'It's blasted across America': How Fox and Sean Hannity amplified a Russia-fueled conspiracy via Isikoff
This is the fifth part in the Yahoo News “Conspiracyland” series. Read and listen to the first four parts here.
“The narrative has been all along Russia, Russia, Russia,” chimed in co-host Steve Doocy. But this new story could change all of that. Doocy then read Zimmerman’s grabber of a lede: “The DNC staffer who was gunned down on July 10th on Washington, DC streets last July just steps from his home had leaked thousands of internal emails to Wikileaks, law enforcement sources have told Fox News.”
At the same time, it had painful real-world impacts. “I was furious,” said Deborah Sines, then the assistant U.S. attorney in charge of the Rich murder investigation. The Fox News account was, she said, a “complete fabrication” based on “lies” about a supposed FBI forensic report that didn’t actually exist — but that nonetheless forced her to waste time and resources investigating.
The previous episode of “Conspiracyland” reported how Ed Butowsky, a Dallas-based financier and guest commentator on the Fox Business Channel, had played a crucial role in the development of the Fox News story. He had persuaded Mary Rich and her husband, Joel, to let him hire a private detective, Rod Wheeler, on their behalf to investigate their son’s murder.
Over the next two nights, Hannity returned to the story with a special guest, lawyer Jay Sekulow. Hannity didn’t mention, and Sekulow didn’t volunteer, that Sekulow just that week had been hired as a member of President Trump’s legal team in the Russia investigation.
“We have this very strange story now of this young man who worked for the Democratic National Committee, who apparently was assassinated at 4 in the morning, having given WikiLeaks something like 23,000 — I’m sorry, 53,000 — emails and 17,000 attachments,” Gingrich said during one of his Fox appearances that week. “Nobody’s investigating that, and what does that tell you about what was going on? Because it turns out it wasn’t the Russians.
Then the Washington police and FBI officials went public, telling reporters they had no information to support the Fox News claims. In an interview, then acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe says that when he checked with his agents, they said there was nothing to the conspiracy claims about Rich’s death. “There’s no there there,” McCabe says he was told.
But even with the Fox News retraction, the bogus story did not die — thanks once again to the Russian disinformation campaign that had helped fuel the conspiracy theories about Rich in the first place. RT and Sputnik, the Russian government-owned international networks, played up every development in the Rich story as reported by Fox News.
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