When 27-year-old Omaha native Seth Rich was killed in the early hours of July 10, 2016 in Washington, D.C., it was tragic. From what evidence there is, Rich was attacked by two men and shot and killed during whatever conflict ensued. Rich had been living in D.C. working as a staffer for the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Soon after Rich’s death, the MAGA world, which is tied to the existing anti-everything-Clintons world of conspiracy, began the rumor that Rich was not the casualty of a botched robbery (as literally every legitimate investigation has shown to be the case), but assassinated. Who would assassinate a DNC staffer? Hillary Clinton, said the conspiracy theorists. Why? According to these sleuths, Clinton and her deep-state team knew Rich had leaked the cache of emails that Wikileaks seemed to strategically leak every time Donald Trump talked about grabbing a woman’s “pussy,” or any other fact about Donald Trump as a person came to light.
The right-wing media outlets of the country ran with the evidence-free rumors that Rich was a whistleblower martyr in the battle against the deep state. Helped along by manufactured Russian disinformation, Fox News and others pushed and promoted every faceless conspiracy without evidence in such a blatant job of political hackery that Rich’s parents were forced to sue and received an undisclosed settlement from Fox News for its lying.
Rolling Stone magazine is now reporting on how the MAGA conspiracy world, like the white supremacist and Neo-Nazi world, has infiltrated areas of society that actually tip the scales of justice in cases like Rich’s. According to a new report profiling federal prosecutor Deborah Sines, there was a MAGA-sized obstacle in her pursuit of justice for Rich.
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Sines spoke with Rolling Stone about how the only witness the police had—a woman who had been walking her dog late at night and reportedly saw two men fleeing the area where Rich was murdered—was doxxed, and all of her information was put out for the public to see. Because it was not public knowledge that there was a potential witness in the first place, Sines suspected that someone on the inside—possibly within the Metro D.C. police—was responsible for this violation.
Seth Rich conspiracy theorist Matt Couch stretched the theory into the idea that Rich and his brother, Aaron Rich, were the leakers and were paid by Wikileaks for the emails, and that's why Seth Rich was murdered. Evidence? There isn’t any. But Couch was the person who wrote a blog post in November 2017 outing the D.C. police’s secret witness, claiming that he—random guy named Matt Couch—had tried to investigate her, but that she didn’t want to respond to him “or his team.” Considering Couch had mostly zero evidence for virtually everything he ever said, where did he get this very real information?
Sines was tipped off that a man going by the name “Blue” and using the anonymous Twitter account @ThinBlueLR seemed to be the source of the doxxing. Blue was big buds with Couch and a part of Couch’s America First Media Group investigators. The Blue account was everything you might imagine a Trump-supporting, anti-Black Lives Matter bigot’s account would be. But Blue’s twitter account also pushed a lot of unfounded information supporting the conspiracy theory that Rich was killed by the Clinton cabal of secret assassins.
That same tipster pointed Sines to an interview Couch did with Blue where Blue said all kinds of crazy stuff, including:
“They will kill people!” Blue interjected. “They killed Seth Rich. They’ve killed a lot of other people.” He went on, “They will fucking assassinate people.” Democrats, Blue said, will stuff a ballot box and steal an election “right in front of you and say, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ They will do that fucked-up shit in every Democrat-run city.”
Unfortunately for Blue, Couch, like most MAGA narcissists, is mostly interested in self-aggrandizing. The tipster pointed out to Sines that at one point in the interview, Couch called “Blue” Doug, and also mentioned that he had been an “officer of the year.” It became very easy to figure out from there that “Blue” was Douglas Berlin, a cop in the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. Sines was forced to report Berlin to the police department. When the D.C. Police Internal Affairs officials came to Berlin and told him he was having his law enforcement powers “revoked,” Berlin got all “It’s the First Amendment. I’ll say whatever the hell I want to say,” and subsequently quit the force.
it seems that Berlin’s offense was not that he publicly doxxed a witness in a murder investigation in order to serve his bogus theories on Hillary Clinton, it was Internal Affairs having to hear and read Berlin’s invective that got him iced, with a suspension that would have likely only lasted 30 days. But Berlin, like many MAGA heads, seems to be a zealot and didn’t want these things to go any further. Peeling the onion of moral bankruptcy and the abuse of power in a narcissist like Berlin is always intolerable to the guilty party.
The sad aspect to all of it is that like every other idiotic conspiracy theory, the real evidence and the real issues get lost. The Clinton campaign emails were not damning in any criminal way. It wasn’t like she talked about holding onto nuclear secrets while she played golf with every foreign espionage actor in creation. In fact, the most damning aspects of the emails were in regards to the more progressive wing of the political field, as the emails showed Clinton’s influence and power over the Democratic establishment at the time. This wasn’t a surprise to anyone paying attention to the Democratic Party over the last 40 years. And while many people felt it proved a conspiracy against Sen. Bernie Sanders at the time, that knock on Clinton’s campaign didn't make enough of a dent to change her primary victories over Sanders.
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