EXCLUSIVE: Outrage at Julian Assange for implicating murdered DNC staffer in email leak and offering $20k reward - as the victim's parents accuse Wikileaks founder of ‘politicizing this horrible tragedy’
- Seth Rich, an analyst with the DNC. was shot in the back in Washington, D.C. on July 10
- Rich is being linked to the 20,000 leaked emails that brought down close Hillary ally Debbie Wasserman-Schultz - forced out as DNC chairman
- Police suspected a robbery, but he had his wallet, phone and watch
- 'Some are attempting to politicize this horrible tragedy, and in their attempts to do so, are actually causing more harm than good,' a spokesman for Rich's parents told Daily Mail Online
- His unsolved murder has reignited old rumors that Hillary and Bill will stop at nothing when they want to silence someone
- Wikileaks is offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in the murder
The
mystery surrounding the murder of rising Democrat star Seth Rich took a
sudden sinister turn Wednesday with claims that he was responsible for
the email dump that brought down close Hillary Clinton ally Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
Julian
Assange, the head of Wikileaks, the organization that released the
emails, announced a $20,000 reward for information leading to Rich's
July 10 death, hinting that Rich was responsible for leaking the
documents.
Assange's
offer has also added fuel to the flames of conspiracy theories sweeping
the Internet that the Democratic presidential candidate and her husband
Bill were somehow involved in Rich's death.
Commenting
to Daily Mail Online for the family, Brad Bauman said 'Some are
attempting to politicize this horrible tragedy, and in their attempts to
do so, are actually causing more harm than good and impeding on the
ability for law enforcement to properly do their job.'
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Seth Rich, 27, a rising star in the
DNC was shot several times as he walked home in Washington. Anti-Clinton
forces link Rich to the dump of emails that brought down close Hillary
Clinton ally Debbie Wasserman-Schultz
After decades in the national
spotlight Bill and Hillary have amassed enough enemies who are more than
happy to point to the number of Clinton associates who have died before
their time
Wasserman-Schultz
stepped down from her post as head of the Democratic National Committee
on the eve of the party's national convention in Philadelphia. Hillary
Clinton has suggested that Russia was responsible for hacking party
computers and leaking the documents.
But the new theory suggests Rich, who was murdered in what looked like a botched robbery, was behind the leak
Rich,
27, was gunned down on his way home in the affluent Bloomingdale
neighborhood of Washington D.C. last month while on the phone to his
girlfriend.
He
was still alive when he was found but died on his way to the hospital.
Police still have no leads and are offering a $25,000 reward for
information.
Hillary
sought out Rich's parents for a private meeting during a trip to their
hometown of Omaha, Nebraska last week. Rich's father Joel told the Omaha World-Herald that the former First Lady knew a lot about his son and was 'very warm and comforting.'
Rich's body was found on the 2100 block of Flagler Place NW, but he still had his watch, cell phone and wallet on him.
'Some are attempting to politicize this horrible tragedy,' Seth Rich's parents told Daily Mail Online through a spokesperson
'There
had been a struggle. His hands were bruised, his knees are bruised, his
face is bruised, and yet he had two shots to his back, and yet they
never took anything,' his mother Mary told Washington's NBC affiliate.
'They took his life for literally no reason.'
So far, police have uncovered no clues to help solve his July 10 murder.
A police report seen by Daily Mail Online also states the circumstances surrounding Rich's homicide are 'unknown'.
The
mystery has sparked a flurry of theories posted online, including
claims he leaked DNC emails or that he was on his way to speak to the
FBI when he was shot.
Reddit user The_Donald also constructed a timeline that links Rich to the Clintons, as pointed out by Heat Street.
'The
death of this DNC staffer is too suspicious to ignore, especially in
the face of voter fraud allegations against Hillary's campaign… The
Clintons definitely have a long list of unfortunate souls who crossed
the wrong politicians', wrote ClashDaily.com, which describes itself as a website for 'God- and country-loving patriots.'
But
one of Rich's closest friends, Miles Mawby, told the Daily Mail Online
that the idea that Rich was the source who gave the leaked DNC documents
to Wikileaks was 'absolutely absurd.'
'Never
in a million years,' said Mawby, who had known Rich since 2011 and was
with him on the Friday evening before he was killed.
'[People
are] fanning flames of wild rumors from the internet from conspiracy
theorists. It's absolutely absurd. Seth was one of the most dedicated
people I've ever met. His day-to-day work…that got him up in the
morning.'
