Prime-time conspiracy theory: The Seth Rich nonsense and how it spread

Hannity let Wheeler spout off on air and never reported later that Wheeler had backtracked. Hannity never reported on his TV show that FoxNews.com retracted its own story, only saying on May 23 that he would “out of respect for the family’s wishes, for now, [not discuss] this matter at this time.” The family had immediately objected to coverage, but Hannity went silent only after pressure had been put on his advertisers. As the story disintegrated, Hannity grasped at straws, going so far as to promote on Twitter unsubstantiated and bizarre assertions from an Internet troll and convicted hacker from New Zealand who goes by the name “Kim Dotcom.”

Devotees of this wild, anti-American conspiracy theory dwell on the fact that Rich’s belongings were not taken—proof, they say, that it wasn’t an attempted robbery. They don’t ask why assassins wouldn’t be smart enough to take the wallet to make it look like a robbery, why they’d get into a physical altercation with Rich, or why they would leave him breathing and conscious. They pretend Rich was killed in a safe neighborhood, when dozens of murders and hundreds of armed robberies have occurred in the area in recent years. They ignore the fact that the FBI had detected the DNC computer breach long before July 2016, that U.S. intelligence agencies agreed Russian hackers were to blame, and that Republican officials who have seen the intelligence accept the claim that Russian hackers were responsible. Even Donald Trump, who initially cast doubt on Russian responsibility, said after an intelligence briefing: “I think it was Russia.”