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On 10 July 2016, Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Conrad Rich was shot and killed just after 4 AM in Washington, D.C. Rich's tragic death was undoubtedly destined to feed a number of conspiracy theories due to his line of work and the proximity of the 2016 presidential election. Among those theories were myriad conflicting claims that Rich was covertly working to expose election fraud, collaborating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on an unspecified investigation, or a recycled assertion that he was imminently to testify against Hillary Clinton when he was gunned down. (No ongoing court case we could locate would involve any such testimony from Rich.) On 13 July 2016, the notoriously unreliable conspiracy-flogging outlet WhatDoesItMean.com hoovered up the fresh tragedy as part of what appeared to be a series of articles capitalizing on recent deaths to drive conspiracies about Hillary Clinton. Describing the 27-year-old Rich as a top DNC official, the site blared that he was bumped off by a Clinton hit team: In short, WhatDoesItMean.com held that Rich was under the impression he was to meet with FBI agents (at the bizarre hour of 4:00 AM) but in actuality had been set up for a fatal encounter with hit men working on behalf of Hillary Clinton. The site correctly quoted a D.C. Metro police press release, as we contacted the department and confirmed that release contained all known information about Rich's death: Police reported that Rich was conscious and breathing at the time of the shooting. Had he any information about his murder having been a set-up, he likely would have conveyed such to attending officer before he died of his wounds shortly thereafter. Contemporaneous news reports suggested that Rich's murder was indeed perplexing, as elements of the incident were dissonant with the appearance of a robbery gone awry: Immediately after that portion, the article quoted the elder Rich regarding the moments prior to his son's death. According to Joel Rich, Seth was on the phone with his girlfriend when the shooting started, and Rich indicated to his girlfriend that he was nearly home and not headed out for an FBI meeting implausibly scheduled in the middle of the night on a Saturday: According to Washington, D.C. television station WUSA, a string of robberies had occurred in the area where Rich was killed, and police believe that spate of crime was likely connected with his death. The station also reported that the 27-year-old staffer worked in voter expansion, helping people find their polling places; Rich's age and the relatively minor scope of his duties made him an unlikely linchpin in a conspiracy involving election fraud or any purported testimony against Hillary Clinton. The young staffer had only been employed with the DNC, where he was a Voter Expansion Data Director, since 2014, making his position and tenure an unlikely match-up with possession of crucial information for which he was supposedly killed. Metropolitan Police Department spokesperson Alice Kim said there is no indication that Seth Rich's death is connected to his employment at the DNC. Slate also noted that the conspiracy theory version of Rich's death was lacking in both evidence and sense, yet WikiLeaks has since fanned the flames of speculation by offering a $20,000 reward for information about Rich's killer: Rich's hometown newspaper, the Omaha World-Herald, also observed the lack of any substance to such rumors: A spokesman for the Rich family said that people attempting to politicize this horrible tragedy are causing more harm than good: Rich was the second deceased individual connected to Clinton by WhatDoesItMean.com and the third inaccurately reported as endangered by the candidate. The same outlet falsely claimed hacker Guccifer (Marcel Lazăr Lehel) was missing and presumed dead after he purportedly hacked into Clinton's e-mail, and just prior to that the site claimed former UN official John Ashe had been murdered on the eve of his providing scheduled testimony against Clinton. Guccifer was confirmed alive and well by officials at the facility in which he was housed, and a federal prosecutor's office affirmed Ashe's legal troubles were in no way connected to Clinton. A common thread between the three rumors was a blogger known by the nom de plume Sorcha Faal. RationalWiki describes Faal's WhatDoesItMean.com conspiracy site as sensational and outrageous: While it's true police maintain an open investigation into Seth Rich's death, the claim connecting him to Hillary Clinton was the third of its sort to emerge from the same conspiracy-monger in mid-2016. All those rumors were variations on the long-circulating (and false) body bags claims that the Clintons habitually do away with once-loyal associates turned political liabilities. Prior to publishing the trio of Clinton-related fabrications, the same site and blogger held that President Obama had ordered the military to nuke the city of Charleston (which didn't happen), that Rear Admiral Rick Williams was fired because he revealed Obama's purchase of a mansion in Dubai (Williams was actually terminated for misconduct), and that Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama were enmeshed in a potentially conflict-starting dispute over the practices of the Monsanto agribusiness corporation.
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