August 1, 2017

Investigator Alleges White House Was Behind Fake Fox News Story About Seth Rich Murder

Fox News

Fight disinformation. Get a daily recap of the facts that matter. Sign up for the free Mother Jones newsletter.

Last year, DNC staffer Seth Rich was shot to death near his home in Washington DC. In May, Fox News ran a segment suggesting that Rich had provided Wikileaks with internal DNC emails, and was rubbed out in retaliation. Because, you know, that’s the kind of thing the DNC would do. Sean Hannity was all over this for days and days until Fox finally retracted the story.

Now, private investigator Rod Wheeler, who was a source for the story, is suing Fox. He alleges that he was falsely quoted, and that Fox originally ran the story at the behest of the White House. NPR has the story:

The Fox News Channel and a wealthy supporter of President Trump worked in concert under the watchful eye of the White House to concoct a story about the death of a young Democratic National Committee aide, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday….Wheeler alleges Fox News and the Trump supporter intended to deflect public attention from growing concern about the administration’s ties to the Russian government. His suit charges that a Fox News reporter created quotations out of thin air and attributed them to him to propel her story.

….The lawsuit focuses particular attention on the role of the Trump supporter, Ed Butowsky, in weaving the story….On April 20, a month before the story ran, Butowsky and Wheeler — the investor and the investigator — met at the White House with then-press secretary Sean Spicer to brief him on what they were uncovering. The first page of the lawsuit quotes a voicemail and text from Butowsky boasting that President Trump himself had reviewed drafts of the Fox News story just before it went to air and was published.

Butowski was one of the big Benghazi conspiracy theorists, but as you might expect, he now says was just joshing around about Trump reviewing the story. Spicer says the meeting with Butowski was just some routine stroking of a big donor. Nothing to see here, folks.

But then again, maybe there is:

The trial should be a fun evisceration of Fox News, even if Spicer and Trump don’t end up on the stand. Stay tuned.

¹Nice use of scare quotes here from the Daily Beast.

HERE ARE THE FACTS:

Our fall fundraising drive is off to a rough start, and we very much need to raise $250,000 in the next couple of weeks. If you value the journalism you get from Mother Jones, please help us do it with a donation today.

As we wrote over the summer, traffic has been down at Mother Jones and a lot of sites with many people thinking news is less important now that Donald Trump is no longer president. But if you're reading this, you're not one of those people, and we're hoping we can rally support from folks like you who really get why our reporting matters right now. And that's how it's always worked: For 45 years now, a relatively small group of readers (compared to everyone we reach) who pitch in from time to time has allowed Mother Jones to do the type of journalism the moment demands and keep it free for everyone else.

Please pitch in with a donation during our fall fundraising drive if you can. We can't afford to come up short, and there's still a long way to go by November 5.

payment methods

ONE MORE QUICK THING:

Our fall fundraising drive is off to a rough start, and we very much need to raise $250,000 in the next couple of weeks. If you value the journalism you get from Mother Jones, please help us do it with a donation today.

As we wrote over the summer, traffic has been down at Mother Jones and a lot of sites with many people thinking news is less important now that Donald Trump is no longer president. But if you're reading this, you're not one of those people, and we're hoping we can rally support from folks like you who really get why our reporting matters right now. And that's how it's always worked: For 45 years now, a relatively small group of readers (compared to everyone we reach) who pitch in from time to time has allowed Mother Jones to do the type of journalism the moment demands and keep it free for everyone else.

Please pitch in with a donation during our fall fundraising drive if you can. We can't afford to come up short, and there's still a long way to go by November 5.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate