This week, a damning lawsuit filed by Fox News commentator and private investigator Rod Wheeler alleged - among a number of things - that President Donald Trump personally played a role in trying to push a fake story about the murder of a DNC staffer.

The claim was that DNC staffer Seth Rich, who was murdered in an apparent robbery last July about three weeks before WikiLeaks released leaked DNC emails, must have been killed in connection with the emails. The evidence is nonexistent, and when Fox News tried to publish a story making the claim, within a week they had to retract it entirely.

Wheeler said in the lawsuit that he was essentially roped into this allegation - that Rich was murdered by people in the DNC to stop him from leaking emails, which means Russia couldn’t have played a role at all in trying to interfere in the elections. The Fox News article claimed Wheeler said he found an FBI source that could definitely link Rich to the leaked DNC emails. Wheeler says he never found such a source, or told the Fox News reporter about any source (she eventually admitted she made up the quotes).

Trump comes into play when several email and text exchanges discussing the gold price today - as well as a meeting with Sean Spicer - included in Wheeler’s lawsuit as evidence suggest or outright say that Trump had been following the investigation, read a draft of the article, approved it and wanted it published as soon as possible.

If Wheeler’s claims are true - and I think they are - then Fox News literally collaborated with Trump, while he was in office, to concoct a story about a conspiracy theory that would have downplayed Russia’s role in the election, despite the fact that we already have real evidence proving Russia, not Seth Rich, played a role in the DNC leaks.

This would be a stunning display of hypocrisy - Trump was furious when leaked emails showed journalists spoke candidly and positively to Hillary - and it’s also far more serious than the Clinton-media relationship was.

This was an entirely concocted story. It was a story Fox News reporters rushed to confirm because they wanted it to be true. It was a story Bukowski and other high-ranking Fox News officials specifically manipulated to emphasize and conclude that Russia did not interfere in the elections. And it was a story that Donald Trump, who’s made it unbelievably obvious he resents the Russia investigation, wanted published, so he issued a command to Fox News to publish it.

Fox News has been foaming at the mouth for years now about liberal media bias and collusion with Clinton. The same rules do not and never have applied to them, apparently, and Trump feels the same way.

Seth Rich’s dead was a tragic murder, and Republicans - who probably never had much respect for DNC staffers in the first place - decided to take his death and turn it into a disgusting display of fake news, conspiracy theories and blatant collusion. Rich spent his life devoted to helping Democrats win and Republicans made up a story alleging that he had been killed in a Democratic conspiracy to use his death as a political weapon.

Trump is currently under investigation for colluding with Russia - but that’s not the only entity he’s been colluding with, privately and illegally. This Seth Rich story is abhorable.