In an age without gatekeepers, you’ll have to puzzle through this yourself

Seth Rich, Trump and Russia, etc. — whatever is true, it doesn’t effect our lives, which is why we should revolt

No gatekeepers

On topics of national politics, it’s hard to know what to believe these days. The Washington Post and New York Times and other MSM outlet lost credibility in 2016 due to their proven collusion with the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign. Once you are aware of how completely unreliable the MSM is, you might simply tune them all out. What the MSM doesn’t cover, from Barrett Brown to Yemen, further reduces their credibility.

Without reliable gatekeepers — and there are very few — anti semitic but plausible sounding conspiracies are now flourishing online, getting mixed up with other more reasonable discussions on Reddit or Voat or other social media. But many good forums are out there, with serious and legitimate questions and theories emerging on social media.

So, Trump, Russia, Seth Rich, etc.: what are we to believe? Let’s try to puzzle through this.

Narrative one: Seth Rich leaked to Wikileaks and was murdered

Right off the bat, there is no way Seth Rich could have had any role in the Podesta publications on Wikileaks in October 2016. The earlier DNC publications is another story.

Podesta responded to a phishing email and clearly did not have two step verification on his accounts. The email chain stops around the time the phishing incident was discovered. An IT staffer at the DNC would not have access to Podesta’s personal Gmail and alumni Georgetown account (which was release but which Podesta did not seem to use).

You did not need technical expertise to break into Podesta’s accounts. You just needed the password, and he handed that over himself. For the DNC material, the first release in July, an insider might be the ideal candidate to suspect, as the information was stored on an internal server and no one individual would have had all the released emails on his or her computer. It would be fairly easy for an insider with access to the server to copy all the email but a much more daunting task for outside hackers to break into all the accounts.

Rich was killed right before the DNC convention and, in theory, could have been the source for those earlier releases, the DNC emails. Craig Murray says he met with someone in a park in DC who handed him a flash drive. That person could have been Rich, in theory.

Murray did not say that he knew the identity of the person he met. He could have thought that the person was Rich after seeing his photo after the murder, communicated his thoughts to Julian Assange in some way, and this confusion lead to the $20,000 Wikileak reward for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrators. Or maybe the person he met was Rich. Or maybe Murray is sure it’s Rich, or maybe not.

Rich’s family denies the recent story about his laptop containing evidence he communicated with Wikileaks. Does the family deny that his laptop was removed by the DC police and not returned to them? Where is the laptop? The police do not have a right to hold it, copy anything from it. The laptop is Rich’s family’s propety. They can give it to the police to help in the investigation… but they wouldn’t need to do that if the murder was a botched robbery.

If the family can present his laptop, or can verify that the police were never interested in Rich’s online life, that would be compelling evidence that Rich was not in communication with Wikileaks and is not the source of the leaks.

As far as the circumstances of his murder, it is interesting that he was conscious for more than an hour after police arrived and that bodycam video is available but nothing he said or anything about the period of time when he was alive has been released. There may be nothing interesting in this material, or there may be details that only the killer and Rich would know and the police want to keep that information private in case they ever have to interview someone about the exact circumstance of his death. A person might falsely confess to the murder. The credibility of a witness might depend on these secret details. There is perhaps video footage from a security camera at a nearby deli.

Apparently Rich was drinking until about 2:30 AM then walked home, a walk that should have taken a few minutes. Police found him close to an hour after he left the bar. There is some evidence of a struggle. He then lived for another hour or so.

A botched robbery is certainly a possibility. If there was a struggle and the perpetrator shot Rich accidently (twice in the back) or somehow got involved in a murder he did not intend, he might have then forgotten about Rich’s valuables and ran away.

If he was assassinated, we would have to assume the assassin was following him all the time and took advantage of Rich’s decision to walk home in the middle of the night. If he had taken a cab, presumably, he would have been murdered a different night in a different location.

Trump and Russia

The two interesting data points about this story: 1) Rex Tillerson, Trump’s own Secretary of State, says Russia definitely interfered with the election and 2) firing James Comey as head of the FBI looks tremendously suspicious.

But let’s parse the options a little here. These are all different options: 1) Trump colluded with Russian operatives to change the election; 2) Trump has some kind of shady deal with some Russian force, commercial or governmental, but that this connection has nothing to do with the 2016 election or at least nothing to do with hacked emails; 3) Trump has nothing much to hide about his connections to Russia and fired Comey because he’s dumb.

Even if Tillerson himself supports the first statement, that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and that this collusion affected the outcome of the election through the release of hacked emails, this option simply cannot be true.

First of all, it’s not logical. Why would Russia need to collude with the Trump campaign if they already had the emails and wanted Wikileaks to release the emails? What does the Trump campaign or Trump himself have to do with this operation? Trump contributes nothing to the publication of any emails.

Secondly, there is no evidence and never will be that Russia hacked into the DNC or Podesta’s private Gmail account. Why? Because the CIA malware outlined in the Vault 7 release was already available to former NSA and CIA employees and contractors and their friends. Anyone could leave “Russian” digital fingerprints. Thus, the idea that the identity of the hacker, if there were a hacker, can be traced digitally is simply not plausible.

Tillerson says he is sure that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia and that Russia did influence the election (strange things to say if you work for Trump, certainly) based on intelligence that he has seen as Secretary of State. I don’t believe him. Whatever intelligence as to digital fingerprints he might have seen is meaningless and he is not in a position to judge its accuracy.

If the evidence is wiretaps or recordings, we have to wonder why Trump or his surrogates would talk about something they cannot in help or change or affect in any way. Why would Russia waste it’s time talking to them about emails when they can just release them?

So, Tillerson is, apparently, distorting the truth in such a way as to hurt his boss. Why would he do that? Simply, Tillerson doesn’t care about his job as Secretary of State as much as he does the continuing collaboration between Exxon-Mobile the US government to continue a policy of neo-colonialism. He is not going to risk that relationship by contradicting key Deep State allies just to stay friends with Trump, if he thinks Trump is not going to be around for very long or Trump is not going to be able to control any aspect of the Deep State.

It is quite possible that Trump has a lot to hide and that much of what he has to hide pertains to deals with Russians. It is possible, but not very likely, that Russia played some role in the publication of the DNC and Podesta emails. These two possibilities need not intersect.

If Russia did play a role in publishing the DNC and Podesta emails, I don’t hold it against them. I don’t think they necessarily did anything wrong by playing a role in the revelation of true internal communications that the people should have access to. Anyone who wants to know (and many still prefer not to know) can know that the Democratic Party is a fraud and a criminal front organization for the real powers who run America. That is valuable and good information to have in the public domain. If releasing this information played a role in Trump winning the election, then I guess Podesta and company should not have conducted a Pied Piper campaign that lead to Trump securing the Republican nomination. They knew Hillary was a weak candidate who people like less the more they hear her speak, a person with bad judgment, in poor health, who no one likes and is morally bankrupt: they said so many times in their emails.

They pushed both Trump and Hillary in front of us and said we had to pick one. Wikileaks published the truth, so we can know that the correct response to the 2016 election “choice” is a revolution.

We need a revolution. Empeaching Trump, deals with Russia, who leaked to Wikileaks are secondary. If Seth Rich was murdered to punish him for leaking the DNC emails, then, as I already said, we need a revolution.