Mawby said Rich was happy with his job at the DNC and supportive of Clinton's presidential campaign.
Yesterday Wikileaks announced it is
offering a reward -$20,000 - for information leading to a conviction in
the murder case, adding fuel to the flames of conspiracy theories that
the Clintons are somehow involved in Rich's death
On the
Friday before Rich was shot, he met Mawby, 27, out for drinks in the
D.C. suburb of Ballston, Virginia. Mawby said Rich was in good spirits
and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
'We
had a long-overdue night catch up, just the two of us,' he said. 'We
were having fun, catching up. We planned on getting together at some
point in the next week. Everything was absolutely normal
Bauman
said: 'The entire Rich family is so heartened by the outpouring of
support and love that they have felt over the past few weeks as they
continue to come to terms with this terrible tragedy.
'The
family is in constant contact with authorities and thank them for their
extremely thorough investigation. The family believes this matter is
being handled professionally and with the seriousness that it requires.
'The
family welcomes any and all information that could lead to the
identification of the individuals responsible, and certainly welcomes
contributions that could lead to new avenues of investigation.
Julian Assange announced a $20,000 reward for information leading to Rich's July 10 death
Rich's
death - along with four other deaths in recent weeks - have reignited
old rumors that Hillary Clinton and her husband will stop at nothing
when they want to silence someone who could stand in the way of their
political ambition.
On
the face of it, such speculation seems ludicrous, but that doesn't stop
the talk. And after decades in the national spotlight Bill and Hillary
have amassed enough enemies who are more than happy to point to the
number of Clinton associates who have died before their time.
'I'm
not saying the Clintons kill people. I'm saying a lot of people around
the Clintons turn up dead,' Larry Nichols, who worked with the former
First Family before turning against them told Daily Mail Online.
After Fox News' Greta Van Susteren tweeted about the death on July 26 of Mark Weiner, a
Clinton confidante preparing to go see his old friend Bill speak at the
DNC, her Twitter feed was filled with comments suggesting one or both
of the Clintons were somehow responsible. Weiner, who had long suffered
from leukemia, suddenly felt ill and put himself to bed. Within hours he
was dead.
'ANOTHER Clinton 'friend' dies at a young age! Glad they aren't my friends!' tweeted Kathy East.
'Did they find a note, or are they still writing it?' queried Irina Florescu.
'Who doesn't the Clintons bump off? Pure evil,' commented Robin Kay Anderson. 'Did he know too much?' asked Ben Nicola Sr.
Websites with names such as Whatreallyhappened.com, Clintonmemoriallibrary.com and Govtslaves.info
obsessively list the deaths going back decades, desperately trying to
pin them on Bill or Hillary. Most put the total at around 50. Others
list nearly 80. Some go even higher.
They
document people who have supposedly killed themselves or been murdered.
Many have died in plane crashes. Other deaths have been put down to
natural causes.
The lists have circulated on the Internet for years. Now the death Rich, among others, have set the rumors afire again.
'I
can't give a guarantee that everyone on my list was killed deliberately
but they all have the potential,' Michael Rivero, the webmaster of
Whatreallyhappened told Daily Mail Online in an exclusive interview.
'But by the general law of statistics there are just way too many of them.'
Rivero, who also hosts a talk radio show on Republic Broadcasting Network,
goes further than most, listing more than 100 names of people with
connections to the Clintons who have died. Among those deaths he
questions are John F. Kennedy Jr. and a man who, he claims, died of
'overdose of mouthwash' while in the dentist's chair.
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'Just the sheer number raises questions,' he said.
The
political establishment dismisses such talk as conspiracy theory gone
wild. And indeed many of the lists that circulate on the web are poorly
sourced and run by people who see evil in anything the Clintons do
Snopes.com,
a website that covers urban rumors has attempted to debunk the rumors.
It points out that the Clintons' years in power have led them to have
thousands of people who can claim they know them and the number of their
deaths is not out of the ordinary.
Snopes founder David Mikkelson says talk about the Clintons being involved is 'claptrap.'
'In
a frenzied media climate where the Chief Executive couldn't boff a
White House intern without the whole world finding out every niggling
detail of each encounter and demanding his removal from office, are we
seriously to believe the same man had been having double handfuls of
detractors and former friends murdered with impunity?' he wrote.
Mikkelson points to people such as 69-year-old Florence Martin whose
name appears regularly on the Internet lists to prove his point.
Martin, who was murdered in her Texas home in 1994, was not a CIA
accountant, as widely claimed, but a night manager at a convenience
store, he says.
Twenty
years after her death a man was finally convicted and sentenced to life
in prison with no mention of the Clintons at his trial.
WHO ELSE IS ON THE CLINTON DEATH LIST?
The
names on the various Internet lists varies from one website to another,
but these are among those most frequently cited as possible victims of a
vast Clinton conspiracy.
Kevin Ives and Don Henry,
both 17, crushed by a train, August 23, 1987. Their deaths were ruled
accidental, with the medical examiner saying they had fallen asleep on a
railroad line after smoking marijuana, but a grand jury found they had
been murdered before being placed on the tracks. They had allegedly
stumbled on a plot to smuggle drugs and guns from an airport in Mena,
Arkansas that Bill Clinton was said to be involved in as state governor.
Victor Raiser,
53, small plane crash, July 30, 1992. The second finance co-chair of
Bill Clinton's presidential campaign was killed along with his son
during a fishing vacation in Alaska. Campaign press secretary Dee Dee
Myers called Raiser a major player in the organization.
Paul Tully,
48, apparent heart attack, September 25, 1992. A chain-smoking, heavy
drinking political consultant who weighed in at more than 320 lb. Tully
died seven weeks before Clinton's first presidential election win. He
had been political director of the DNC during Clinton's rise. Tully was
on the left of the Democratic Party and usually worked for those who
shared his views, however he agreed to work for Clinton because he was
impressed with his oratory and thought he was the only Democrat who
could beat President George Bush.
Paula Gober,
36, single car accident, December 7, 1992. She was Clinton's
interpreter for the deaf for several years and traveled with him while
he was governor of Arkansas. Her vehicle overturned on a bend, throwing
her 30 feet. There were no witnesses.
Vince Foster, 48, committed
suicide on July 20, 1993. He was an Arkansas lawyer who Bill appointed
as deputy White House counsel when he became president in 1993. It
didn't take long for Foster, 48, to realize he had made a terrible
mistake by accepting the post. He hated the work and fell into a deep
depression. Just six months into the job, his body was found in his car
in Fort Marcy Park, Virginia, a gun in his hand and a suicide note torn
into 27 pieces in the trunk.
Stanley Heard,
47, small plane crash, September 10, 1993. An Arkansas chiropractor
who, according to the book, A Profession of One's Own, treated the
Clinton family, Heard was asked by Bill Clinton to represent the
practice as plans for 'Hillarycare' were being finalized. His attorney
Steve Dickson, was flying him home from a healthcare meeting in
Washington DC just eight months into the Clinton presidency. On the way
to the capital from his home in Kansas, Dickson's small plane developed
problems so he landed in St. Louis and rented another plane. That rented
plane was the one that crashed in rural Virginia, killing both men.
Jerry Parks,
47, shot to death, September 23, 1993. Parks was head of security for
Bill Clinton's headquarters in Arkansas. As he drove home in West Little
Rock, two men in a white Chevrolet pulled alongside his car and sprayed
it with semi-automatic gunfire. As Parks's car stopped a man stepped
out of the Chevy and shot him twice with a 9mm pistol and sped off.
Despite there being several witnesses, no-one was ever arrested. The
killing came two months after Parks had watched news of Vince Foster's
death and allegedly told his son Gary 'I'm a dead man.' His wife Lois
remarried and her second husband, Dr. David Millstein was stabbed to
death in 2006.
Edward Willey Jr, 60,
Willey,
60, was having serious money problems and his wife, a volunteer aide in
the White House, agreed to ask Bill Clinton for a paid job. Their
meeting ended when Clinton allegedly forced himself on her in the Oval
Office, kissing her, fondling her breast and pushing her hand on to his
genitals.
Four
years later Kathleen Willey wrote a book in which she put forward a
theory that the Clintons may have had her husband murdered. She said
after his death, a friend had told her that Ed had confided that he took
briefcases full of cash to the Clintons' base in Little Rock, Arkansas
during Bill's first presidential campaign.
Herschel Friday,
70, small plane crash, March 1, 1994. Friday was an Arkansas lawyer who
Richard Nixon had once considered for the Supreme Court. Friday was
known as a benefactor of Bill Clinton, serving on his campaign finance
committee.
Kathy Ferguson,
37, gun suicide, May 11, 1994. She was the ex-wife of Arkansas State
Trooper Danny Ferguson, who was named in a sexual harassment suit
brought by Paula Jones against Bill Clinton. Ferguson left a note
blaming problems with her fiancé, Bill Shelton. A month later Shelton,
upset about the suicide verdict, killed himself.
Ron Brown, 54,
plane crash, April 3, 1996. Brown was chair of the Democratic National
Committee during Bill Clinton's rise to the presidential nomination and
was rewarded with the cabinet position. He was under a corruption
investigation when his plane slammed into a mountainside in Croatia.
Doctors who examined his body found a circular wound on the top of his
head which led to suspicions that he had died before the plane crashed,
but that theory was later discounted. The crash was attributed to pilot
error.
Charles Meissner,
56, same plane crash as Brown. Meissner was assistant secretary for
international trade and had been criticized for allegedly giving special
security clearance to John Huang, who later pleaded guilty to federal
conspiracy charges for violating campaign finance laws, in a case that
enmeshed the Clinton administration.
Barbara Wise,
48, natural causes, November 29, 1996. Wise, who worked alongside
Brown, Meissner and Huang in the Commerce Department was found dead at
her desk on the day after Thanksgiving 1996. Her death was originally
classified as a homicide but police later said Wise, 48, who had a
history of severe ill health, had died from natural causes. A local TV
station initially quoted an unidentified police source as saying her
body was partially nude and her office was locked, but those reports
were also later denied.
Mary Mahoney was
just 25 when she was gunned down along with two assistants at the
Washington D.C. Starbucks in 1997 where she was night manager. Mahoney, a
lesbian, was also a White House intern and gay rights activist who
reportedly acted as a 'mother-figure' to various women who had allegedly
been sexually harassed by Bill Clinton.
John Ashe,
61, a politician and former president of the United Nations General
Assembly, was pumping iron at his home in Dobbs Ferry, New York on June
22 when he dropped the weight. He died from 'traumatic asphyxiation.
Ashe was about to stand trial in a corruption case for allegedly
receiving $500,000 from billionaire real estate developer Ng Lap Seng.
Ng was involved in a fundraising scandal and named in a 1998 Senate
report for illegally funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to the
DNC during Bill Clinton's presidency. 'During the trial, the prosecutors
would have linked Ashe to the Clinton bagman Ng. It would have been
very embarrassing. His death was conveniently timed,' The New York Post reported.
Mark Weiner,
62, died on July 26. He had been due to be part of the Rhode Island
delegation to the convention but pulled out due to ill health. However,
Weiner, who was suffering from leukemia, still planned to travel to
Philadelphia to see Bill Clinton speak and was dressing for the trip
when he suddenly said he felt ill. Weiner, who raised prodigious amounts
of money for both Clintons, never woke up. Both Bill and Hillary
attended his funeral in Providence last week, with the former president
giving the eulogy, remembering his old pal as 'forever young, forever
exuberant … always just a little too much.'
Victor Thorn,
54, a journalist and strong critic of the couple climbed a mountain
near his State College, Pennsylvania home on his August 1 birthday and
shot himself to death. He wrote a trilogy of books on the Clintons,
devoting one of the books to the number of their contacts who had
mysteriously died
Shawn Lucas,
38, a lawyer who supported Bernie Sanders, was found dead on August 2
on the bathroom floor of his Washington DC apartment. Just a month
earlier he had attempted to serve papers on Wasserman-Schultz in a fraud
case that alleges the party had unfairly favored Hillary Clinton in the
primaries over Sanders. A video of Lucas taking the papers to the DNC's
Washington headquarters has been viewed almost 400,000 times as of
Wednesday morning on YouTube. In it, Lucas, who was said to have been a
Sanders supporter and worked for a company called One Source Process,
calls serving the papers 'the most gratifying thing I have ever
done.' Lucas's mother Susan told Daily Mail Online the family is
currently awaiting results of an autopsy and she does not know why her
son died. 'He was a young man — 38. He was in good health,' she said.
'But these things happen when people in seemingly good health suddenly
die.
The
list of deaths associated with people who had worked with Clinton was
originally drawn up by right-wing radio personality Linda Thompson. She
too died early in May 2009. She was 56 when she took an overdose of
medication prescribed for a gastric bypass surgery she had had more than
a decade earlier.
Anyone
with information about the attack is asked to call police on
202-727-9099 or text anonymous information to the department's tip line
at 50411.
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