At some time prior to June 2016, the email server of the Democratic National Committee was compromised. Emails released by DC Leaks and Wikileaks showed clear bias within the DNC in favor of Hillary Clinton to be the nominee as early as March 2015. Suggestions floated by various party members included ways to attack Bernie Sanders’ religious views, how to discredit opposing media narratives, Hillary Clinton’s relationships with Wall Street, and misuse of Clinton Foundation funds were also discussed. In a 2016 article for the Observer, Michael Sainato states that Sanders was not treated as a viable candidate. Rather, the DNC actively worked against him to ensure Clinton’s nomination, even preventing the Sanders campaign form accessing voter database files. Sainato also rightly points out that many people are beginning to see that the voice of the people is often ignored by our leaders. The information contained in these emails indicated a lack of impartiality, which likely angered and alienated many Democrat party loyalists, particularly the Bernie Sanders fans. One such disenfranchised individual, employed by the DNC will become especially important in this story.
What would become of DNC insiders who blew the whistle on such activity? As John Podesta stated in an email to Joel Benenson and Robby Mook, there would be few objections to making an example of a suspected leaker, whether there was any real basis for it or not. This was following an embarrassing Washington Post article outlining the Clinton campaign’s need for a branding strategy. In the article by Philip Rucker and Anne Gearan, Clinton is compared to Budweiser and other generic, big name corporate brands. Essentially, Clinton is a far cry from a craft beer and the campaign desperately needs to rebrand her. What would be the consequences for leaking emails that could cost them the election?
In June of 2016 the DNC disclosed to the public that its email server had been breached, and they had been secured as of June 11, 2016. Later that month, Guccifer 2.0 publicly advertised the availability of leaked DNC emails on DC Leaks. Users of online forums such as reddit and 4 chan began sifting through these emails and compiling information, which was then disseminated in memes on social media. Additional emails became available over the next few weeks from Wikileaks bringing the total to roughly 150 thousand. Guccifer would later provide zip files he received from an unnamed source to an independent digital forensics team known as Forensicator.
Analysis of the metadata contained therein yielded the following conclusions: the files were copied either directly from the server, or from a computer connected to the local area network or LAN. This conclusion was based on the timestamp which indicated the copy occurred on 5 July 2016 at an average transfer speed of 23 megabytes per second, and Eastern Standard Time settings were in force on the system. This information was ignored by both the media and the FBI, who instead relied on the conclusions of Crowdstrike. The DNC had refused FBI requests to access their servers to investigate the source of the leak. Crowdstrike, who had received $100 million from Google Capital in July of 2015 concluded that, you guessed it, Russia did it. It may be worth noting that Google CEO Eric Schmidt resigned within 24 hours of President Trump’s executive order on human rights abuse and corruption. It’s probably nothing.
On July 10, 2016 just five days after the files were copied, Seth Rich was pronounced dead upon arrival to the hospital after sustaining two gunshot wounds to the back. He was still in possession of his personal effects including his watch, wallet, and phone despite the DC police statement that this had been a robbery.
The Russian hacking narrative would begin later this same month. Then FBI head, James Comey indicated that this is when the surveillance began of candidate Trump’s transition team. This is consistent with both the Schiff and Nunes memos detailing the FISA court applications for surveillance warrants. This week we have seen the question of what happened to Seth Rich re-emerge in the collective consciousness, and the question remains. Who killed Seth? Well known individuals in the social media and politics sphere such as Julian Assange of wikileaks and Kim Dotcom formerly of the Pirate Bay, have alluded to Seth Rich as the leaker. Assange has not mentioned him by name, as Dotcom has, but he did carefully select his words in an interview on a Dutch television program, Nieuwsuur, from August 9, 2016. This interview can be found by searching “Julian Assange On Seth Rich” on youtube.
Assange: Whistleblowers 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.
Reporter: That was just a robbery, I believe. Wasn’t it?
Assange: No. There’s no finding. So… I’m suggesting that our sources take risks.
Draw your own conclusions.