want her death investigated, either.

The Crime, Part 1

Seth Rich was born in Nebraska to a Jewish family, and he developed an early interest in politics; he graduated college with a degree in political science and joined the DNC in 2014 to be their “voter expansion data director.” I have no idea what that means except he was good with computers.

Seth was vocal about being a Bernie supporter and it has been stated anecdotally that he was getting disillusioned and angry with the Democrat machine in 2016, since it was favoring Hillary and shutting out Bernie. Back in 2016, Bernie had a lot of momentum. The old coot from Vermont was considered an “outsider” and a “change agent,” and not just the geriatric communist he is known as today.

On July 9, Seth Rich left work and he was reported as being at a bar that night, a place called Lou’s City Bar, about a mile and a half from his apartment; he was a regular there. Lou’s has been rated D.C.’s number one sports bar; it’s a famous place. People at the bar recognized Seth. The bar closed at around 1:45 a.m. and he did not go home that night. It is not clear where he was in the interim, but the interim may have not been very long—perhaps a half hour or so.

The murder was treated as a street crime, and it was never solved. Now we find out from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that it is still an “ongoing investigation.” Nine years and it’s still an open case.

The Vaughn Index

Whenever a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request is made—which is usually filed as a lawsuit—the organization either forks over the files or they decide to withhold some stuff. If they redact or deny access, they have to produce a Vaughn Index which lists the documents, what is being withheld or redacted, and the reason why. To make matters particularly confusing, the Vaughn Index need not be organized in any coherent way. It does not have to be chronological. It can be hundreds of pages long. It’s just a random listing of stuff you can’t see.

Just the other day in early March of 2025, the FBI released the Seth Rich Vaughn Index. No, we’re not allowed to see what Seth Rich had on his lap[tops. The Vaughn Index for Seth Rich said that the files could not be released—nine years later, mind you—because they might “interfere with law enforcement proceedings or investigations” or they might be withheld to “protect a person’s personal privacy.”

Now here is why this seems fishy. It’s rare for the FBI to withhold information when a Democrat is a victim. But in this case, it may well be a Dem-on-Dem crime. I suspect Seth’s laptops are part of a bigger matter.

The Crime, Part 2

WikiLeaks is a website (you can visit it yourself, it’s still up) created by or at least under the leadership of Julian Assange. Assange is a perplexing but highly interesting character. Born in Australia, Assange even as a kid was a notorious computer hacker (enough to almost get thrown in prison as a kid) with a keen interest in politics whose dream was to automate and facilitate the ability of whistleblowers to report misdeeds. Most sites named “Wiki” allow for crowd-editing of content; Wikileaks never did. It relied entirely on Assange and a small, tightly vetted volunteer staff. Assange built networks of redundant servers all over the globe as he set out to save the world.

It didn’t take long. Here is a truncated version of Assange’s meteoric rise to global notoriety. One of Assange’s army of volunteers got data from the deep web via The Onion Router (TOR) and mined through over a million documents to learn that a Somali leader was hiring gunmen to assassinate people in their government. This was in late 2006. This was spectacular news, even if it was a matter local to Somalia. Who knows if American intelligence agencies even knew this—remember this was an effort of searching the dark web and then scouring over a million documents to extract evidence.

About a year later, Wikileaks posted the standard procedures used at Gitmo from a U.S. military manual. That was embarrassing. The truth sometimes is.

Around 2007, enter a U.S. Army intelligence officer named Bradley Manning (later Chelsea Manning—he transitioned, so I’m going to use his surname and male identity since he transitioned after he got caught). Manning released a video showing a helicopter encounter in Iran that showed U.S. troops firing on people who possibly were civilians. Manning was never a high-level officer, but he worked in U.S. military intelligence and he was a computer geek on the level of Wikileaks guys. More documents were released until Manning was arrested in 2010 and sentenced in 2013 for espionage and got 35 years in prison. (Manning was pardoned in 2017 by Barack Obama, which is a strange turn of events.)

Despite Manning’s troubles and mounting problems for Assange, this didn’t stop Wikileaks. They were quite broad in scope: they exposed information on everything from climate change to Scientology to the United States Department of Defense.

Fast forward to 2010. Barack Obama declares that Wikileaks is a threat to national security. Wikileaks by now has released over 250,000 classified documents to and from the U.S. State Department and various embassies and consulates around the world. These leaks include the U.S. plans to isolate Iran and missives that were fearful of Iran’s potential for becoming an atomic power.

