“The last two years have brought unimaginable pain and grief to my family and me,” Aaron Rich said in a statement. “I lost my only brother to a murder that to this date has not been solved, only to then have politically motivated conspiracy theorists falsely accuse me of grotesque criminal acts.”

“I accept The Washington Times’s retraction and apology,” he continued, “and I am grateful that The Washington Times has acknowledged the indisputable truth that these allegations are, and always have been, false.”

In the column, James A. Lyons, a retired United States Navy admiral, asserted that “it is well known in the intelligence circles” that the Rich brothers were responsible for sharing a cache of committee emails with WikiLeaks. He also questioned why Aaron Rich had not been interviewed after his brother’s death.

In the retraction, The Times disavowed both allegations, writing that it had no basis to believe the statement about the intelligence community and acknowledging that Aaron Rich had been interviewed by law enforcement officials after his brother’s death.

Seth Rich was 27 when he was shot in the back near his Washington home in 2016. While the police have theorized that he may have been killed in a botched robbery attempt, right-wing commentators have repeatedly connected the death to the leaked Democratic National Committee emails, spawning an enduring conspiracy theory.