Seth Rich Material To Be Destroyed by Duram April 28!, 3569

Mr. Durham:
On October 12, 2020, I sent a letter to you and then-Attorney General William Barr about the need to preserve evidence related to the origins of the “Russian collusion” investigation. Neither you nor anyone else at the Department of Justice responded to the letter.
Yesterday I learned that the evidence is due to be destroyed not later than April 28, 2021 pursuant to a protective order. I urge you again to take steps to secure the evidence and prevent its destruction, in no small part because I believe the public has a right to know what it reveals. I cannot discuss the exact nature of the evidence, however, because of the restrictions in the protective order.
If another lawyer informed me about the evidence that was relevant to one of my cases, I cannot imagine sticking my head in the sand the way you have. Like President Trump, I’ve come to suspect that you and Mr. Barr were acting in bad faith, and that you appeased President Trump with the pretense of a legitimate investigation even as you were “running out the clock.” That said, please feel free to prove me wrong.
Ty Clevenger
Now in the interest of total fairness, there are some additional updates to this story.
On Oct. 7, 2020, NPR – specifically NRP affiliate station, WAMU, the radio station of American University in D.C., ran a story that a judge ordered Twitter to unmask someone who claimed to be an FBI employee who sent a fabricated FBI document to FOX News that led them to report inaccurately about Seth Rich’s murder.
NPR’s reporting of the content of the forged document is sketchy and contains disputed information itself.
“The ruling could lead to the identification of the person behind the Twitter name @whyspertech. Through that account, the user allegedly provided forged FBI materials to Fox News. The documents falsely linked Rich's killing to the WikiLeaks hack of Democratic Party emails in the lead-up to the 2016 election.”
First of all, we have followed the Seth Rich more closely than most and I don’t remember ever reading an assertion that WikiLeaks, itself, was accused of doing the so-called “hacking” of the DNC emails. It was either falsely attributed to a hacker named “Guicifer” or Russian intelligence operatives.
Of course, Bill Binney proved both of those options were not possible, long before NPR ran this story. So clouding the truth of this story are incorrect assertions from both sides of it.
So Fox apparently took the bait - an allegedly forged FBI document from an anonymous source – that stated that between Jan. 2015 through late May 2016, Seth Rich sent London-based documentary producer Gavin MacFayden, a WikiLeaks higher-up, some 44,053 DNC emails.
In other words, if this purported FBI whistleblower document had been real, it would have proven that (A) Seth Rich was in direct contact with WikiLeak’s leadership; and (B) this would have disproven a previous denial by the FBI that they had never investigated Seth Rich’s murder was a lie.
So that’s why the story was so tempting to FOX. I’m not excusing how FOX News handled the story from that point on.
When they realized the document was a fake, they should have retracted the story and apologized. However, according to the NPR story:
“The late Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes used to boast (incorrectly) that the network had never had to retract a story.
“Ailes told colleagues he saw corrections as a sign of weakness rather than a duty. He was forced out more than a year ago during a building sexual harassment scandal.”
That’s why when we get a story wrong, we admit it and correct it right away. Just admit you made a mistake and move on. Everyone knows that even the best reporters occasionally make a mistake. Admitting it, enhances one’s credibility, not diminishes it!
And that’s why the Rich family successfully sued FoxNews, and their sources.
However, to my knowledge, NPR has never investigated the claims of Bill Binney that the metadata connected to the DNC emails shows that the so-called hack of the emails originated from the Eastern Time Zone of the United States, and the speed of the downloads far exceeded the known internet speeds available in Washington, D.C. at the time.
So, the sordid tale of Roger Ailes refusing to retract a story is a stain on Fox, but that does not mean the Seth Rich murder story is settled, and does not justify the MSM, in general, tagging it as a far-fetched conspiracy tale, either.
We hope that Ty Clevenger’s efforts to preserve the documents the Justice Department has on the Seth Rich case bear fruit, and all those records are preserved. Why not. It costs the government practically nothing. However, my reporter’s intuition tells me that certain folks cannot afford to let that cat get out of the bag ever again.
So, I’ll believe that Seth Rich’s death was a simple robbery gone bad just as soon as the purveyors of that conspiracy theory address the simple hard facts that so far indicate that the so-called “hack” was actually done from within the DNC building, itself. And the fact that FoxNews made a mistake and took the fake news bait offered by a yet-to-be-disclosed Twitter person does not change that one seminal public fact.
I’m still reporting from just outside the citadel of world freedom. Good day.