Most people probably missed this intriguing blogpost by Publius Tacitus which appeared yesterday.:
Although this provides a good summary of what is currently known about the Seth Rich case, the intriguing new info in it is this:
“But now there is new information that may corroborate what the human sources quoted in the Fox article claimed about Seth’s role in getting the DNC documents to Wikileaks. Borne from a FOIA request filed in November 2017 by attorney Ty Clevenger, who requested any information regarding Seth Rich and Julian Assange. The NSA informed Clevenger in a letter dated 4 October 2018 that:
Your request has been processed under the provisions of the FOIA. Fifteen documents (32 pages) responsive to your request have been reviewed by this Agency as required by the FOIA and have found to be currently and properly classified in accordance with Executive Order 13526. These documents meet the criteria for classification as set forth in Subparagraph © of Section 1.4 and remains classified TOP SECRET and SECRET.
If NSA had come back and said, “No, we do not have anything pertaining to Seth Rich,” that would have been news. It would have been especially unwelcome news for those who believe that Seth was the source on the DNC emails. But now the opposite is true. The NSA says that it has documents that are classified TS and S. What do those documents say or prove? That remains to be seen.”
Although the letter cited here was dated October 4th, I had not seen any previous news about this, nor could I find this cited elsewhere on the web. When I and others queried the author (in the Comments section) about his source for this info, he responded:
“The source is the letter that the lawyer, Ty Clevenger, received from the NSA. I have seen the letter.”
Presumably Publius Tacitus knows Clevenger.
So the key question is this: why does the NSA have 32 pages of secret or top secret documents (which of course they refuse to release) pertinent to Seth Rich and Julian Assange?
The Deep State expects us to believe that Russian agents (presumably “Guccifer 2.0”) hacked the DNC and provided Wikileaks with the DNC emails they subsequently published. Hence, there would be no reason to think that Seth Rich was ever in touch with Wikileaks, and the NSA couldn’t have captured any correspondence between Seth and Wikileaks officials. Moreover, the FBI was at pains to deny rumors that they had examined Seth’s laptop soon after the murder. Though they didn’t say that specifically — rather, they said that they were not investigating the Seth Rich murder , as the FBI does not investigate murders. (After which the MSM had a good laugh at the absurd Seth Rich “conspiracy theorists”.)
https://www.newsweek.com/seth-rich-dnc-staffer-wikileaks-leaked-emails-fbi-610383
However,.what if the FBI was investigating Rich for espionage — rather than probing his murder? The FBI did not flatly state that they had not looked at his laptop.
The Fox News report — withdrawn at the insistence of the Murdochs — which prompted public concern about Seth’s laptop, was evidently based on info which Sy Hersh supplied to Ed Butowsky in a phone call that Butowsky secretly recorded:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYzB96_EK7s
Although Hersh has refused to go public with this story (he likely has only one source for it), he had an opportunity to state that he had been BSing Butowsky — but refused to do so. Which likely means he was being honest when he told Butowsky about a source inside the FBI, considered highly reliable by Hersh, who described to Hersh seeing an FBI memo regarding an FBI analysis of Seth’s laptop. That analysis indicated that Seth had arranged with Gavin Macfayden of Wikileaks to provide DNC emails to Wikileaks via drop box in exchange for a payment.
Another pertinent issue has recently caught my attention. There is strong reason to suspect that Guccifer 2.0, far from being a Russian intelligence agent, is a Deep State creation meant to establish the hoax that Russian hackers were the source of the Wikileaks DNC releases.
Yet it is clear that, as of June 15th, 2016, when G2.0 made his first appearance, he was aware that Wikileaks was planning to release DNC emails. On June 12th, Assange announced that Wikileaks would soon release “upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton”; he never mentioned the DNC. But, soon thereafter, Crowdstrike indicated that the DNC had been hacked, and Guccifer 2.0 claimed that he was the hacker, and had provided Wikileaks with DNC emails which he had purloined. This suggests strongly to me that both Crowdstrike and G2.0 (possibly one and the same?) had been tipped off by elements of the Deep State that DNC emails had been transferred to Wikileaks.
Since the NSA has ominiscient ability to intercept electronic communications, what is the chance that they weren’t carefully monitoring communications to and from the principals of Wikileaks — including Gavin Macfayden? If they were doing such monitoring, then they would have intercepted Seth’s offer to provide the DNC emails in a drop box to Macfayden. And this finding could then have been conveyed to the DNC. Almost as soon as Assange had confirmed that new material related to Hillary Clinton was soon to be released, the DNC and Crowdstrike quickly deduced that leaked DNC emails would soon be made public. And to distract attention from the incriminating content of the emails, they hit on the clever stratagem of “proving” that Russian intelligence hackers, bent on Hillary’s destruction, were the actual source of the emails. Almost as soon as Crowdstrike’s claim that Russian intelligence had hacked the DNC was made public, G2.0 popped up to claim that he was the hacker, and had provided his trove to Wikileaks. To prove his hacking credentials, he released a Trump Opposition Research document — cited by Crowdstrike the day before as having been taken by the hackers from the DNC — on which he had intentionally placed “Russian fingerprints” in the meta-data that he knew would lead cybersleuths to conclude that he was Russian. (The only small problem with this charade is that we now know that the opposition research document had been a file attachment to the Podesta emails; apparently we are dealing here with another “gang that can’t shoot straight”.)
If the NSA had unmasked Seth as the source of the DNC leak, and had provided this info to the DNC, this might be quite pertinent to Seth subsequent murder. (And possibly also the mysterious death of Seth’s confederate Shawn Lucas.) Although the Deep State could be confident that Assange wouldn’t reveal his source for the DNC emails, Seth Rich would have been in a position to destroy the Guccifer 2.0 hoax — as long as he was alive.
You’ll note that the alleged FBI analysis of Seth’s laptop claims that Seth had indicated he had friends who were aware of his drop box. One of these friends might have been Shawn Lucas, the process server for the lawsuit against the DNC. About a month after Seth’s murder, Lucas died mysteriously of a drug overdose involving multiple potent drugs. Quite a mysterious death for someone not known to abuse drugs. It has also been pointed out that the DNC made large payments to Crowdstrike the day after the murders of both Seth and Shawn. Sheer coincidence? Maybe.
Okay, so maybe Sy Hersh’s trusted source is actually just a lunatic, and there was no FBI investigation of Seth’s laptop. And maybe Seth never made any effort to contact Wikileaks, and the NSA therefore had no need to intercept his non-existent communications with that organization.
Which however then leaves us with the question: Why does the NSA have 32 pages of documents, marked Secret and Top Secret, pertinent to Seth Rich and Wikileaks?
Perhaps those who will be quick to deride this essay as “conspiracy theory” will have a clever answer for this. And will they also be eager for those NSA documents to be declassified and released, so that my crackpot suspicions can be put to rest? Perhaps I shouldn’t hold my breath.
