The Epoch Times reports on the continuing efforts by the FBI to hide the contents of Seth Rich’s computer, and while I am not sure why, the reasonable assumption is that to disclose this material would, as a number of experts have long contended, prove that Mueller’s claim that the DNC computer was hacked by Russians was of a piece with the entire nonsensical and disproven claims that Russia conspired to defeat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Since it has been several years since focus was on the murder of Seth Rich and the publication by Julian Assange of the efforts inside the DNC to see that Hillary was the party’s presidential candidate, a summary look at the details is warranted.

Seth Rich was a DNC staffer who was mysteriously murdered on July 10, 2016, in Washington, D.C. after having been shot twice in the back. None of the valuable items in his possession seem to have been stolen. That would seem to rule out robbery. He had no known enemies and the murder occurred early in the morning (4:20 a.m.) in a safe neighborhood of the city. No one was ever arrested or prosecuted for the crime. There were no known witnesses to the murder. Nor to my knowledge were any suspects ever named. Local law enforcement nevertheless suggested his murder was part of a botched robbery. Six days after the murder, Wikileaks published over 19,000 emails and 8,000 attachments from the DNC files. In November of that year, they published over 8,000 more emails from the files. The emails showed that party officials favored Clinton over rival Bernie Sanders.

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, long embroiled in a lengthy effort to avoid extradition to the U.S. from the U.K., has refused steadfastly to name the source of this material but has hinted on Dutch television that it was Seth Rich. He has repeatedly said the Russian government was not the source.

Persons familiar with such things have examined the rate of data transmission, inter alia, and concluded the DNC system was not hacked by outsiders. Instead, they contend that the files were copied to a storage device like a thumb drive and transmitted to Assange’s Wikileaks.

The usual MSM and lefty internet sites dismissed these claims as “fake news” and the claimants as “conspiracy theorists.” Robert Mueller seems to have played along with them by indicting a number of Russian intelligence agents for hacking these files. If this were intended to cover up the truth it would be a convenient way to do it, for it is extremely unlikely any of these agents would appear here to contest the allegations in the indictment. (This was not the first time the Russian Collusion fairytale was fanned by a Mueller stunt like this. Mueller indicted a number of Russian firms and individuals for attempting to influence the 2016 election. Only one showed up to contest the charges, Concord Management and Consulting, and the Department of Justice dropped the charges against it.) 

After Rich’s murder, on March 15, 2018, a source provided to the FBI information and material extracted from the computer. The FBI originally claimed it never had possession of Rich’s laptop nor any information from it. Years later (in 2020) after receipt of this material, however, the agency backtracked and admitted it had thousands of files from Rich’s computer. Brian Huddleston sued under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain disclosure of those documents.

On September 29, U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant ordered the Bureau to produce them in 14 days, dismissing the argument that that to release them would present a clear invasion of the Rich family privacy interests.  How weak was the Bureau’s defense? Judge Mazzant noted “Pointedly, the FBI cites no case law for the proposition that survivors of the deceased have a privacy interest in information related to the deceased’s favorite music or relationship history.” He said that cases relating to autopsies, death scene photographs, and other materials from a person’s final moments” were inapplicable.”

The FBI filed a new motion asking Judge Mazzant to reverse his order and argues that in the event he does not, it will need 66 years to produce that information.

Ty Clevenger, Huddleston’s lawyer disputes the FBI’s claims:

"If the court overrules the FBI’s motion, the FBI wants to produce records at a rate of 500 pages per month. At that rate, it will take almost 67 years just to produce the documents, never mind the images and other files,” Ty Clevenger, a lawyer representing Huddleston, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“After dealing with the FBI for five years, I now assume that the FBI is lying to me unless and until it proves otherwise. The FBI is desperately trying to hide records about Seth Rich, and that begs the question of why.”

For certain, the FBI stall is not only to protect Mueller. The claim that the DNC was “hacked” was bruited about by then-President Obama, the FBI, the Department of Homeland security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and it was done before it ever received a report from Crowd Strike on the DNC server images. Mueller claimed that the DNC hacks took place between May 25 and June 1, 2016. Crowd Strike’s sensors were on the DNC’s network beginning on May 1 of that year, and they report that there was no indication of any intrusion on the network after that May 1 date. This strongly suggests to me that the “conspiracy theorists” were right when they claimed the leak of the DNC network was an inside job. It may well not have been Seth Rich who did it, but, whether it was he or not, why is the FBI trying so hard to keep what has been in its possession for over four years a secret?