This programme contains some strong language
On the 10th of July 2016,
a young man was shot dead on the streets of Washington, DC.
27-year-old Seth Rich was a political campaigner
who worked for the Democratic Party.
The only thing this is designed to do is get to the bottom of it.
I don't care whether it's a straight theory or a conspiracy theory,
or some other kind of theory, if it helps us solve the case.
All we want is the truth.
OK, thank you very much.
Thank you. In a city torn by political divisions,
this unsolved murder has become dynamite.
Jack Burkman...
And lobbyist Jack Burkman is one of many looking for answers.
The purpose of a re-enactment is to bring everything
out of the woodwork.
I like that metaphor - ants out of the woodwork.
You're in the general vicinity right now, within about 100 yards,
of where the murder occurred.
We're headed to the final two scenes of the big re-enactment,
and this is the shooting scene.
These are the two most dramatic scenes, I think.
Obviously this is where the action is.
Rolling. Quiet, please.
Action! Save your breath.
Do not run, walk.
Go!
Bang, bang!
Good. We'll do that again.
I don't care how CNN talks about it. I just want them to talk about it,
because that will draw things out.
I'm not interested in what they report.
I just want to get to the truth.
What they say along the way is irrelevant.
I want attention on the story.
Seth Rich's murder became the focus of a series of conspiracy theories
that have gripped America.
This is the story of how one man's death went from the streets of
Washington all the way to the White House.
In the summer of 2016,
American Democrats were split down the middle trying to decide upon a
candidate to run for president.
If Wall Street does not end its greed, we will end it for them!
The fierce battle was between the outsider Bernie Sanders
and the establishment favourite Hillary Clinton.
The backdrop of the Democratic primaries
were that they were unexpectedly
competitive and unexpectedly tense,
because Bernie Sanders was much more popular than the DNC had reckoned
with, and was mounting a genuine challenge to Hillary Clinton and was
harnessing some of the youth energy.
So you have a populist in Bernie Sanders and sort of the party
establishment in Hillary Clinton,
and it is just a brutal primary fight.
Some people see Bernie Sanders as
sort of trying to steal the possibility
of a first woman president.
On the other hand, you have people saying Hillary Clinton's corrupt and
people are just sort of sick of her after decades of her being, really,
one of the leading Democratic figures in the country.
The word was "savage."
Hillary Clinton's supporters were constantly, like,
shaming Bernie Sanders' supporters as sexist
and, you know, misogynists.
The smears on him and on his voters were intense.
It was within this cut-throat world
that young politics graduate Seth Rich
hoped to make a difference.
Seth grew up in Nebraska, Middle America,
and in 2016 he was working for the
Democratic National Committee, the DNC,
focusing on voter engagement.
Seth worked in the tax base at the DNC and his job was to
remove barriers or obstacles to vote.
So, in the United States,
a lot of people get wiped off the voter rolls between elections.
Seth's job was to make sure those
people were aware that they'd been wiped
off the voter rolls and to get them
back on the voter rolls, so that they didn't
have any issues on election day in casting their vote.
There's a photo of him in an American flag,
head to toe, shirt and pants.
To Seth, it wasn't an ironic fashion statement.
He loved America, he believed in the Democratic Party -
that was central to understanding Seth.
Then, in June that year, Seth's
beloved party came under direct attack.
The Washington Post reported hackers working for the Russian government
had broken into the Democrats'
computer system in the DNC headquarters,
where Seth worked.
It was a pivotal moment,
confirming that these presidential
elections were to be like none other in history.
The first hack in June 2016 - what is noticeable
when you go back and read those
reports is that everyone was taking the tone that the DNC took,
which is like, some information was compromised,
but there's no reason to
believe that they've gotten into anyone's e-mails,
there's no real cause for alarm.
It should have been. I mean, the
idea of Russians hacking into American
electoral systems should have been more alarming, maybe, than it was.
The Russians denied any involvement,
and with the presidential candidates still to be decided upon,
Democratic eyes were focused elsewhere.
Then, a few weeks later,
alarming news reports came in of a shooting in a DC neighbourhood.
RADIO: A Democratic National Committee worker
was gunned down in Northwest DC
over the weekend. DC police found 27-year-old Seth Rich shot multiple
times. Investigators don't know whether Rich's
killing is linked to recent robberies in the area.
That night, Seth had been drinking till late in his local bar.
Now here's Lou's City Bar.
This is the last place Seth, we know for sure, was seen alive.
This is the place that Seth would go a lot of the time,
one of his favourite bars in the city
according to the people who knew him.
Seth drank into the early hours and then started the walk home.
The walk would have taken 30 minutes to maybe 45 minutes,
if he was taking his time.
Now, in reality it took him three hours.
What happened in that time?
It's not clear.
For at least some of the walk, Seth
was on the phone with his girlfriend.
