A former Fox News contributor which accuses the network, Fox, of working with the White House to peddle fake news about the murder of Seth Rich. Seth Rich was an aide at the Democratic National Committee who was fatally shot in Washington, D.C., one year ago. In May of this year, Fox News published an explosive piece online headlined “DC Murder Mystery: Slain DNC Staffer was Wikileaks’ Source, Say Investigators.” The article claimed that Rich—not the Russians—provided WikiLeaks with internal emails from the DNC. But within weeks, Fox retracted the story.
Now the only person quoted in the piece, Fox contributor and retired D.C. police officer Rod Wheeler, is claiming Fox knowingly used made-up quotes from him. And that’s not all. The lawsuit also alleges direct White House involvement in the story. In the lawsuit, the former police detective, Wheeler, claims he was used as a pawn in a plan by the White House to, “shift the blame from Russia and help put to bed speculation that President Trump colluded with Russia in an attempt to influence the outcome of the presidential election,” unquote. At the time, Wheeler was being paid to investigate the Rich killing by a Trump donor in Texas named Ed Butowsky. The lawsuit also claims Wheeler received a text message from Butowsky saying, quote, “Not to add any more pressure but the president just read the article. He wants the article out immediately”.
Marcy Wheeler talking:
what’s important about the White House involvement is that when the story first came out, in May, Sean Spicer was asked, “Did you have any involvement in this?” And he denied it, very aggressively, to NBC. And then, yesterday, he was quoted as confirming that he was involved prior to the actual release of the story. So all of a sudden, now that Spicer is losing his job at the White House, his story has changed. And he has confirmed
– Sean Spicer in May. In fact, he had had a meeting in April with Butowsky and with Wheeler,
so, all of a sudden, his story has changed. And that is, I think, one of the most important parts of the lawsuit. I mean, it’s important for people to remember that a lawsuit is just a lawsuit, and you can make any kinds of claims in that that you want, although Wheeler claims to have documentation of Butowsky, who is the donor, of the Fox journalist involved, both of them admitting that they effectively invent—attributed these quotes to him when they weren’t his quotes. He claims to have his own quotes that he gave to the journalist, which were scrapped in favor of these ones, which basically said that the DNC or D.C. government had thwarted the investigation into Seth Rich’s murder, and also said that Rich’s computer had evidence that he was in communication with WikiLeaks. So those are the two invented quotes. That’s what the—that’s what the gist of the lawsuit is about. Wheeler said, “You invented these quotes. You attributed them to me. Even after retracting the story, you have not retracted the association between me and those quotes.” And so, what he’s asking for is compensation for having been defamed by Fox News because those quotations, which have been discredited, are still there in his name, and he never said them.
– Rod Wheeler, the former police detective, got from Butowsky, if this is true, the donor, the longtime Trump supporter and donor, that said the president has read this, and he wants this to be published.
this is a really well-written lawsuit to capture the attention of the press. At the very beginning of the lawsuit, they start with this text. The idea is that these quotations, which were not Wheeler’s, he claims, these quotations ended up in a story attributed to him because the president wanted them there, because the president wanted to push back. And again, the lawsuit makes it very clear. This story came out in the wake of the Jim Comey firing. So, the story gets started back in February. It’s kind of churning along, all along the way. Jim Comey gets fired. And within days, Fox News presents this story trying to create an entirely different narrative about Russia’s involvement and Seth Rich’s involvement in the leaked emails to WikiLeaks. And so, it’s a response, allegedly, to the Jim Comey firing. It is an attempt to present an alternative story.
Again, it’s another lie that came from at least the White House, or at least the involvement of the White House, about the role of Russia in getting Trump elected. And Butowsky, at least—this is the donor from Texas—Butowsky, at least in his texts—he’s now claiming he was joking, but at least in his texts, he said that the president had already seen the story and was pushing to get the story on the air on Fox News. So, if Butowsky’s texts are right—and I suspect he may one day be put under oath by somebody like Robert Mueller—if those texts are right, then it’s another incident where Donald Trump personally involved in trying to rebut this—the intelligence community’s findings about Russia involvement in getting him elected.
Rod Wheeler. it’s important to remember that he kind of went along with the story, so he’s not 100 percent credible, but he has a lot of documentation for what he alleges in his lawsuit. And Butowsky, meanwhile, is just saying, “Hey, I was joking.”
The significance, again, is that this is—this is a story that Fox News invented about a guy who got murdered. They retracted the story, but they have not retracted the quotes. And it’s interesting, in the lawsuit, it makes it very clear that the journalist involved and Butowsky both said that they had gotten the substance of those quotes from some guy at the FBI that they didn’t name. Wheeler suggests that that FBI guy was just invented, which, if that’s right, it would sort of make it similar to a story that Bret Baier on Fox News told right before the election, where he said a bunch of Fox agents were—sorry, a bunch of FBI agents were sure that Hillary was going to be indicted. It would be a second case where Fox had a story alleging FBI claims that then got retracted, that was really central to politics.
Malia Zimmerman is the reporter for Fox that did this story. it’s interesting because she, after the retraction of the story, gave a statement to Seth Rich’s family where she basically blamed it all on Wheeler. And when he asked her about it, when Wheeler asked Zimmerman about it, she was like, “Well, this is what the lawyers at Fox News told me to write. I didn’t write the statement.” So Fox is institutionally blaming all of this now on Wheeler. And as I said, he seems to have a fair amount of documentation to show that he was set up, that he was set up to voice these—these, basically, conspiracies about this murdered staffer.
– Butowsky and Benghazi, can you talk about the connection
Butowsky, in one of the texts that Wheeler includes in the lawsuit, says, “I’m responsible for most of what we know about Benghazi.” So, Butowsky not only is responsible for this conspiracy about Seth Rich, but he himself claims to be responsible for the conspiracy about Benghazi.
Fox News and the Republicans made a big deal about the death of a number of—of four people in Benghazi in 2012. And Ed Butowsky, as you said, a Republican donor—I would call him a rat [bleep], a classic Republican operative, dirty operative, he claims that the Benghazi fake scandal came from him, as well. So, he’s got a history of inventing scandals and inventing conspiracies where none existed. And I think that sort of lends towards Wheeler’s credibility in this lawsuit.
– Seth Rich family, who are dealing with the death of their son in his mid-twenties, the DNC staffer who was murdered.
they have wanted to just grieve and, I mean, ideally, get the murder solved. But it keeps—his death keeps being turned into a conspiracy that it’s not. And I think one of the most appalling things yesterday is that Butowsky, before this lawsuit came out, deleted his Twitter account, and he said, “Well, you know, people are saying mean things about me on Twitter.” And it’s like, dude, you just invented a conspiracy about a murdered guy, and you’re complaining about people being mean to you on Twitter. It’s just—it’s just appalling that the Rich family has to continue to have their son be turned into the fodder of this kind of conspiracy mongering.
____
Marcy Wheeler
an independent journalist who covers national security and civil liberties. She runs the website EmptyWheel.net.
— source democracynow.org 2017-08-03