Topic: WorldNetDaily
We've shown how WorldNetDaily is not about to let facts get in the way of its conspiracy theories about the death of Democratic staff Seth Rich, even move than six years after the fact. So it's unsurprising to see one of WND's favorite conspiracy theorists also refuse to give up the ghost. Jack Cashill wrote in his Dec. 21 column:
In my 2019 book, "Unmasking Obama," I focus the spotlight on those intrepid investigators who are doing the work that mainstream journalists are paid to but don't.
One unsung investigator who deserves more attention is Ty Clevenger, a self-described, "Ex-cop, ex-journalist, disgruntled lawyer, muckraking blogger (http://LawFlog.com), and cheerful optimist. (OK, maybe that last one is a stretch.)"
In a sense, all the investigators I have highlighted are, like myself, optimists. We continue to believe that surrender is not an option and that despair is for losers. For the last several years, Clevenger has dug away the dirt surrounding what may be the most revealing mystery of our time, the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.
hrough his legal efforts on behalf of client Brian Huddleston, Clevenger has discovered that the FBI has in its possession not just Rich's personal laptop but his work computer as well. "I think it's huge," Clevenger recently told Emerald Robinson on her program "The Absolute Truth."
Clevenger is a discredited lawyer who is perhaps the chief remaining Seth Rich conspiracy-mongerer. He made a big splash when he represented right-wing operative Ed Butowsky in suing various people and media outlets for purported defamation -- nearly all of which have been either withdrawn or thrown out of court, in no small part because Butowsky lied during his lawsuit against oneoutlet, NPR. (Butowsky has also been made to apologize to Rich's brother for false statements he made about him.) And Robinson, if you'll recall, is a former Newsmax correspondent who got booted from there after spreading wacky anti-vaccone conspiracy theories on her Twitter account.So neither of these people are what anyone would call credible.
Cashill didn't mention any of this unsavory history, of course. Instead, he rehashed the conspiracy:
The media accepted the explanation of the Metropolitan D.C. Police that Rich's murder was the result of a botched robbery – but how does one botch a "robbery" after beating and then killing the victim.
"I think Julian Assange was telling the truth," Clevenger told Robinson. Two weeks after Rich's death, Assange suggested on Dutch TV that Rich was his source for the DNC emails then unsettling the Democratic Party. Assange offered a $20,000 reward to find Rich's killer.
The media has mindlessly blamed the Russians for hacking this information, but as Clevenger pointed out the FBI never looked at the DNC computers that were allegedly hacked. Instead, the alleged crime victim, the DNC, took the unlikely step of circumventing the FBI and hiring its own investigator, the Democrat-friendly firm CrowdStrike.
In fact, the Mueller report found that the DNC emails were, in fact, stolen by Russia and that Assange had been in communication with Russian military officials before and after Rich's death.
Cashill went on to try to make a big deal out of journalist Ellen Ratner being told by Assange that Rich was the source for the leaked DNC emails. But as one observer noted, Clevenger and Butowsky wanted to treat Ratner as a hostile witness in at least one of their lawsuits even though she was supposedly their own.
After parroting more claims from Clevenger -- whose word, again, is of dubious value to anyone who's not a Seth Rich conspiracy obsessive -- Cashill concluded: "What neither the FBI nor the mainstream media can deny is that Seth Rich was murdered on a Washington Street and that his killer or killers remain at large. The real scandal here, the undeniable one, is that our media have less than zero interest in finding out just who those killers are." Just as it's undeniable that Cashill will put conspiracy theories ahead of facts.
