Was Seth Rich Murdered by the Russians, the Democratic Elite, or the Democratic Base?
11/07/2017
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The Washington DC police department currently claims a closure rate of 70% for homicides in 2016, so it’s not too surprising that the gunning down of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich on the night of July 10, 2016 has yet to be solved.

Rich was shot twice in the back. Nothing was stolen from him, although an attempt may have been made to take his watch.

He survived long enough to talk to emergency responders, but what he told them, if anything, about his assailants (cops seem to believe there were two) is unknown. The most obvious question for somebody to have asked the dying man was the number and race of his assailants. But I can’t find anything in the media on that. If he said he’d been attacked by two white men, that would add interest to the many conspiracy theories that have arisen since then.

If he had said he’d two blacks, that would suggest it was random.

There supposedly exists never-released surveillance video tape showing the legs of the assailants. How were they dressed: in basketball shorts and Nikes? Or were they dressed like the man in the Black Cube advertisement?

Former DNC Chair Donna Brazile writes in her new memoir:

I felt some responsibility for Seth Rich’s death. I didn’t bring him into the DNC, but I helped keep him there working on voting rights. With all I knew now about the Russians’ hacking, I could not help but wonder if they had played some part in his unsolved murder.

Besides that, racial tensions were high that summer and I worried that he was murdered for being white on the wrong side of town. [My friend] Elaine expressed her doubts about that, and I heard her.

The FBI said that they did not see any Russian fingerprints there.

So it appears the Democrats immediately came up with a conspiracy theory that the Russians did it, which is ironic …

Rich’s murder on July 10 was in the midst of a string of racist attacks on police by Black Lives Matter enthusiasts in Dallas (late July 7) and Baton Rouge (July 17), along with a number of non-lethal shootings of whites by blacks presumably inspired by President Obama’s July 7th denunciation of the police shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling.

So, there would be political incentives for the DC power structure to cover up crucial details, such as the race of the attackers, of what might have been another black-on-white murder. For example, it’s possible that a dying Seth Rich told somebody that the attackers were black youths, but that has been kept hushed up from the public for the usual Coalition of the Fringes reasons.

It’s not unknown for youngish white male Democrats walking the streets of gentrifying neighborhoods to be attacked by blacks for larcenous or racist reasons.

Here’s liberal journalist Brian Beutler describing to NPR getting shot by a mugger for not handing over his cell phone in DC’s Adams-Morgan district in 2008:

BEUTLER: A friend of mine [named Matt] and I were walking around late at night on a weekday. We took a turn onto a – sort of a side street that’s poorly lit and had a history of gang violence on it. And it was in our neighborhood and I’d been up and down it, you know, hundreds of times without incident. But this time, we were approached by a couple of African-American teens, I think – both, you know, wearing hoodies and blue jeans. And they said they wanted our phones and we resisted a little bit, but not for too long before one of them pulled out a gun, handed it to his friend and shot me. I fell to the ground. They ran a way. But I got up and I thought that I was OK. And when I realized that it had been an actual gunshot…

HEADLEE: As opposed to rubber bullets.

BEUTLER: As opposed – yeah. I thought maybe this is a prank. If I fell down from what I thought was a gunshot, but then got right back up, it’s probably not a real gun, because if it was a real gun I’d be laid out. And so we decided this couldn’t have been real and we were probably in a little bit of denial, had a little bit of – a little bit too much adrenaline working against our reason. But after a few steps up the street, it was clear to me that I had been shot. I saw my shoulder bleeding. And that’s when we started running ’cause we knew there was kids around with a gun, that they didn’t get the phones that they said that they were after and they were willing to shoot people. So we started running. My friend called the ambulance.

HEADLEE: While you are running.

BEUTLER: While we were running. And we got a couple blocks before I realized that I wasn’t just suffering from a shoulder wound. There something else wrong. I got very weak and couldn’t run anymore – slumped down onto the sidewalk and just tried to stay conscious. The ambulance arrived quickly. They revived me by, you know, injecting fluid into my veins, picked up my blood pressure and got me to the hospital very quickly. The doctors told me I needed to go into surgery to have my spleen removed…

HEADLEE: …Because it had a bullet in it.

BEUTLER: It had – yeah. It had been ruptured. I had also sustained injuries to my lung, my diaphragm, my stomach, my kidney. And when I woke up, I didn’t realize how extensive the surgery they were going to do was because I thought, well, if they have to take out my spleen, that’s just one organ. People get their appendixes removed all the time without needing long hospital stays or long recuperation times. But it turns out that when you have internal damage, they basically cut me open down the abdomen and the extent of the surgery led to me being sort of out of commission for health reasons for three to six months.

Years later, Beutler’s attempted murderer had never been brought to justice.

I don’t know the surname of the Matt who was with Beutler in 2008, but in 2011 journalist Matthew Yglesias was knocked down by two blacks out Polar Bear Hunting. He wasn’t robbed, just victimized in the Knock-Out Game.

It’s worth noting that it took Yglesias two years to admit publicly that his assailants were black.

[Comment at Unz.com]
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