Authored by Joe Lauria via Consortium News,
The attorney in the freedom of information case against the Federal Bureau of Investigation seeking the contents from the computers of a murdered staffer of the Democratic National Committee has criticized the number of redactions in the index that the bureau turned over to the court late Monday night.
“Lots of things in the Seth Rich indexes don’t pass the smell test,” wrote Ty Clevenger, the attorney for Brian Huddleson, a Texas businessman, who filed a Freedom of Information Act request in September 2017 seeking to learn whether Rich was the source of WikiLeaks’ 2016 publication of DNC emails that impacted that year’s U.S. presidential election. Huddleson sued the F.B.I. in June 2020 after the bureau turned down his request.
Rich, who was the DNC’s voter expansion data director, was murdered on a Washington D.C. street in the early morning hours of July 10, 2106, 12 days before WikiLeaks released its DNC emails and 15 days before the start of the DNC convention on July 25, 2016. The case has never been solved.
Suspected WikiLeaks Link
The suspicion that Rich may have been WikiLeaks’ source arose when Julian Assange told a Dutch TV interviewer two weeks later on Aug. 10, 2016 that:
“Whistle-blowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. As 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.”
Pressed by the interviewer to say whether Rich was the source of the DNC emails, Assange said WikiLeaks never reveals its sources. Yet, it appeared to be an indirect way of naming Rich, while formally maintaining WikiLeaks‘ policy.
(Assange could also have been cynically using Rich’s death to divert the trail from the real source. Rolling Stone magazine reported in November 2019 that lawyer’s for Seth’s brother Aaron had tried to subpoena WikiLeaks and Assange to depose them on evidence of Seth’s involvement but were unable to.)
On the same day of the Dutch TV interview, WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the solution of the mystery of who killed Rich.
The suspicion was furthered when an audio recording of investigative reporter Sy Hersh, taped without his knowledge, was posted online on Aug. 1, 2017.
“What I know comes off an F.B.I. report. Don’t ask me how. You can figure it out, I’ve been around a long time,” Hersh says on the tape. “I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. This person is unbelievably accurate and careful, he’s a very high-level guy and he’ll do a favor. You’re just going to have to trust me.”
The F.B.I. cyber unit got involved after the D.C. police were unable to access protected files on Rich’s computer, Hersh said. So the F.B.I. “found what he’d done. He had submitted a series of documents, of emails. Some juicy emails from the DNC,” to Wikileaks, Hersh said.
“He offered a sample, an extensive sample, you know I’m sure dozens of emails and said ‘I want money.’ Then later Wikileaks did get the password, he had a Dropbox, a protected Dropbox,” Hersh said. He went on:
“Wikileaks got access, and before he was killed … he also, and this is also in the F.B.I. report, he also let people know, with whom he was dealing. … I don’t know how he dealt with the Wikileaks and the mechanism but … the word was passed according to the NSA report, ‘I’ve also shared this box with a couple of friends so if anything happens to me it’s not going to solve your problem.’”
WikiLeaks posted a link to the Hersh audiotape on Twitter on the day it was released. Hersh has since backed away from making those remarks and refuses to discuss it.
Kim Dotcom, the internet entrepreneur who was close to WikiLeaks and Assange told Consortium News in an interview that he was the middleman between Rich and WikiLeaks, after Rich had contacted him.
And the Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity ran a test led by William Binney, a former technical director of the National Security Agency, which showed that the DNC emails had to be locally downloaded and not sent over the internet.
The NSA, Binney argues, would have a record of a Russian hack of the emails, which it has never produced, despite the mainstream belief, based in part on an unproven U.S. indictment, that Russian military intelligence, and not a DNC insider, had stolen the emails and given them to WikiLeaks.
If Rich communicated with someone at WikiLeaks or with Dotcom a record of those emails or messages would presumably be found on either his work or personal computer. It is that information that Huddleson sought to obtain with his FOIA request.
Reasons for Withholding Information
It took nearly five years battling in court for the F.B.I. to finally turn over a so-called Vaughn Index of files found on Rich’s laptops and only after a judge’s order last November. This is just a list, not the content, of the files, (some with brief descriptions some without, some with dates and some without), and the reasons why the F.B.I. is withholding them from the public.
Files that have dates are mostly not in chronological order making it difficult to create a timeline.
The reasons the bureau gave for withholding Rich files were mostly to “protect a person’s personal privacy” and to not “interfere with law enforcement proceedings or investigations.” These reasons were given on Rich files described as “Written School Assignment, Essay or Term Paper;” “Cover Letter;” “Resume;” “Job Posting;” “Campaign Organization Chart;” and even a “Poem” and a “Birthday Party Menu,” which were withheld.
Yaacov Apelbaum, a technical expert for the plaintiff, says that redacting a file called “Chart of Calls Made and Shifts Scheduled” because it supposedly could interfere with law enforcement suggests “evidence of coordination or activity the FBI does not want exposed.”
He said the redacted “List of Events by Date and Time” file “could suggest organized activities or misconduct.” “Roster of Names and Phone Numbers” “may contain associates, informants, or persons of interest that the FBI is protecting” or “indicates repeated efforts to hide individuals connected to a case,” Apelbaum said.
Clevenger tweeted, somewhat sarcastically it seems: “A lot to sort through here. They’re withholding his job offer letter from the DNC, for example, ‘to protect information, that if disclosed, could reasonably be expected to interfere with law enforcement proceedings or investigations.’ So the DNC is a suspect in his murder?”
Clevenger told Consortium News in an email: “We will definitely challenge the indexes. The small number of files in the indexes indicates one of two things: files have been deleted or files have not yet been accounted for. Even the files listed in the indexes have been redacted excessively.”
Binney went further in his reaction to the released index, telling an email group:
“Where’s the index of all the email? Further, where are the emails? … They only show an index of a few email from November and December of 2012. Guess they don’t want to show any connection to Wikileaks. This is a major issue for KP [F.B.I. Director Kash Patel] – coverup of criminal activity.”
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
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