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FBI Has Been Lying About Seth Rich: Emails Reveal Possible Connection Between Peter Strzok & Rich

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Published on: February 4, 2020

OK, when I write “Possible Connection” in the headline, I simply mean they are connected in some way.  I don’t mean they conspired or anything like that.  In fact, the documents will demonstrate there was some sort of connection between Peter Strzok and Seth Rich in email form, but due to the nature of the multitude of redactions, we can’t quite determine what that is except that he is the subject of an email that was contained in a fulfillment of a Freedom of Information Act request by Judicial Watch.

In a post from December 2017, it was theorized the Strzok was former FBI Director James Comey’s “hitman,” and the question arose whether or not he had anything to do with the murder of Seth Rich.

From The Patriot Crier:

Specifically, it had become known to Comey that Rich was the source for the WikiLeaks revelations that eventually destroyed Hillary’s campaign.  More important personally to Comey was the threat Rich posed to the lie that the FBI director had constructed in order to defend his actions in exonerating Hillary and to justify investigating Trump. 

Rich was going to expose the entire Russian hacking claim as a sham and Comey couldn’t countenance that.  If Strzok was in the loop he knew exactly what had to be done.

Now, my point here is not to validate the website that posted this, but rather to simply document that this was part of a working theory a couple of years ago, and despite the adamant claims of outlets like Newsguard, the police only theorize that Rich was killed during an apparent robbery, though the evidence suggests otherwise and no one has been apprehended and brought to justice.  A theory, reality does not make, Newsguard.

With that said, here are the documents obtained by Judicial Watch.

Craig Murray at Consortium News writes on the development and the lies of the FBI concerning Seth Rich and documents they had in their possession.

A persistent American lawyer has uncovered the undeniable fact that the FBI has been continuously lying, including giving false testimony in court, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests for its records on Seth Rich, a young employee of the Democratic National Committee who was murdered in July 2016. The FBI has previously given affidavits that it has no records regarding Seth Rich.

A Freedom of Information request to the FBI which did not mention Seth Rich, but asked for all email correspondence between FBI Head of Counterterrorism Peter Strzok, who headed the investigation into the DNC leaks and WikiLeaks, and FBI attorney Lisa Page, has revealed two pages of emails which do not merely mention Seth Rich but have “Seth Rich” as their heading. The emails were provided in, to say the least, heavily redacted form.

Before I analyze these particular emails, I should make plain that they are not the major point. The major point is that the FBI claimed it had no records mentioning Seth Rich, and these have come to light in response to a different FOIA request that was not about him. What other falsely denied documents does the FBI hold about Rich, that were not fortuitously picked up by a search for correspondence between two named individuals? 

Agreed!

As a result of this find, attorney Ty Clevenger wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney John Durham, U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue, and Inspector General Michael Horowitz:

Mr. Durham, Mr. Donoghue and Mr. Horowitz:

I wish to file a criminal complaint regarding false statements made by FBI Section Chief David M. Hardy in two affidavits [click here and here] filed in the FOIA case identified above [i.e., Ty Clevenger v. U.S. Department of Justice, et al., Civil Action No. 18-CV-01568]. I requested FBI records pertaining to Seth Rich, who allegedly was the source of Democratic National Committee emails published by Wikileaks in 2016 (rather than Russian hackers). In the affidavits (attached to the email version of this letter), Mr. Hardy testified that his office conducted a reasonable search, and it found no responsive records.

New evidence proves otherwise, and it appears that Mr. Hardy has perpetrated a fraud on the court. Judicial Watch recently published documents that it obtained in response to a FOIA request for communications between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page (https://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/JW-v-DOJ-Strzok-Page-Prod-16-00154.pdf), and I would direct your attention to pages 123-125. In those pages, you will find a heavily-redacted email discussion regarding Mr. Rich.  Note that the header on those emails is “Seth Rich.”

I defy Mr. Hardy to provide an innocent explanation for his office’s failure to produce these emails, and I suspect the misconduct reaches far beyond my specific FOIA request. Several facts are worth noting:

* Mr. Hardy touts the reasonableness of relying on the FBI’s Central Records System (“CRS”), but note that CRS does not search the FBI email system. That sort of half-baked, designed-to-fail search methodology would never be tolerated in litigation among private parties, yet it appears to be standard operating procedure at the FBI. And note that when I asked the FBI to search its email systems, it arbitrarily refused.

* Mr. Hardy’s staff purportedly searched for “Seth Conrad Rich” but failed to search for “Seth Rich,” another tactic designed to exclude responsive records.

* According to Mr. Hardy’s affidavit, the only records indexed by CRS are those that are manually designated by FBI personnel. Undoubtedly, FBI personnel know that they can immunize their email communications from FOIA requests simply by omitting the subject matter from the CRS, because Mr. Hardy will subsequently declare (1) that a CRS search is sufficient and (2) there is no need to conduct an email search.

I have previously written to Mr. Durham regarding evidence that the FBI was hiding information about Mr. Rich, and I have attached a December 13, 2019 order issued in Butowsky v. Folkenflik, Case No. 4:18-cv-00442-ALM-CMC (E.D. Tex.). Please see pages 23-29 in particular. Finally, I have attached an October 8, 2019 reply in the FOIA case, and it notes a previous occasion wherein Mr. Hardy provided inaccurate information to a court.

It appears that FBI personnel are deliberately hiding records about Seth Rich and deliberately deceiving the court about the reasonableness of their searches for those records. Worse, this sort of bad-faith non-compliance appears to be the norm.

I request that your respective offices investigate to determine whether responsive information has been withheld intentionally, and whether Mr. Hardy knowingly submitted false affidavits to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

Thank you for your consideration.

/s/ Ty Clevenger

Clevenger then received a response from the Justice Department, which he blogged about.

When you get caught with your pants down, just deny the obvious. That appears to be the strategy of the FBI, according to a letter I received from this afternoon from the Justice Department.

The letter from Asst. U.S. Attorney Kathleen Mahoney maintains — despite clear documentary proof to the contrary — that the FBI conducted a “reasonable search” for records about Seth Rich, the murdered Democratic National Committee employee who (rather than Russian hackers) is alleged to have leaked DNC emails to Wikileaks.

Since your humble correspondent still works a day job (with lots of deadlines), I’ll let you read the letter addressed to Magistrate Judge Lois Bloom and analyze it for yourself. Just click here for the letter, and click here for the exhibits to the letter.

Incidentally, I asked Judicial Watch to provide a declaration authenticating that it received the emails cited above in response to a FOIA request to the FBI, and Judicial Watch refused. What is that about? I needed the declaration so I could submit the emails as evidence in court (although Ms. Mahoney’s letter obviates that need).

In my experience, Judicial Watch likes to hog the spotlight (specifically the Fox News studio cameras) and often does not play well with others. That’s unfortunate, because those of us seeking the truth should be working together. And it’s not like I’m a threat to JW’s multi-million dollar fundraising operation.

Mr. Murray, mentioned above, provides some nuggets from the emails.

The opening email, at the bottom, dated 10 August 2016 at 10.32 a.m., precisely, just one month after the murder of Seth Rich, is from the media handling department of the Washington Field Office. It references WikiLeaks’ offer of a reward for information on the murder of Seth Rich, and that Assange seemed to imply Rich was the source of the DNC leaks. The media handlers are asking the operations side of the FBI field office for any information on the case. The unredacted part of the reply fits with the official narrative. The redacted individual officer is “not aware of any specific involvement” by the FBI in the Seth Rich case. But his next sentence is completely redacted. Why?

It appears that the word “adding” [in the email with a 12:53 p.m. time stamp] refers to a new person added to the distribution “to” list.  

This appears to have not worked, and probably the same person (precisely same length of deleted name) then tries again, with “adding … for real” and blames the technology – “stupid Samsung.”

The interesting point here is that the person added appears not to be in the FBI – a new redacted addressee does indeed appear, and unlike all the others does not have an FBI suffix after their deleted email address. So, who are they? 

He added:

The fourth email, at 1 p.m. on Wednesday August 10, 2016, is much the most interesting. It is ostensibly also from the Washington Field Office, but it is from somebody using a different classified email system with a very different time and date format from that of the others. It is apparently from somebody more senior, as the reply to it is “will do.” And every single word of this instruction has been blanked. The final email, saying that “I squashed this with …..”, is from a new person again, with the shortest name. That phrase may only have meant I denied this to a journalist, or it may have been reporting an operational command given. 

As the final act in this drama, Strzok then sent the whole thread on to the lawyer, which is why we now have it. Why? 

Murray continues:

Finally, and perhaps this is the most important point, the FBI was at this time supposed to be in the early stages of an investigation into how the DNC emails were leaked to WikiLeaks. The FBI here believed WikiLeaks to be indicating the material had been leaked by Seth Rich, who had by then been murdered. Surely in any legitimate investigation, the investigators would have been absolutely compelled to check out the truth of this possibility, rather than treat it as a media issue? 

We are asked to believe that not one of these emails says “well if the publisher of the emails says Seth Rich was the source, we had better check that out, especially as he was murdered with no sign of a suspect.” If the FBI really did not look at that, why on earth not? If the FBI genuinely, as they claim, did not even look at the murder of Seth Rich, that would surely be the most damning fact of all and reveal their “investigation” was entirely agenda driven from the start.

In June 2016 a vast cache of the DNC emails was leaked to WikiLeaks. On July 10, 2016, an employee from the location of the leak was murdered without obvious motive, in an alleged street robbery in which nothing at all was stolen. Not to investigate the possibility of a link between the two incidents would be grossly negligent. It is worth adding that, contrary to a propaganda barrage, Bloomingdale — where Rich was murdered — is a very pleasant area of Washington, D.C. —and by no means a murder hotspot. It is also worth noting that not only is there no suspect in Seth Rich’s murder, there has never been any semblance of a serious effort to find the killer. Washington police appear perfectly happy simply to write this case off. 

So far, outlets like Newsguard refuse to correct themselves when attacking those of us who have reported on the Seth Rich murder, the drama surrounding it and the possible ties to Wikileaks.

Now, it appears the corrupt FBI is also involved.  The question is, what is their involvement and why did they not release these documents the first time they were requested?  Furthermore, what other documents do the FBI have on this issue that they continue to withhold?

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