In 2016, Wikileaks published a searchable archive of over 30,000 emails to and from Hillary Clinton’s private email server. Remember, Hillary did not use the official government email account (which she was required to do as Secretary of State, particularly for classified or secret materials)—she used her own private server. We know that Obama knew this because he communicated with Hillary on her private server (which means that the people who tended to Obama’s Blackberry had to whitelist her private address—so they all knew). If you want to access this portion of Wikileaks, here’s your link. Note that Wikileaks has a tendency to publish unedited tranches of material—a lot of these emails are quite mundane and boring.

The question is: How did Julian Assange’s Wikileaks get the Hillary emails? Hillary did not share her emails with Wikileaks, so somebody stole them.

Russia, Russia, Russia

Well, that’s where Seth Rich comes in handy. The Mueller Report stated that Wikileaks got an email with an encrypted file on July 14, 2016, from a person who called himself Guccifer 2.0. If you look at the timeline, this is four days after Seth Rich was murdered.

At the time, there were allegations that Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian agent and that this proved the DNC emails were hacked by Russia and then turned over to Assange. The actual story of Guccifer is far more bizarre.

• Guccifer turned out to be an unemployed Romanian taxi driver named Marcel Lehel Lazar

• He had only an antiquated computer and next to no hacking skills

• He claimed he used a different method to hack accounts: he researched the people and guessed their passwords. He claimed this was a very effective method

• He said that he hacked Hillary’s private email server and found it very easy to do

• Guccifer hacked other information and wound up in Romanian prison for a time, then he was extradited to the United States. He confessed to hacking Hillary’s email (remember, this guy had only an ancient computer—he didn’t even own a smartphone) and served a few years in the United States. He got out of prison in 2021

• Here is his picture

But is Lazar really Guccifer? Media outlets, and even Wikipedia, throws a little shade on this, calling him a “supposed hacker.” He confessed and was convicted, but did he do it? And if so, why? He didn’t seem to be a political activist. He was a Romanian and far removed from insider D.C. politics. And there is no evidence anywhere he enriched himself in any way by doing this. How would he even know that that Hillary was using a private server? The Democratic National Convention (DNC) claimed Guccifer was working for the Russians, but that is a baseless and somewhat stupid accusation. To buy into that, you have to accept the notion that the Russian intelligence apparatus—which prides itself on its spying skills—hired an unemployed Romanian taxi driver with a beat-up laptop to hack the American presidential election.

But the emails could also have been downloaded to an external device, like a thumb drive, or they might have been put in some sort of archive and shared with others. It’s not clear how they got from Hillary’s homemade server in New York to Wikileaks.

Seth Rich definitely had the opportunity to get the emails, and he had the skills. He also may have had motive, since he was increasingly disillusioned by the Democratic nomination being hijacked by Hillary and kicking Bernie to the curb. Almost all mainstream reporting on the subject calls the very notion of Rich’s being the one who delivered the emails to Wikileaks “baseless” and a “conspiracy theory,” which in my experience means it’s true.

Julian Assange never said that Rich was the source of the emails, but he made a rather pointed and peculiar statement after Rich’s death that the people who sent materials to Wikileaks often did so at the risk of their own lives. Wikileaks offered a reward to find Seth’s killers and some say that Assange—who rarely commented in any way on sources—was going as far as he dared to confirm that Seth was their source.

On one level, the emails were damaging to the Democrat Party because they showed a consolidated and rather petty campaign to undermine Bernie and promote Hillary. We all know from the 2008 election and again in 2016 and certainly in 2024 that the Democrats despite their name are not very big on democracy. The DNC’s official story was that Russia hacked the DNC computers and delivered the emails to Wikileaks, but there is no proof of that except for some guy in Romania who said he did it. There is also no proof that Seth Rich leaked the emails, although Assange made some cryptic comments that alluded to it. Gee, it might be helpful to see what was on Seth Rich’s laptops.

Laptops and an Investigative Reporter

Seth Rich died leaving behind two laptops: one was his personal home computer, and he also had an office laptop. Nothing has been released from these two computers although the FBI has held them for nine years. And if you look at the Vaughn Index, they’re not going to release anything from these laptops—even seemingly personal items such as files titled “poem.” Nine years and we got nothing.

The murder has never been solved despite the fact that it was a pretty high-profile slaying.

An investigative reporter named Seymour Hersh has claimed that Seth Rich was the point of contact between the DNC and Wikileaks, but Seth Rich never actually delivered the emails. Hersh says that instead, Rich deposited them in a “dropbox” that Wikileaks was able to access. When Hersh called it a dropbox, he was speaking generically—there is no indication that he used the commercial product called Dropbox. He simply used an online storage account that Wikileaks could access. He uploaded, Wikileaks downloaded.