So some people have said that he had been offered a job
with the Clinton campaign and that Seth was considering moving,
and so perhaps there could have been a dispute over that.
OK, so this is about as far as Seth got.
Around 4:20 in the morning, he was discovered over there
after a couple of shots had been fired.
One of Seth's neighbours was first to the scene.
So, this is where I came running down
when I heard the shots up in my house.
Seth was laying in the middle of the intersection here, facing this way,
with his arms and his face down on the ground.
His hands were moving, so I knew he was alive, and that's good.
And then the police officer came
over and he was just roping this off.
I said, "Where was he shot?"
He said, "It appears he's shot in the abdomen."
And Seth and I made eye contact and
the look on his face was like, you know,
"What the hell?"
Seth was taken to a local hospital,
but died a few hours later.
DC police issued a statement saying it appeared to be a street robbery.
But it wasn't long before that version of events
began to be questioned.
Audio detection used by the Metropolitan Police Department
picked up gunshots at 4:19am,
arrived about three minutes later to the scene and found Seth Rich there
with gunshot wounds.
He had his phone, wallet and watch still on him,
and that was part of what I think got a lot of conspiracy theorists
wondering what was going on, because to their mind, if it's a robbery,
why does he still have of all these things on him?
The fact that Seth still had his valuables on him
and had been shot twice in the back
lead to intense speculation that there was a more sinister
motive behind his murder.
I was in New York, if I remember correctly,
but I saw somebody post something to the effect of,
"Is it true what they're saying about Seth on Facebook?"
The story just erupted.
It was his Facebook profile picture and his DNC headshot
that just filled my news stream.
That was the first big red flag that this was going
to be a really bad thing.
Within the hour,
there were people posting conversations
about how it might have been the
Clintons that did it, or it might
have been this or it might have been...
That it wasn't just a mugging.
It was the Hillary brand being thrust into Seth's murder
by anti-Hillary people on social media.
The allegation that Clinton's team
were involved in dirty tricks was about
to receive a massive boost.
12 days later, Julian Assange's online organisation, WikiLeaks,
published 20,000 e-mails illegally
obtained from the DNC computer system.
Crucially, the e-mails revealed the Democratic Party
was biased in favour of Clinton.
The DNC leaked e-mails were published on July 22nd,
and they showed that the DNC top
brass was conspiring against the Sanders campaign,
was openly disdainful of Sanders, of his chances,
and gave every indication that they
were going to do everything they could
to make sure that Hillary Clinton got the nomination.
ALL: We won't vote for Hillary, hell no, DNC!
We won't vote for Hillary...
There were Sanders supporters
protesting against the Clinton campaign,
protesting against what they saw as, you know, DNC corruption.
It was massive. I mean,
suddenly you're seeing the inner workings of this party
scheming against Bernie Sanders,
so it sort of opened up new divisions
within the Democratic coalition.
It was more obvious, I guess, to the world that
political animals are political animals.
They don't have values - they just want to win.
Despite the turmoil within the party,
just four days after the e-mails were published,
Hillary Clinton successfully fought off Bernie Sanders and was formally
nominated for the 2016 presidential election.
But that was just the starting gun for the most brutal presidential
campaign in living memory.
I think we've had enough of the Clintons, in all fairness, right?
Don't you think? We've had enough.
I mean, at what point... At what point do we say...
..Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt person
ever to seek the office of the President?
He cosies up to white supremacists, makes racist attacks,
calls women pigs, mocks people with disabilities.
You can't make this up.
These vicious claims,
about me, of inappropriate conduct with women are
totally and absolutely false.
He owes our country an apology and he needs to take responsibility
for his actions and his words.
And, in time, the mystery surrounding Seth Rich's death
would become central to the campaign debate.
The very first place that the conspiracy
ever took route was on Reddit,
where there were links to local news stories about Seth being killed and
at least one of them said something like,
"DNC staffer leaks e-mails and is killed."
After that, the first actual news site,
if we want to call it a news site,
that suggested he had been killed for leaking
something was a site called
WhatDoesItMean.com, which is a conspiracy-leaning site,
and it claimed that Seth Rich had been on his way to meet with the FBI
when he was killed.
There is this cluster of far right and conspiratorial sites that act as
feeder sites into slightly larger sites,
which eventually feed into Fox News.
So there is a food chain,
and stories that are compelling make their way up this food chain.
A key political player in this food chain
now took up the Seth Rich story.
Roger Stone is a right-wing political operative
who at one time worked for
the Nixon White House. He refers to himself as
the dirty tricks specialist.
He was part of a group of far right figures in the '90s,
who basically suggested that Bill Clinton was running a drug cartel
out of Arkansas and having his
political opponents killed to cover it up.
He coined the term "Clinton body count" and Hillary Clinton became
embroiled in that.
So Roger Stone, in early August,
tweeted that Seth Rich was one of four people that Hillary Clinton had
recently had murdered.
