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  • 2017-05-22 (xsd:date)
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  • Seth Rich's Parents 'Thank' Internet for Spreading Rumor He Leaked Thousands of E-Mails to WikiLeaks? (en)
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  • On 20 May 2017, a Twitter user with the handle @RedPillDropper tweeted a month-old video, using it to bolster a claim that it showed the parents of murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich thanking the Internet for spreading a debunked rumor that Rich leaked tens of thousands of e-mails to the document-dumping web site WikiLeaks just before he was killed: The tweet referred to a now-debunked Fox News story from mid-May 2017 involving Rod Wheeler, a Fox commentator who claims to be a private investigator and former D.C. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) homicide detective. Wheeler told the network that his inside sources at MPD and the FBI informed him Rich had 44,053 emails and 17,761 attachments on his computer, and that he had been in contact with WikiLeaks. He added that his sources told him police and the feds were told to stand down from the murder investigation. The story was picked up and aggregated by multiple web sites, but it only took a few hours for it to fall apart. Wheeler later backtracked on his claims, saying the Fox story wasn't accurate. We have been unable to locate a private detective license under his name in Washington, D.C. or Maryland, where his company, Capitol Investigations, is based. Rich's family did not thank the Internet for spreading the false story. On the contrary, they sent a cease and desist letter on 18 May 2017, threatening to sue Wheeler if he continued to make comments about the case to the media. The family also responded vehemently to the rumor through their spokesman Brad Bauman, saying the claims were false and that the stories were exacerbating their grief. The video supposedly showing Rich's parents thanking people was originally posted to the family's GoFundMe page and uploaded to YouTube on 24 April 2017 — weeks before Wheeler made the claims. In the video, Rich's parents thank people who donated money to the family's campaign to keep the investigation active until the murder is solved: Bauman, the family's spokesman, told us that he and Aaron Rich, Seth Rich's brother, had encouraged Rich's parents to make the video in order to thank folks who had given money to the GoFundMe effort. On the GoFundMe page, Aaron Rich noted that his brother's death has been convenient fodder for conspiracy theories: Everyone from former Georgia representative Newt Gingrich to Fox News pundit Sean Hannity to the Russian government has promoted the baseless story even after it was debunked. Rich was shot at 4:19 a.m. on 10 July 2016, during what MPD investigators suspect was an attempted robbery, based on a string of similar crimes in the Bloomingdale neighborhood in which he lived. He was transported to a nearby hospital, where he passed away from his wounds. (en)
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