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The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Washington, D.C. must release records about the murder of former Democratic National Committee employee Seth Rich, according to a Department of Justice official, and I have asked DOJ to compel the FBI to release any records that it may have about the murder.

In a letter dated October 2, 2017, the chief of administrative appeals at DOJ’s Office of Information Policy, Sean R. O’Neill, wrote that he was directing the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys to search for and produce any records covered in my September 1, 2017 Freedom of Information Act request. As records are produced, I’ll post them here.

For those of you who live in a cave (or get your news from the New York Times or Washington Post), Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has hinted very strongly since last year that he received leaked DNC emails from Seth Rich, not Russian agents. And last week Congressman Dana Rohrabacher said that Mr. Assange is willing to produce proof in exchange for a pardon.

Does that mean that Mr. Rich’s murder is related to the leaked emails? I have no idea. But when, as Glenn Greenwald has asked, will it be appropriate to start questioning the official narrative?

Incidentally, our hero of the day, Sean O’Neill, is the same Sean O’Neill who ordered the FBI to produce records about the Hillary Clinton email investigation after the feds initially told me that her emails were not a matter of public interest. Not surprisingly, the U.S. Attorney’s Office gave me an equally ridiculous excuse for withholding the Seth Rich file, i.e., because I had not submitted a death certificate to prove that Mr. Rich was dead.

Bear in mind that I had requested records pertaining to the investigation of a murder. If Mr. Rich’s murder was being investigated, would that not necessarily infer that he was dead? I thought the answer was obvious, and I’m glad to see that Mr. O’Neill agrees.

Meanwhile, I filed an identical FOIA request with the FBI, and on September 19, 2017 our old friend David M. Hardy wrote that his office had searched the “Central Records System” and his staff was “unable to identify main file records responsive to the FOIA.” I’ve played the FBI’s FOIA game long enough to know that lots of records are left out of the “Central Records System” (like emails, for example), and I did not limit my request to the “Central Records System.”

In the appeal that I filed over the weekend, I asked DOJ to order the FBI to search electronic records and hard copies in the Washington Field Office, where the records most likely would be kept. If records are found, I suspect the FBI will assert a law enforcement exemption, but at least the FBI will be forced to acknowledge that it is participating in the investigation.

Maryland judge orders release of records about Hillary Clinton’s lawyers

As was widely reported three weeks ago, Annapolis Circuit Judge Paul Harris ordered the Maryland Attorney Grievance Commission to investigate my complaints against the lawyers responsible for destroying Hillary Clinton’s emails, namely David Kendall, Cheryl Mills, and Heather Samuelson. You can read Judge Harris’s order by clicking here.

On his own initiative, Judge Harris also ordered the clerk to unseal the records from Ty Clevenger v. Attorney Grievance Commission of Maryland. The entire docket is now available online.