Before you think that Seymour Hersch is just some crackpot nosing around stuff that’s none of his business (which is the liberal media’s approach to this), let me introduce you. Seymour “Sy” Hersh is the guy who broke stories on the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, got a few Watergate bylines, and he is the reporter who exposed the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He’s won the Pulitzer prize, the George Polk Award (five times), and the National Magazine Award. He’s got more credentials than the entire journalistic teams at CNN and MSNBC put together.

Hersch independently started to look into the Seth Rich case when he got dragged into a lawsuit involved Fox News. Seth Rich’s brother, Aaron Rich, filed a lawsuit against Fox News. A guy on Fox News name Ed Butowsky claimed that Seth Rich was murdered in D.C. because he leaked the emails. Aaron Rich sued, saying this was slander. Sy Hersh testified under oath in that lawsuit. What he said was interesting. Sy Hersh said that had information that Seth Rich was indeed in touch with Wikileaks around the time of his death and that the information relating to this contact with Wikileaks would be found on his laptop.

Why Does This Matter?

You would think that Democrats would be eager to solve a crime that involved the murder of one of its own, but they are stonewalling this investigation. I guess they figured that in 10 years, we’d all forget. Well, allow me to remind you that the symbol of the Republican party is an elephant, who never forgets.

Here’s why it matters:

• It’s always good to solve murders

• Remember how everything in 2016 and Trump’s first term was about “Russia, Russia, Russia” and Trump was a Russian agent? Remember how late-night comics made fun of Trump being in cahoots with Putin? The Seth Rich materials might shed some light on this and by light, I mean it could debunk the collusion

• Somebody got the emails to Wikileaks. If it wasn’t Seth Rich, who was it? I have a good imagination and it’s pretty hard to imagine that Guccifer did it

• There is a rumor that Julian Assange told his friend Ellen Ratner (a liberal reporter) that Seth Rich was the source of the emails. Ellen Ratner’s brother was for a time Julian Assange’s lawyer

• Ratner went on record saying that Assange told her that the emails did not come from the Russians but rather from a source within Hillary’s campaign—but did not name names

• Credible investigative reporter Sy Hersh says Seth Rich was involved

The FBI has already gone on record saying it will turn over Seth Rich’s computer but they need another 66 years. I am not making this up. In 2023, they asked for 66 more years! If this really was just a robbery that turned deadly, why not investigate it? And what lurks beneath this story if it’s true?

• The Democrats ran Bernie off the road

• The Democrats were so eager to look good they didn’t mind bumping off a kid who worked for them

• There may be other nefarious things like campaign financing violations, fraud, collusion

• I wonder if someone “hired” Guccifer to take the fall? He didn’t have much going for him until he freely confessed to a crime that landed him in prison on two continents

• The whole case sheds light on Hillary’s private server

It’s All About Hillary’s Private Server

Hillary set up her own private server for her email account while she was Secretary of State under Barack Obama. She was so secretive about it, she kept the hardware in one of the extra bathrooms of her home in New York.

Hillary is not a tech geek; she had to pay somebody to set this thing up. She had to buy the equipment and she had to keep it functional. It was intentional, deliberate, and part of something else—Hillary would not have bothered to set up a private server without having a reason. Government officials, particularly those who have access to classified, top secret, and potentially dangerous information, are obliged to use government email accounts so that they can be kept secure. In fact, Hillary (and Barack’s) use of this private email of hers for official business was illegal.

Hillary put her stuff on an unsecure network. She didn’t do this by accident; she did this with malice aforethought. But why?

Well, if I were in the business of selling secrets to Russia and/or China or some other country, I would need an easy way for them to get them secrets. Wouldn’t it be really easy if instead of making them hack into my computer, I just slipped foreign agents my password? I could say, here is my account name, by the way, the password is thus-and-so, and a foreign actor could easily and quickly retrieve secrets from my account. I would not have to announce that somebody other than myself accessed the account.

“Hi, China, send over $10M and I’ll give you the password. Thanks!”

Is that what Hillary did? I have no idea—I have no proof she did. I am just stating what to me seems quite logical … and there is no other explanation I can think of that makes sense. Hillary didn’t need a personal server, she set one up anyway in violation of the law and at personal expense—and it would be a really nice, clean, easy way to ship secrets to our enemies for cold hard cash. Why else would she have done this? For fun? I doubt Hillary has ever done anything for fun.

I believe that the reason that Seth Rich’s murder is going unsolved has to do with Hillary. No matter how this unsolved murder investigation plays out, it’s going to raise the issue of Hillary’s private server. An audit of her finances at this time might be enlightening, since Hillary wouldn’t do this without a payday. No matter what we find out, the real mystery here is this: Why did Hillary Clinton have a private email server while she was Secretary of State?