Like everything else that seems to touch Donald Trump, it turns out Russia has nosed its way into the alleged Fox News/Trump administration conspiracy to concoct fake news surrounding the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.
In case you’ve forgotten the extremely complicated details of the Seth Rich story, let me say that in my opinion it should be a bigger scandal than any of the sexual harassment scandals – and that’s not because I don’t think sexual harassment is hugely important. But I would argue that if the Rich allegations are true (and they’re pretty damning), a so-called news network colluding with a White House to exploit the tragic death of a young man by spreading fake news, to make Donald Trump look better, is at least as disgusting but more of a serious problem to our democracy.
So here’s a brief recap: Last week, Fox News contributor Rod Wheeler, who is also a private investigator, filed a bombshell lawsuit alleging he was a pawn in a scheme by Republican donor Ed Butowsky, Fox News and the Trump administration to create a false narrative that it was Rich, not Russia, who hacked the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Not surprisingly, we now learn that Russia wanted to promote this conspiracy theory.
Recently, correspondent Andrew Feinberg was fired from Sputnik, a Russian news service, after he refused to help that outlet keep the story alive by asking about it at a press briefing. It was a moral compunction not shared by Fox News’ Sean Hannity, by the way.
Feinberg discussed the matter on MSNBC’s Joy Reid yesterday:
FEINBERG: On Friday, May 26, my last day there, I was called into a meeting with my editor, the guy who supervised me day-to-day, and a man I had never met, an older man who would later identify himself as the bureau chief. Which was interesting because I had never once seen him in Sputnik’s Washington bureau.
I came to this meeting and I was told next week, when the president comes back [from Europe], we’d like you to ask about Seth Rich … during briefings and whatnot and I said no. I said I wasn’t comfortable with that and they said, well, in that case, we have a termination letter for you, and handed it to me right then.
Feinberg told Reid that he had assumed the bureau chief was Russian, judging from the man’s name and accent.
Feinberg further explained that at the time, the Fox News story had already been retracted and there was no evidence to support the theory that Rich’s murder was related to the leaking of DNC documents to Wikileaks.
FEINBERG: I wasn’t comfortable asking questions in a live briefing that would advance a narrative that was not grounded in reality and it’s very troubling, this lawsuit, because it reveals that the Trump administration in the guise of then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer was involved in pushing this now-discredited story.
Now, there's no evidence here that Russia did not decide all on its own or for any reasons connected to Trump that it wanted to promote the Rich conspiracy theory. All 17 U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russia was behind the hacking of the DNC. So it’s no surprise that the country would be eager to seize any opportunity to discredit that conclusion.
But this is yet another instance of Trump’s self-interest aligning with Russia’s.
And now Fox News is in the mix.
Watch Feinberg below, from MSNBC’s August 6, 2017 AM Joy.
Lawsuit alleges FOX created fake news story about Seth Rich
Ex-Sputnik reporter, Andrew Feinberg, joins Joy Reid alleging that he was fired by the Russia-backed outlet because he would not advance a since-retracted story about the slain DNC staffer.