Crusading attorney battles feds over Seth Rich cover-up

Murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich
Murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich

By Alicia Powe

WASHINGTON – Before the government began making examples of Jan. 6 political prisoners for protesting election fraud, Democrat politicians and their operatives were plagued with allegations they had killed a Democrat staffer for trying to expose their scheme to rig the 2016 election.

The murder of slain Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich would be another cold case.

The government concealed evidence from the crime scene, allowed the DNC to engage in a cover-up with a team of cyber security experts, and withheld Rich’s devices that it claimed it didn’t have.

The corporate media still maintains the state-dictated narrative that Rich was killed during a botched robbery and, in tandem with Big Tech, continues to systemically warn that reports of Rich leaking a trove of emails to WikiLeaks founder and political hostage Julian Assange are “fake news” and “conspiracy theories.”

But defense attorney Ty Clevenger is still on the case, leaving no stone unturned, in a legal battle against the Federal Bureau of Investigation that has spanned nearly six years.

This week, a Texas judge’s ruling in a lawsuit Clevenger filed against the FBI is igniting hope that the mystery surrounding Seth Rich’s death and the attendant political scandal may finally be brought to light.

On Tuesday, Judge Amos Mazzant, of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, ordered the FBI to finally turn over Rich’s devices.

“We’re not done yet,” Clevenger told WND in an exclusive interview after the judge issued the order. “The order gave us 14 days to submit proposed schedules for how fast the FBI must produce the evidence.”

“The judge has previously shown impatience with the FBI delays. They wanted 66 years and he made it clear it will not take a long time to do this – they have to produce the files. I don’t know exactly how long that’s going to be, but I’m cautiously optimistic that we’re getting close.”

Indeed, in October 2022, the FBI asked for a whopping 66 years to produce the information if the judge refused to reverse the order. Many asked, what is the government hiding?

Seth Rich was the director of voter expansion data for the DNC, where he worked on voter registration systems.

In the early hours of July 10, 2016, Rich was gunned down by unknown attackers just blocks from his D.C. residence while walking home from a bar. He was shot twice in the back, and his wallet, credit cards, Rolex watch and phone were left in his possession. Still, the Metropolitan Police Department described the homicide as a “botched robbery.”

An official investigation conducted by law enforcement officials produced no leads in the effort to find Rich’s killer or killers, nor any possible motive for the homicide.

On July 22, 2016, fully 12 days after Rich was killed and days before the Democratic Party Convention in Philadelphia, WikiLeaks began publishing “44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments” from top DNC officials.

The emails revealed that high-ranking officials of the DNC and the Clinton team had sabotaged Sen. Bernie Sanders’ candidacy, used racist, anti-gay and sexist slurs about their constituents and engaged in bizarre rituals like “Spirit Cooking.”

The intelligence agencies and DNC claimed Trump “colluded with Russia” to hack their server and badgered Trump with baseless allegations in an investigation that spanned nearly the entire duration of his presidency, but suspected that Rich leaked the information.

Asked whether Rich leaked the DNC emails, Clevenger’s answer was decisive. “Yes. I don’t think the FBI would have fought me this hard – unless there was something really embarrassing they were trying to keep under wraps,” he said. “Unfortunately, the conclusive evidence that I have seen in a case pending in DC is sealed, so I can’t talk about it.

“But I have tried to get [Rep.] Jim Jordan and John Durham to subpoena the evidence from the civil case because I think the public ought to know what’s in there. So far, neither of them is interested.

“I don’t know who killed Seth Rich. I’m not trying to get in the middle of the murder investigation. I’ve always focused on finding any evidence that he was involved in the leak. When I proved that he was the source of the leak, then I’d start making noise about the murder investigation.”

Assange repeatedly denied that Russia or any “state party” was involved in the leaking of DNC emails, and the WikiLeaks founder even strongly alluded that Rich was the source of the emails.

WATCH:

According to Judge Mazzant’s order, the FBI must surrender the information it possesses on Seth Rich’s personal laptop, his work laptop, the DVD and the tape drive.

Once the proposed schedule is handed to the judge, it’s only a matter of time before the truth is revealed.

“I emailed the attorney for the FBI today to specify that we are interested primarily in the metadata and the file names,” Clevenger told WND. “From that information, we can determine what uploaded or downloaded for either machine and we should be able to tell quickly if he was if he had large volumes of emails that he was uploading and downloading.

“According to my expert, that can be done in a few hours. We don’t want to know about his emails to his girlfriend or his Thanksgiving photos. We are strictly looking to find out whether he was involved in leaking the emails.

The crusading attorney urged plaintiffs with a case against the government to steer clear of suing in deep blue jurisdictions like the District of Columbia and New York if they want a fighting chance at winning.

“Judge Mazzant is actually an Obama appointee, but he’s not blindly pro-government,” Clevenger said. “One of the biggest mistakes that conservative organizations make is filing your FOIA cases in Washington, D.C., or New York. That’s why we filed in Texas instead of D.C., because we knew which judge we were going to get.”

Clevenger first sued the FBI for Rich’s devices in 2017.

“I filed a FOIA case, on my own behalf, in New York. The bureau told me they didn’t have Rich’s communications or devices, and the judge dismissed the case. Then documents began to leak out, so we filed a new case in Texas in Sept. 2022 – because frankly, the odds of getting a fair judge in a place like New York or D.C. are slim to none.

“They have gone from saying they didn’t have anything, to acknowledge they’ve got a personal laptop, a work laptop, or DVD, a tape drive, and multiple 302 interview forms. They are hiding things, there’s no question, and that begs the question, ‘Why?’”