It was this thrust of Hillary Clinton did this for some reason,
we just need to figure out what that reason is.
They weren't thinking about the facts.
They were looking to establish a narrative for a pre-made villain.
Donald Trump has had a disastrous few weeks.
If you look at the polls, he needs a miracle.
The growing conspiracy theories were turbo-charged by this intervention
from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Dutch TV,
implicating Seth as the source of the e-mail leak.
Whistle-blowers go to significant efforts to get us material,
and often very significant risks.
There's a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered,
just a few weeks ago for unknown
reasons as he was walking down the street
in Washington. That was just a robbery, I believe, wasn't it?
No, there's no finding, so...
What are you suggesting, what are you suggesting?
I'm suggesting that our sources take risks.
But was he one of your sources, then, I mean?
We don't comment on who our sources are.
But why make the suggestion?
Julian Assange manages to imply very heavily
without saying outright that Seth Rich was a WikiLeaks source.
Later the same month, they also
tweeted that they were offering a $20,000
reward for information on his death.
What Julian Assange was and what his implications were was an accelerant
to this sort of very small, slow burning fire.
High-profile American broadcasters eagerly leapt onto the story.
Julian Assange is suggesting that a DNC staffer,
who was inexplicably murdered on the eve of the Democratic National
Convention, he's suggesting, hinting,
he was a source of leaked e-mails that expose the conspiracy to steal
the nomination from Bernie Sanders.
Anyway, the guy, this 27-year-old staffer's name is Seth Conrad Rich.
He was murdered in DC.
They left his watch, they left his wallet, they left his money,
so it wasn't about robbery.
It was this constellation of far right pseudo-journalists massing on
this story all at once.
Online radicals added their own slant.
I'll tell you this - Assange, he knows it's hurting Hillary.
She's degenerating out of the stress daily.
Whatever's in these e-mails has got her scared to death, you can see it.
It feels like a cornered, hairless rat.
Now senior Republican politicians readily joined in.
We have this very strange story now
of this young man who worked for the Democratic National Committee,
who apparently was assassinated at four in the morning,
having given WikiLeaks something like 23,000 - I'm sorry -
53,000 e-mails and 17,000 attachments.
Nobody's investigating that,
and what does that tell you about what was going on?
Because it turns out it wasn't the Russians, it was this young guy,
who I suspect was disgusted by the corruption of
the Democratic National Committee.
But it was on social media where the Seth Rich story really took off.
Facebook became the biggest news purveyor in the country.
It was almost like junk food.
It had more allure for people, it had more draw,
in a way that people found irresistible.
Cassandra Fairbanks,
a Bernie Sanders supporter and political vlogger
with a huge Twitter following and reputation
for backing liberal causes,
also jumped on the story.
A massive amount of shit...
We were all putting out, you know,
what happened to Seth Rich and if he could have been the source,
why there wasn't footage or any kind of clues or suspects or,
you know...?
The whole case just seemed so unusual
that we were asking questions about it.
We are investigating
to understand what happened in that situation with Seth Rich.
And then when Julian Assange came out,
randomly bringing up Seth Rich out of nowhere, we were like,
"Oh, crap." Like, "This just got really real."
I mean, even to this day, Julian Assange never names sources.
He doesn't even hint at sources generally, so this was very unusual.
I was tweeting about it and, like, a
single tweet with a photo of him and,
you know, just a little blurb about WikiLeaks would get 5,000 retweets
easily. They were reaching a lot of people.
A lot of people wanted to know what was going on.
We were all just convinced that it was him, and...
Yeah, it started to go pretty viral pretty quickly.
Still grieving from the tragic death of their son,
Seth's family now found themselves at the centre of a political
feeding frenzy.
Numerous theories were being bandied around -
that Seth was a Sanders fan working with WikiLeaks,
or even a closet Republican leaking e-mails to Putin's Russia.
And obviously it wasn't Seth.
Like, if anybody knew Seth, that is the most absurd thing...
..I have ever heard in my life.
The idea that Seth, a patriot to the core, would
give Russians DNC e-mails to empower Donald Trump, the, you know,
nominee of the party he despised...
..was crazy.
With the DC police no closer to
finding Seth's killers, in September,
the family was approached by self-styled investigator
and right wing lobbyist Jack Burkman, who was keen to help.
Burkman offered a substantial reward of his own money to find Seth's
killers and the family agreed to
work with him in appealing for witnesses
on a Washington local news programme.
From the beginning, we pounded the streets,
we went into the Bloomingdale neighbourhood of Washington,
which is where Seth lived and was killed,
and we went door-to-door.
We distributed more than 10,000 flyers in that immediate area.
Burkman organised a press conference,
to give the family the chance to speak.
We have to make this safer.
You've got two people that shot my son...
..twice in the back,
and that someone would just shoot him in the back - think about it.
You don't want that with your children, with your family,
and we want to bring this to closure.
