The murder of Seth Rich occurred on July 10, 2016, at 4:20 a.m. in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Rich died about an hour and a half after being shot twice in the back. The perpetrators were never apprehended; police suspected he had been the victim of an attempted robbery.
The 27-year-old Rich was an employee of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and his murder spawned several right-wing conspiracy theories, including the false claim, contradicted by the law enforcement branches that investigated the murder, that Rich had been involved with the leaked DNC emails in 2016. It was also contradicted by the July 2018 indictment of 12 Russian military intelligence agents for hacking the e-mail accounts and networks of Democratic Party officials and by the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion the leaked DNC emails were part of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Fact-checking websites like PolitiFact, Snopes, and FactCheck.org stated that the theories were false and unfounded. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post wrote that the promotion of these conspiracy theories was an example of fake news.
Rich's family denounced the conspiracy theorists and said that those individuals were exploiting their son's death for political gain, and their spokesperson called the conspiracy theorists "disgusting sociopaths". They requested a retraction and apology from Fox News after the network promoted the conspiracy theory, and sent a cease and desist letter to the investigator Fox News used. The investigator stated that he had no evidence to back up the claims which Fox News attributed to him. Fox News issued a retraction, but did not apologize or publicly explain what went wrong. In response, the Rich family sued Fox News in March 2018 for having engaged in "extreme and outrageous conduct" by fabricating the story defaming their son and thereby intentionally inflicting emotional distress on them. Fox News reached a seven-figure settlement with the Rich family in October 2020.
Seth Rich
Early life and career
Rich grew up in a Jewish family in Omaha, Nebraska. He volunteered for the Nebraska Democratic Party, interned for Senator Ben Nelson, was active in Jewish outreach, and worked with the United States Census Bureau. In 2011, he graduated from Creighton University with a degree in political science. He moved to Washington, D.C., to work for pollster Greenberg Quinlan Rosner. In 2014, he began working for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) as the voter expansion data director. One of his tasks at the DNC was the development of a computer application to help voters locate polling stations.
Shooting and death
On Sunday, July 10, 2016, at 4:20 a.m., Rich was shot about a block from his apartment at the southwest corner of Flagler Place and W Street Northwest in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
Earlier that night he had been at Lou's City Bar, a sports pub from his apartment, in Columbia Heights, where he was a regular customer. He left when the bar was closing, at about 1:30 or 1:45 a.m. Police were alerted to gunfire at 4:20 a.m. by an automated gunfire locator. Within about one minute after the gunfire, police officers found Rich conscious with multiple gunshot wounds. He was transported to a nearby hospital, where he died over hours after being shot. That he was not shot in the head is seen as evidence against the shooting having been an "assassination". According to police, he died from two shots to the back and may have been killed in an attempted robbery. Residents noted the neighborhood had been plagued by robberies.
Rich's mother told NBC's Washington affiliate WRC-TV: "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 ... They didn't finish robbing him, they just took his life." The police told the family they had found a surveillance recording showing a glimpse of the legs of two people who could be the killers.
Aftermath
On the day after the shooting, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz issued a statement mourning his loss and praising Rich's work to support voter rights. Two days after the shooting, Hillary Clinton spoke of his death during a speech advocating limiting the availability of guns.