Clevenger and his client Brian Huddleston are also asking Judge Mazzant to order the FBI to release its relevant LYNC communications and documents showcasing the extent of its relationship with Crowd Strike, the cybersecurity company the Democratic National Committee hired to “wipe the servers” the day after Rich was killed.

“We asked the judge to order the FBI to search its internal messaging systems, LYNC,” Clevenger explained to WND. “LYNC is used to send instant messages within the FBI and the whole system is completely designed to fail.

“An FBI employee must manually decide that an email or text message is relevant to a particular case and then enter that manually into an index. So, if the bureau wants to hide something, they just don’t put it in the index. No corporation in litigation could ever get away with such a thing. But so far, the courts have allowed the FBI to do this.

“If you sue Exxon, they will demand to search through your emails and IT systems. The FBI is not subject to these searches. The bureau only searches this index of whatever the FBI agents happen to decide to put in there. And we know in the case of Seth Rich, nothing was indexed because they originally searched for records, and nothing showed up.

“FBI agents who’ve been interviewed by the Inspector General said they didn’t realize that LYNC messages were saved. They assume they were automatically deleted. FBI agents were much more honest in their LYNC messages than they would be elsewhere because they mistakenly assumed it would be deleted. We’ve asked the court to order that search and we are waiting for a decision on that.”

After WikiLeaks’ published the trove of Clinton and DNC emails, the FBI asked the DNC to avail its allegedly breached servers to the bureau, which would allow intelligence agencies to identify whether it was hacked, establish the source of the breach and verify whether the trove emails were leaked.

But the DNC refused to cooperate. Instead, as WND reported in 2017, Democrats hired CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, to make a “replica” of all the information on its server and computers, turning over a major law-enforcement investigation to the private sector.

CrowdStrike was the only entity that ever accessed the DNC’s computer systems.

Conspicuously, Federal Election Commission records show that CrowdStrike, an FBI contractor and private cyber security firm, received a $98,849.84 check from the Democratic National Committee the day after slain DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered.

Clevenger and Huddleston have asked the judge to order the FBI to surrender all of its CrowdStrike reports related to the 2016 DNC leaks.

Lawyers for the bureau initially “pretended that I didn’t even request it,” Clevenger said. “I had to make clear to the court, ‘No, I actually asked for these CrowdStrike reports, and they’re ignoring me.’ Then they produced the cover page for three different reports – and that was it, they redacted everything else. So, we’re litigating right now in court to get them to produce more, but they’ve got something to hide.

“This is the only time in the history of the FBI that they allow a purported crime victim, in this case the Democratic National Committee, to hire its own expert to come in and conduct the investigation and then just hand over a report to the FBI, without the FBI ever looking at the computers that were purportedly hacked,” Clevenger said. “And it has never happened since.”

Clevenger warned that Fox News is nearly “as involved in the cover-up as the FBI.”

“Fox News paid for everyone’s silence,” he said. “I begged Fox to hold off settling the case and they paid money through the nose not just to make the case go away and silence everybody. Fox News is the controlled opposition,” he said, contending it’s no surprise when “one Murdoch sat on one of the boards for the Clinton Foundation. The Murdochs are ‘conservative’ as long as it makes them money – they are professionally Republicans.”

When Clevenger is not fighting the Deep State for Seth Rich’s metadata, he is suing private prisons for torturing inmates. His clients are among inmates who were beaten to death while incarcerated and were allowed to rot to death from infection in a prison cell.

“One of my clients had a long history of mental illness and was threatening suicide, covered the window to his jail cell and they just ignored it and he hanged himself.

“If Jim Jordan wanted to hold hearings on the conditions of these prisons, where J6 defendants are now languishing, or on Seth Rich, he could. But he obviously hasn’t.”


IMPORTANT NOTE TO WND READERS: Shortly after Hamas terrorists fired over 5,000 rockets from Gaza into Israel on Oct. 7 and then proceeded to attack the Jewish state by land, sea and air – torturing, burning, beheading and murdering well over a thousand people, including women, children and infants, and wounding and abducting hundreds more – world reaction was, in its own way, almost equally shocking.

For after the biggest one-day mass slaughter of Jews since the Nazi Holocaust, what followed was an outpouring of celebratory demonstrations, unbridled Jew-hatred, deliriously gleeful support for Hamas and bitter condemnation of the nation of Israel. Not just in the Arab-Muslim world, but throughout the Western world as well, including all across America.

Why? What is behind the explosion of anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, pro-terror sentiment in the United States, where Israel has long been one of America’s closest friends and allies? Why are hordes of young “woke” LGBT demonstrators marching in support of Hamas – when Hamas wouldn’t think twice about binding and blindfolding them and throwing them off the roof of a tall building – as they routinely do in the Muslim world?

It turns out there’s one area of agreement that is so powerful, deep-seated and all-consuming that the vast differences between the deranged left and the murderous jihadists melt away into Kumbaya harmony.

All of this and much more is completely exposed in November’s issue of WND’s critically acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine, titled ISRAEL VS. GLOBAL JIHAD: How Jew-hatred, radical Islam and Leftism are pushing us toward World War III. Beyond a deeply insightful dive into why leftists are surging toward radical Islam – which hates and dreams of raping and butchering them – this Whistleblower issue includes fantastic articles by everyone from top Israeli analyst (and former Israel Defense Forces officer) Caroline Glick to Harvest Christian Fellowship’s Pastor Greg Laurie on the current war in Israel and biblical prophecies regarding the End Times … which he says are now upon us.

WHISTLEBLOWER is available in both the popular print edition and a state-of-the-art digital version, either single issues or discounted annual subscriptions.


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This article was originally published by the WND News Center.

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