Isikoff’s source for this link is Deborah Sines, a former assistant U.S. attorney who led the Rich investigation. The Russian rumor, he writes, is “the first known instance of Rich’s murder being publicly linked to a political conspiracy.” In the podcast, “Conspiracyland,” Isikoff makes a similar claim.
But that’s not true. Unfounded links between Clinton and the Rich killing predate the July 13, 2016, “bulletin” and
coverage of it by a sketchy site called WhatDoesItMean.com. What’s more, the “hit team” story, which Sines says was repeated several weeks later, wasn’t the primary Rich-related conspiracy that gained traction.
As Isikoff’s reporting makes obvious, it’s in fact much more accurate to pin the broad embrace of Seth Rich conspiracies on WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange — and on U.S. actors like Infowars’ Alex Jones and Fox News’s Sean Hannity.
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All of the aforementioned tweets are still active, suggesting they haven’t been identified as being linked to Russian intelligence by Twitter. Those tweets have been removed and archived. Isikoff’s report notes that one prominent Twitter account from that set, TEN_GOP, promoted the Rich conspiracy theory as articulated by Infowars. There were, he says, some 2,000 tweets focused on promoting Seth Rich conspiracies from accounts linked to Russian actors.
This fits with our understanding of Russia’s efforts in 2016: to highlight and exacerbate existing divides in American politics. An expert on Russia’s efforts made that point in the “Conspiracyland” podcast.
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The TEN_GOP tweet was also more than a week after WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange
implied in an interview on Dutch television both that Rich’s killing was suspect and that he might be the source of the material stolen from the DNC that WikiLeaks had published the prior month. This was obviously not the case, since WikiLeaks didn’t begin receiving that stolen information until days after Rich’s death, as special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report details. But it was a particularly potent strain of the Rich conspiracies, and one that has survived since.