Seth Rich's parents have settled their lawsuit against Fox News just before Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs were slated to potentially give testimony in the case, saying they were "pleased" with the settlement and hope the media will be more careful in the future. Via Rolling Stone:
The statement continues: “The settlement with Fox News closes another chapter in our efforts to mourn the murder of our beloved Seth, whom we miss every single day. It allows us to move on from the litigation we initiated in response to Fox News’ May 2017 article and televised statements concerning Seth’s murder.”
[...] Seth Rich was a 27-year-old Democratic National Committee staffer who was gunned down in the early morning hours of July 10, 2016. As Rolling Stone reported in August, Rich’s murder — which remains unsolved more than four years later — became instant fodder for conspiracy theorists, online trolls, and political opportunists who tried to claim that Rich, not Russia, had leaked tens of thousands of internal DNC documents to WikiLeaks, the radical transparency group, during the presidential race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Others on the right, including Trump adviser Roger Stone, insinuated that the Clinton family was somehow behind Rich’s murder.
There is no evidence to support these theories. Investigations by the Trump administration and two Republican-led congressional committees have concluded that Russia carried out the hack-and-leak attacks on the DNC and the Clinton campaign. Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian intelligence agents for those cyberattacks; Mueller’s final report says WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, made statements “designed to obscure” the source of the DNC leaks while also having “implied falsely” that Rich was his source.
The conspiracy theories really took off after FoxNews.com published an explosive story alleging that Rich was WikiLeaks’ source for the DNC emails. Sean Hannity hyped it more than anyone. But the story fell apart under closer examination.
And of course, it still looks like the Trump White House was pushing the story hard in order to distract from the Russia collusion story.
