As recently recognized by two prominent New York Times columnists, the right wing in this country is populated by some truly awful human beings. Two of them, Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi, are firmly entrenched in Donald Trump’s “inner circle.” Because they both are regarded as operating on the “fringe” of politics, dwelling in a world of imagined conspiracies that generally tend to fester just outside the ambit of “respectable” news and discourse, the real malevolence and far-reaching harm of their actions are given a sort of “pass” by our corporate media. The thinking almost seems to be that since no “reasonable” person takes them seriously, the harm they commit is less deserving of our censure and revulsion.
For the parents of a 27-year old Democratic staffer named Seth Rich, though, the harm caused by these gleeful charlatans, and their pro-Trump enablers run amok, was very real, as these two practiced liars danced upon the dead body of their son.
Russian hackers weren’t the ones behind the theft of Democratic emails that upended the 2016 presidential race, conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi told his InfoWars fans last year. Instead, Corsi said, Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich had stolen the emails and was murdered in revenge for the heist.
But Corsi was lying. In an email to Trump confidante Roger Stone in 2016, Corsi acknowledged that hackers were behind the email theft, according to newly released messages.
After the Rich family had to endure the trauma of the July 2016 death of their son (likely occurring as a result of an attempted robbery in Washington D.C. gone bad) the opportunistic Stone, Corsi, and others (including Newt Gingrich) decided to it would be swell to cause the Rich family some more pain, to assist the election of their friend, Donald Trump. So they and their friends in right-wing media concocted and pushed a story out of whole cloth, all in an effort to implicate and impugn the candidacy of Hillary Clinton: Their fiction suggested that Seth Rich had been responsible for disclosing Democratic Party emails to Wikileaks—the same emails that both Stone and Corsi (and likely several others) knew had been hacked by the Russians—and as a consequence was deliberately murdered (presumably by nefarious Democrats … from somewhere).
This is the same type of malicious crew that came up with the “Vince Foster” smear against Clinton and the “birther” smears against President Barack Obama. It had worked before, propelling them and their poison into the limelight, so why not try it again?
In his InfoWars posts and a series of YouTube videos, Corsi portrayed Rich as a disaffected supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who stole the emails to get revenge against the DNC and paid for it with his life. Corsi wrote Rich had clearly been “implicated in breaches of email systems.” The young staffer was, according to Corsi, the “likely perpetrator.
The Seth Rich smear took off in the right-wing universe, on the tip of Sean Hannity’s forked tongue at every turn. We now have clear evidence that these creeps knew they were lying from the outset. To Corsi and Stone, Rich’s parents, distraught over these phony media reports (which were amplified by Fox News and other so-called “standard” sources of right-leaning swill), were just collateral damage along the way.
In an August 2, 2016 email, made public Tuesday in draft court papers prepared by Mueller’s office, Corsi told Stone that “hackers” were behind the WikiLeaks releases.
But they kept up the smear of Seth Rich well into 2017 and 2018. As noted by Will Sommer, writing for the Daily Beast:
Corsi’s biggest push for the Seth Rich conspiracy theory came in his 2017 series for Alex Jones’ InfoWars, where Corsi worked as a Washington bureau chief.
Rich’s death was effectively turned into a meme by the right wing of this country. As Olivia Nuzzi put it in New York Magazine:
He was reborn a symbol of American political corruption, his memory hijacked by activists and conspiracy theorists who perceived in his death an opportunity, first to hurt Hillary Clinton, and then, after the election, to push back against the idea that Russia hacked the DNC to help elect Donald Trump.
This is how the Rich family described the nightmare they were forced to endure because of Stone, Corsi and others of their ilk, back in 2017:
Imagine living in a nightmare that you can never wake up from. Imagine having to face every single day knowing that your son was murdered. Imagine you have no answers — that no one has been brought to justice and there are few clues leading to the killer or killers. Imagine that every single day, with every phone call you hope that it’s the police, calling to tell you that there has been a break in the case.
Imagine that instead, every call that comes in is a reporter asking what you think of a series of lies or conspiracies about the death. That nightmare is what our family goes through every day.
The Rich family is suing for these smears and thus couldn’t comment for the Daily Beast story linked above. Corsi, of course, had no comment.
It’s hard to fathom what kind of twisted and hate-filled belief systems serve to motivate these people, but the fact that they are a welcome presence in this administration should be a loud and urgent alarm. Corsi’s previous claim to fame was propagating the Swift Boat lies that sank John Kerry’s candidacy in 2004. The incessant repetition of those wholesale, televised smears in places like Ohio directly resulted in the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004. As a result of that re-election, this country experienced the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and thousands of Americans who might otherwise be with us right now died pointlessly in a now largely ignored and forgotten country called Iraq.
Bad people who worm their way into the highest echelons of our government can hurt us all. And Stone and Corsi are not just “fringe.” They are not just “nutty” or “wacky.” What they are is very simple.
They are truly bad people.