When I saw the story about Seth, the heartbreaking story,
all I could think of was my mother getting the call that Mary Rich got.
I have never seen people with the strength and the fortitude and the
courage of Joel and Mary Rich.
The police made very clear that they
thought this was a robbery gone awry,
and they very much wanted me to believe that.
This is not a robbery gone awry.
Credit cards, cash, wallet not touched.
Expensive gold chain around his neck, not touched.
Watch, not touched.
Shot twice in the back.
Now, robbery gone awry, why would you shoot...
Seth Rich was a little guy. Nobody feared Seth Rich.
He was many things. He wasn't a fearsome dude.
Nobody thought that he would chase them down the street and hurt him.
Everybody knows this is not a robbery.
Now the question is - whodunnit?
The whodunnit is the question.
Was it the DNC, was it the Russians, was it somebody else?
Who knows?
Who knows...
But after 20 years as a political lobbyist,
Jack Burkman has earned a controversial reputation
for his promotion of some fairly extreme views.
Homosexuals molest children at a rate
from somewhere between 200-1000% more than straight people.
To even think with these facts on the table,
to allow them into something like the Boy Scouts as Scout leaders...
Hold on, Angela. ..is absurd.
Why don't people like me?
Oh, lobbyists aren't loved. I mean, lobbyists are not a beloved group.
You might love your dentist or your doctor or your realtor.
You don't love your lobbyist.
The press gives us a bum rap and then
when you add on top of that pundit
and now murder investigator, I mean, people... It's not a beloved guy.
That's OK.
Jack Burkman is the kind of guy who talks a really big game
about the kind of services he can provide, the kind of power he has,
the kind of connections he has.
For someone like Jack Burkman,
Seth Rich is a perfect opportunity to boost his own platform
and get his own name in the news.
I mean, yeah, I like lobbying.
I'll be honest with you, I like this murder investigation stuff.
I've taken a liking to it.
Friends either call me Columbo or Angela Lansbury now.
By October 2016,
the bitterest presidential campaign in a generation was reaching a
crescendo.
At the centre of the hostilities was one issue - Democratic e-mails.
She should never have been allowed to run for the presidency,
based on what she did with e-mails and so many other things.
The more e-mails WikiLeaks releases,
the more lines between the Clinton Foundation
and the Clinton's personal finances, they all get blurred.
The first thing we should do -
let's get rid of Hillary.
But the tide seemed to be turning against Trump.
Now he was being accused of
colluding with the Russian government that had
allegedly hacked the Democrats' computers.
Will Donald Trump and admit and condemn
that the Russians are doing this
and make it clear
that he will not have the help of Putin in this election?
Putin, from everything I see, has no respect for this person.
Well, that's because he'd rather
have a puppet as president of the United States.
No puppet, no puppet. And it's pretty clear...
You're the puppet! It's pretty clear you won't admit...
No, you're the puppet. ..that the
Russians have engaged in cyber attacks
against the United States of America,
that you encouraged espionage against our people.
The Trump campaign is trying to distract from the Russia story.
They're trying to negate the Russia story,
they're very much trying to keep the DNC hacks about the content and
gossip that's in the e-mails, and
not about the fact that Russia may have hacked the DNC.
That is a huge story,
a foreign country interfering in an American presidential election,
and it's a potentially disastrous story for the Trump campaign.
They're going to do better if Democrats are continually divided
and fighting, and sowing doubt about
the Seth Rich case is a great way to do that.
And partly because one of the things that Sanders supporters
believed is that the DNC rigged the election for Hillary and the e-mails
play into that.
Imagery of Seth became pretty common.
There was a mythology built around who he was,
fighting against Hillary on the inside and
doing his patriotic duty and
that he was really a Trump supporter all along.
And just so much play of him as an American hero,
but also as a very mythologised version.
Hi, guys.
So I get asked...
Even some Democrats, especially
those who had supported Bernie Sanders,
felt the Seth Rich story spoke to them.
I was really unhappy with the DNC.
I think that the things that came out in the WikiLeaks e-mails were
horrible, and it's not the way I think that a party should be run.
It was just so unfair, and I was like,
"I don't want to support these people."
So I had started to look into Trump a little more seriously,
and so I was just like, "All right, let's do this. Trump it is."
You know? Like...
I put on a Trump hat, tweeted a picture.
Yeah, it just kind of snowballed. I don't really know...
When you go on Twitter every day,
you can see how many people you
reached in the last 24 hours and mine is
usually around a million for the day.
When you have people who have as many followers as I do
tweeting out the same kind of messages, it adds up.
A lot of people were seeing this
stuff and asking questions themselves.
Yet as the electioneering came to an end,
the polls had Hillary Clinton way ahead
with an overwhelming prospect of victory.
Thank you. Let's go vote, North Carolina!
God bless you! Thank you all!
The next morning, America awoke to a huge political upset.
Hillary Clinton supporters gathered here and they started confident but
that began to fade as the night went on.
Donald Trump started a surprising battle ground
winning streak in Florida,
North Carolina and elsewhere.
Trump has defeated Hillary Clinton for the presidency.
He has now captured the nation's highest office.
It was a clear mandate from the American people that they want
change and not, you know, not Hillary Clinton.
Election night was wonderful.
Me and some friends went to a Trump hotel and drank a lot of champagne.
It was a good night.
AIRHORNS
CHEERING
CHANT: Trump! Trump! Trump!
Everyone was shocked, including Trump supporters,
including Trump himself.
It hadn't dawned on anyone, including him,
that he was going to win.
I mean, the next day in New York City was like
a bomb had gone off. There's no other metaphor for it.
I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear...
But as the new president took office...
So help me, God.
Congratulations, Mr President.
..a cloud hung over his shock victory -
the hacking of the Democrat e-mails.
And in a tense interview,
President Trump was quick to deny any involvement.
According to the Washington Post,
the CIA has concluded that Russia intervened
in the election to help you win the presidency.
Your reaction? I think it's ridiculous.
I think it's just another excuse.
I don't believe it. I don't know why.
It's all fake news. It's phoney stuff. It didn't happen.
It was a group of opponents who got together, sick people,
and they put that crap together.
You have seen this around everything
with the Trump campaign and the Trump
administration, whenever something bad happens for the Trump campaign,
and certainly the idea that Russia was helping the Trump campaign by
hacking the DNC would have been very bad news.
They go into overdrive trying to create alternative narratives,
trying to create so much confusion that it's hard for consumers of news
to even know what's happening.
Now, more than ever, the new Trump presidency needed a distraction,
and the Seth Rich story was about to take another twist,
as a new player entered the game.
Ed Butowsky is a businessman in Texas.
We don't really know exactly why he was interested.
He just says he had interest in the case,
but we know he did have ties to the current administration.
He's kind of like this guy behind the scenes,
funding an investigation into Seth Rich and his murder.
Butowsky is a Republican Party donor and Fox News contributor.
In February 2017,
he, too, offered to help the Rich family
in finding their son's killers.
I think the Rich family,
like any family who lost a loved one and was probably grieving,
and that it's an unsolved murder...
And so, you know, if you're approached
by a wealthy businessperson...
I can't speak for the family,
but it seems natural that maybe they would want to have this guy look
around and see if he can get answers about their son's murder.
Butowsky's first move was to
hire Rod Wheeler,
a former Washington, DC homicide detective,
who was also a Fox News regular.
Wheeler gave this interview, promoting his involvement.
..homicide detective. They just wanted me to kind of look into the
case a little bit more, see if I can
develop some leads, interview some people,
which I've been doing over the past three weeks.
This case, Alison, may actually open up a can of worms
as far as what's been going on here in DC.
Rich's case,
Butowsky also brought in Malia Zimmerman,
an investigative reporter at Fox News.
Zimmerman had a reputation for exposing political corruption,
and Butowsky was keen to introduce her to Wheeler as soon as possible.
It's very unusual for someone who claims to be aiding the family
and to be apolitical to immediately set up an investigator
in a meeting with Fox News,
and what it indicates is Fox News and Butowsky, a Trump supporter,
were orchestrating a specific story.
That they had something in mind and that they wanted Rod Wheeler's
findings to reflect what they had in mind.
Meanwhile, in Washington, DC,
there appeared to be a breakthrough in the investigation,
unsurprisingly broken by the local Fox News station, Fox 5.
DC police have had very few leads in this case,
however they have said they believe it was a botched robbery.
But this morning, a possible break in the case.
Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman,
who's put up reward money in this case,
says he has new evidence linking Rich's murder
to Rich's discovery that Russian operatives had hacked the DNC.
And to promote this breakthrough,
Burkman gave a cosy interview on the breakfast show.
Jack joins us live in the studio with more this morning.
Good to see you once again. Break down it.
It's like a spy novel. Yes, exactly.
It does, it does, I wish... It's kind of a... It's a morbid subject,
but it's a hopeful subject, because finally some progress,
and it's my job to bring closure to the family.
That's what I'm trying to do.
Burkman had received e-mails from a Russian man called Dimitri,
who claimed to have vital information.
Dimitri is a gentleman who approached us out of the blue.
He claims he had the answer to the Seth Rich murder mystery.
He said that he knows someone - I won't get into names -
high up in a state-controlled company,
who's close to Putin in Russia,
who co-ordinated the murder of Seth.
He said, "The focus should now be on finding Seth Rich's killers, yes.
"Once again, I am not interested in the 100k reward,
"as I fear being killed myself if I come out publicly."
So his whole thing is he wants to be paid privately.
"Two men trailed the victim for days before executing their mission.
"Their names are in our files.
"Now, no more questions.
"Let me just get to work in the next 16 hours
"for me to retrieve everything for you.
"I am privy to this information by virtue of my work,
"and I have two first-hand sources,
"one ready to travel all the way from Moscow to share with you his
"insight." It's very clear to me he really believes what he's saying is
true, and he thinks he knows the
people at the top of the food chain who co-ordinated this.
The publicity surrounding Burkman's breakthrough deeply offended
the Rich family, as it suggested Seth had conspired
in some way to harm the
Democratic Party.
But Burkman refused to back down and made an advert appealing for help
that included a Russian translation.
In the interview, Burkman's theory went unchallenged.
..in August, the timeline matches.
Why are you so committed to this, Jack?
So, Burkman went on Fox 5 and was, you know,
essentially saying this conspiracy theory.
What he said is basically this -
that Seth discovered that the Russians
had been hacking and therefore the
Russian government did away with Seth. Now...
And got no pushback from the local anchors.
You've put yourself in the spotlight. Are you fearful at all?
I mean, if this is true...
Well... ..why shouldn't you be a target?
We've hired security. Since I talked of this,
I've hired private security for my family.
Yes, I am fearful, but, you know...
I should add that these are all things that
deeply repulsed the family and made them very much regret
ever having communicated with Burkman in the first place.
So I asked him point blank - if Mary Rich asked you to stop,
would you?
He couldn't answer that question.
He just said, "That's a really good question."
It's very clear that Mary Rich has asked him to stop and he hasn't.
Despite protests by the Rich family,
the private investigations continued.
Meanwhile, inside the White House,
the pressure on the President went up a gear...
..as FBI director James Comey had a bombshell announcement to make.
I've been authorised by the Department of Justice
to confirm that the FBI,
as part of our counterintelligence mission,
is investigating the Russian government's efforts
to interfere in the 2016
presidential election.
And that includes investigating the nature of any
links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the
Russian government.
It was now that the Seth Rich conspiracy theory
appears to have reached the highest office in the land.
Dallas businessman Ed Butowsky and private investigator Rod Wheeler
arranged a meeting inside the White House with the President's
Press Secretary, Sean Spicer.
I think when we learned that Rod Wheeler
had gone into the White House
with Ed Butowsky to meet with Sean Spicer, that's absolutely stunning.
And it's around this time, too, that Butowsky starts telling Wheeler that
President Trump is aware of the story and wants it to come out
and has a keen interest in his investigation.
It goes to the conspiracy theory that travelled from this dark corner
of the web to the White House.
That really says something about the
current media environment we live in.
As Butowsky's plans gained pace,
President Trump's latest shock move dominated US news media,
as news anchors urgently reported.
We begin with that bombshell from the White House late today.
FBI director James Comey fired by President Trump.
It came without warning.
Just last week, Comey testifying about the FBI's investigation into
Russia's meddling in the US election.
Congress was outraged,
and the Trump presidency seemed like it was being strangled at birth.
Mr President, the termination and removal of James Comey raises the
critical question as to whether the FBI investigation of Russian
interference in the last presidential campaign will continue,
and whether the investigation into any collusion or involvement by the
Trump campaign will also be investigated by the FBI.
It was an explosive news story.
When the President, under investigation,
fires the person investigating, it causes a bit of
a media firestorm.
For a lot of people,
this recalled Richard Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre.
This looked like firing the person who was investigating you.
So, on May 9th, Trump fires James Comey.
On May 10th, the Washington Post reveals that he met with two Russian
officials and revealed classified information.
So he has two events back-to-back that are extremely damaging.
With the President on the ropes over his links to Russia,
now was the time for Butowsky's investigation to break.
The Seth Rich story is useful for Trump in a few ways.
One, it's just a distraction,
it is something that mainstream outlets are talking about instead of
talking about him firing Comey.
It also casts doubt on the idea that Russia provided these e-mails to
WikiLeaks. If someone else did it, then Russia didn't do it,
which takes a huge plank out of the Russian collusion story.
So it's incredibly politically useful.
On the 16th of May 2017, the Fox News website
published Butowsky's story.
It was written by Malia Zimmerman,
and reported that an FBI source had
new evidence to prove Seth had indeed
been the DNC e-mail leaker.
Malia Zimmerman's story said that
according to an unnamed federal source,
there was direct proof on Seth Rich's
computer that he had sent something
like 40,000 e-mails to WikiLeaks.
So it was a smoking gun.
The story quoted private investigator
Rod Wheeler as confirming the e-mail
exchanges, and he went on Washington's local Fox 5 News
to publicise the story.
The answer to solving his death lies on that computer,
which I believe is either at the police department
or either at the FBI. I've been told both.
But you have sources at the FBI saying that there is information...
For sure. ..that could link Seth Rich to WikiLeaks?
Absolutely, yeah, and that's confirmed.
Then, that evening, the Seth Rich murder made it into the big league.
It was the headline story on the
biggest right-wing political show on the
Fox National News network, reported by their most famous anchor,
Sean Hannity.
Tonight - another massive breaking news story.
Explosive developments in the mysterious murder
of former DNC staffer Seth Rich
that could completely shatter the narrative
that, in fact, WikiLeaks was working with the Russians,
or there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
Once more, Fox brought on Wheeler to corroborate the story.
There was a federal investigator that was involved
on the inside of the
case, a person that's very credible.
I'll tell you - let me just say this, Sean -
I don't like to suggest things without saying the person's name,
but I can't say the person's name because that person would be thrown
under the bus, and I can't do that.
But this person, we checked them out - we have to check them out -
very credible. He says he laid eyes on the computer and he laid eyes on
the case file. Yeah, so this was a huge turning point for this story.
Sean Hannity starts talking about it,
so it becomes Seth Rich shared information with WikiLeaks,
he was killed for it.
The Clinton body count notions start kicking up again.
It is a... Can I say shitstorm?
It's a shitstorm.
Hannity hooked onto the story and wouldn't let it go,
and his programme continued to report it.
Now, if true, this could become one of the biggest scandals in American
history, and could mean that Rich could have been murdered under very
suspicious circumstances.
Sean Hannity just goes crazy far.
He was absolutely relentless that, you know,
this story was true and that it was a cover-up by the DNC.
A lot of people in Middle America trust Sean Hannity.
They take the five minutes of what
he's saying and they believe it to be true.
They assume that Fox News fact checked it.
They assume that they're not being misled.
Yet just a week after the story was published,
Fox News were forced to retract it,
as the FBI denied all knowledge of an investigation.
Mainstream media discredited the story as fake.
But by then, the damage was done.
It really didn't matter in this environment.
In this media environment, facts don't matter.
You had it on websites. It was going everywhere.
You have it on Twitter, on Facebook,
and it's just spreading like a wildfire.
And Americans across the country took to their webcams.
All the circumstantial evidence points to
Seth Rich being the WikiLeaks source.
This is the DNC staffer, a potential leaker killed,
shot dead in a robbery where nothing was stolen.
This is going to blow up and some very big people are going to go down
and the Democrat Party will be changed forever.
This was not a robbery gone awry,
this was not any kind of street thugs,
it wasn't a gang thing, this was a premeditated hit.
Oh, yeah, I tweeted the story multiple times.
I do think that it's highly likely that he was the leaker.
These sort of self-proclaimed far right journalists are throwing
all of their social media power
behind promoting Seth Rich theories and tweeting
this hashtag - #WhoKilledSethRich?
A recurring issue we have in the United States is people don't have
an awesome sense of media literacy,
where they have difficulty distinguishing
what outlets are credible and what outlets are not.
And just because someone has perhaps seen it posted on
Facebook, which is a massive place for Americans to get their news,
they see their friends posting media and they trust it as a result.
That's how these sort of hoaxes and fake news spread.
I think that the average American is not completely stupid.
I mean, we're not talking about five-year-olds.
We're talking about adults.
They're weaving and painting a narrative
about how Trump colluded with Russia,
even though there's zero direct evidence.
What facts have we seen of collusion of Donald Trump?
Yet that's all the media talks about.
Folks, this shit is huge.
But maybe I have too much faith in humans. I don't know.
If they can get to Seth Rich and
they can get to a bunch of other people,
they can get to you.
Ed Butowsky and Rod Wheeler have now fallen out over
who was responsible for the false story and bogus FBI source.
Wheeler is suing Butowsky,
claiming he and Fox News worked together
with the White House to produce
fake news, causing shock waves in the media.
Explosive allegations this morning - The White House worked with Fox News
to run a conspiracy story involving a murdered DNC staffer.
Rod Wheeler is saying that this was a big conspiracy theory
by the White House. The White House, he says,
wanted to push this theory out there as soon as possible.
And, essentially, what he's saying is that these quotes that were
attributed to him are entirely fabricated.
Rod Wheeler now appeared to be horrified.
Well, the quotes that she added to her story,
specifically references me as saying that
I knew for a fact that Seth Rich sent e-mails to WikiLeaks,
and that just was totally fabricated - I never said that.
Butowsky has denied the allegations and is fighting
hard for the lawsuit to be thrown out.
The White House has tried to
distance the President from the controversy.
Did the President know about the story, pre-publication,
and did he have an influence on the way the story was written?
The President had no knowledge of this story
and it's completely untrue that here,
the White House involvement in this story, and beyond that,
this is ongoing litigation and I'd refer you to the actual parties
involved, which aren't the White House.
Does it disturb you that there's an allegation out there
and a lawsuit and Trump's
press admitted meeting with these two individuals,
that this was discussed in your White House,
at this particular place?
He met with members of the media.
I don't find that to be a strange thing.
