For a solid month in early 2017, Fox News, and host Sean Hannity in particular, obsessively covered the death of Seth Rich, a young staffer for the Democratic National Committee. There was a strong chance, according to Hannity, that Rich was the person behind the massive leak of DNC e-mails during the 2016 presidential election, and if that's true, then isn't it very suspicious that he was killed on the street shortly thereafter. During one of his nightly broadcasts, Hannity called it "the single biggest fraud, lies, perpetrated on the American people by the media and the Democrats in our history."

This version of the story of Rich's death, the version that strongly implies that Hillary Clinton had a hand in the revenge killing of a DNC staffer, is unfounded. In fact, Fox was forced to retract their reporting on it, and Rich's family even sued Fox, claiming that reporter Malia Zimmerman and Ed Butowsky, a frequent Fox News guest, intentionally fabricated the story to make Rich seem like the person responsible for the leaked e-mails.

That seemed to be the end of it. But the Rich case turns out to be much more deliberate than that. In an extensive new piece out on Tuesday, Yahoo News reports that the story actually originated as part of a Russian disinformation campaign. Per Yahoo News:

Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, first circulated a phony “bulletin”—disguised to read as a real intelligence report—about the alleged murder of the former DNC staffer on July 13, 2016, according to the U.S. federal prosecutor who was in charge of the Rich case. That was just three days after Rich, 27, was killed in what police believed was a botched robbery while walking home to his group house in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., about 30 blocks north of the Capitol.

From there the story started popping up on small blogs, citing Russian intelligence. Over the next two and a half years, the Russian government–owned media organizations RT and Sputnik ran multiple stories suggesting that Rich had provided leaked DNC e-mails to WikiLeaks.