If you've spent any time recently watching Fox News personality and noted street martial artist Sean Hannity—I don't know, maybe you lost a bet—you have heard a lot about Seth Rich. Rich was murdered last summer on his way home from the bars in what D.C. police believe was a botched robbery attempt that ended in senseless tragedy. He was 27.

Why about this story has Hannity so riled up? At the time of his death, Rich worked for the DNC—one of the entities from which Wikileaks illegally obtained emails it used to help torpedo the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton. If Rich was the source of the leaks and was killed to ensure his silence, Hannity's reasoning goes, then Russia is off the hook, President Trump can be exonerated, and we can all move on together to making America great again. There is a problem with this theory, though, and it's one endemic to many of the things that come out of Sean Hannity's mouth: It's total bullshit.

Let's back up a bit. Earlier this month, Fox's D.C. affiliate ran a story quoting one Rod Wheeler, a private investigator, who asserted that he had discovered evidence that Rich had been in contact with Wikileaks before his death. The next day, Fox News published an article on the subject that repeated Wheeler's claims. From there, it was only a matter of time before it made it to Sean Hannity's show, where it was broadcast nightly into millions of living rooms as the elaborate cover-up that the Mainstream Media doesn't want you to know about.

Here's how the story unraveled. Wheeler, it turns out, is a verifiable dipshit whose previous greatest hits include warning the late Bill O'Reilly about the gangs of pink gun-toting lesbians raping young girls all over America. His services were paid for not by Rich's grieving family but instead by Ed Butowsky, a Dallas businessman who writes for Breitbart in his spare time. Wheeler is a regular Fox News contributor, which means that he was purporting to serve as a source for the same people paying him to appear on the air. When pressed, he admitted that he had no such evidence described in the local report, claiming that he had only heard about possible evidence from a Fox News reporter, who was already preparing their story that ran the next day. Fox News has issued a retraction without bothering to provide an explanation or correction, presumably because saying something like "WE PROMOTE GROUNDLESS CONSPIRACY THEORIES" would require a degree of courage that no one in that organization possesses. Here is all they could muster: