The family of slain DNC staffer Seth Rich is suing Fox News over its false reporting that Rich – not Russian hackers – was behind the leak of DNC emails to WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign. Sean Hannity has especially promoted the baseless conspiracy theory. DEVELOPING.

ABC News broke the story:

The family of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, who was killed in 2016, has filed a lawsuit against Fox News, an investigative reporter and one of the network’s frequent guests over a story about Rich and allegations that he was involved in a conspiracy, according to the lawsuit.

Rich was shot and killed in Washington, D.C., in July 2016. Police said he was shot several times in the back and later died at a local hospital. Rich was 27 years old and worked as a voter-expansion data director for the DNC at the time.

The May 16, 2017, Fox News article, which allegedly contained “false and fabricated facts,” according to the lawsuit, fueled conspiracy theories that Rich was murdered in connection with a massive WikiLeaks data dump of 20,000 DNC emails days after his death.

Sean Hannity is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit, nor is he mentioned in ABC's story. But he continued promoting the fake news, even after Fox retracted the story and the Rich family pleaded with him to stop. Hannity is still suggesting that Wikileaks did not get the emails from Russia (though he seems to have stopped smearing Seth Rich) despite the fact that the intelligence community found that the Russian government had “directed” the hacking.

However, the complaint is very, very damning in its portrait of collusion between Fox News and a Republican operative.

I’ll have more on this once I have had the chance to read and digest the full complaint.

Meanwhile, the complaint is embedded below for your own review. Let me know your thoughts and observations, as it’s very meaty and I could easily miss something!

(Hannity image via screen grab)