You guys are all members of the media...
He was pushing a story that was
later retracted because it was false.
he met with that reporter and he met with a campaign donor.
Does it disturb you, does it say anything about this White House,
that you would entertain that kind of story?
It doesn't bother me that the press secretary would take a meeting with
somebody involved in the media about a story.
None of that was disclosed.
They had a conversation and that was the end of it.
The Clintons are criminals. Remember that. They're criminals.
One of the backbones of Trump's presidency
has been an all-out assault
on what he calls fake news.
What we want to see in the United States is honest, beautiful,
free, but honest press.
We want to see fair press. I think it's a very important thing.
We don't want fake news.
What Trump did was he managed to entirely shift the
meaning of what fake news is. When he says fake news,
he means the mainstream media bias against him.
So he calls CNN fake news, he calls the New York Times fake news.
So fake news, it's a term I don't like using.
Misinformation I think is a better term
when we're talking about stories that are false,
that are spread even though they're false.
The controversy has caused deep upset for the Rich family,
and they've withdrawn from the media.
They, too, have launched a lawsuit against Fox.
And we will get to the bottom of Seth Rich, no matter what it takes,
no matter what it costs. I don't care if I have to go to Mars.
They have cut ties with lobbyist Jack Burkman
and asked him to stop his
investigations, but he's continued.
We will find the killer.
How's that?
Good? OK, Al, next guest.
Does it feel like it becomes almost borderline showbiz?
Oh, everything's showbiz.
I mean everything in the States is showbiz.
This is a hyper-commercialised world.
Rolling. Quiet, please.
Action! Did you want something? You want my watch?
Here, have it.
Burkman's latest publicity stunt was to stage a filmed
re-enactment of Seth's murder based on his investigations.
Go. Bang, bang!
I see cops prowling around. They're
going to cause us trouble, pretty soon.
Are they?
Yeah, they're going to. Cops are eager to shut us down here.
I want to get this done because they're going to...
I think there's two cop cars circling us.
This city hates me. The city hates me, the mayor hates me,
so they don't want to make my life easy,
because they know that we'll take
it to the Internet and they don't want that.
You guys don't want to do anything. Walk. Bang, bang.
Good, then go get a reward. $145,000 if you know something.
Guys... Go pick it up.
Many local residents are sick of the conspiracy theories still being
played out. This is...it makes my blood boil.
I'm totally outraged by this.
It's people trying to swing a buck
off of a murder. We're not here for that.
You damn amateur, you exposed us.
No, no, no, no, no, they can't trace it back to you.
I took all the necessary precautions.
It was an armed robbery. It was a crime.
There's no evidence to support what they're re-enacting here.
Walk, walk. Bang, bang!
There were multiple armed robberies in the neighbourhood
and the cops even told us,
"Watch out when you're walking late at night."
Crime was up. It's a great neighbourhood.
We love it. We care about it,
so we want people to know what
the environment was here, not what's being portrayed over here.
It's false.
OK, that is a wrap for this scene. Thank you very much.
In your heart, do you feel like you're doing the right thing?
Yes, yes.
I must. I have to keep on.
The right thing is getting to the truth.
There's only one right thing and that's getting to the truth,
following the evidence and that's getting to the truth.
That's the only righteousness in any of this.
CHANTING: I am Seth Rich! I am Seth Rich!
The story of the hacked e-mails has moved on,
but the Seth Rich controversy survives,
on the Internet and the streets of Washington, DC.
I think that he was a sacrificial lamb.
I think that he did what he felt was right and tried to expose something.
I mean, a botched robbery and you leave the things that get robbed -
the cellphone, the watch, the money?
Come on! The poor soul's dead. Let's investigate that.
This story highlights the disconnect many Americans now have with
traditional media and a deep distrust of mainstream politics.
Without social media, this story would be dead.
It would be a cold case, nobody would be talking about it,
nobody would be thinking about it, it would just be done.
But thanks to social media,
the story is continuing and hopefully it will lead to
figuring out who killed him.
I have no idea who killed him.
I know who benefited from his death, and that was the DNC.
We know that the DNC has something to do with what happened.
We know the evilness of the Clinton Administration.
I don't think we've ever seen this
much misinformation being given life in
the mainstream. Usually these things
are relegated to the far dark corners
of the Internet, but now they've
been pulled into more of a mainstream
fashion by large media outlets on the right that are allied with the
President, and I think the Seth Rich case is one of the most glaring
examples of that.
We can survive misinformation,
but what we can't necessarily come
back from is if the federal government
promote misinformation from the White House press room,
from the Oval Office. That is something
that is harder to come back from.
The 2016 election will be stamped as the first fake news election.
In the middle of all this, Seth was used as a political pinball by
the political animals that don't typically get airtime.
Parasites who will...
..completely disregard a grieving family and a set of facts,
in order to try and create an air of doubt rooted in conspiracy theory.