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Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch obtained evidence that a computer contractor working under the direction of Hillary Clintons legal team destroyed subpoenaed records that the former secretary of state stored on a private email server she originally kept at her New York home, and then lied to investigators about it. Yet no charges were brought against Clinton, her lawyers, or her paid consultant.

The leniency accorded to Clinton contrasts with recent moves by Attorney General Merrick Garland to aggressively investigate former President Trump and his lawyers for allegedly obstructing investigators efforts to locate subpoenaed records at his Florida home. Legal experts say the apparent double standard may provide a useful defense for Trump and his legal team.

The treatment of Clinton included a deal with her defense team that required the FBI to, in effect, obstruct its own investigation. During its 2016 probe, the bureau agreed with her lawyers' demands to destroy two laptop hard drives containing subpoenaed evidence immediately after searching for files on them. They did so while the information was still being sought by congressional investigators and even though the lawyers had served under Clinton at the State Department and were subjects of the FBIs investigation. In fact, the laptops were theirs.

Long before it bowed to the request, the FBI suspected Clinton's lawyers played hide-and-seek with evidence, making the concession that much more baffling.

The scandal first erupted on March 2, 2015, when news broke that Clinton had secretly set up a non-government email server in the basement of her Chappaqua, N.Y., mansion in the weeks before she started her job at Foggy Bottom in early 2009. She used the unauthorized and unsecured device to conduct official State Department business including transmitting and storing classified information which allowed her to bypass legally mandated archiving of her government records.

The next day, the House Select Committee on Benghazi sent her attorney David Kendall a letter advising his client to preserve all electronicrecordscreated since January 2009 and specifically not to delete any emails on her private server. The panel then issued a subpoena for recordsrelated to the deadlyterroristattack on the U.S. consulate in Libya.

Three weeks later, on March 25, Kendall and former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills, who also acted as her personal attorney, asked a computer contractor with Platte River Networks, which hosted Clintons secret email server, to join a conference call with them, according to FBI documents. Over the next week, the contractor, Paul Combetta, deleted the entire email archive from Clinton's server using a software program called BleachBit, which digitally shreds" files to prevent their recovery.

All told, the paid Clinton agent scrubbed 31,830 emails from her server and backup files. In addition, he permanently removed duplicates of the emails from the laptops of Mills and another Clinton lawyer and aide, Heather Samuelson, where they also had been stored. According to FBI records, Combetta knew the documents he destroyed were under subpoena.

In July 2015, the FBI counterintelligence division opened a criminal investigation, codenamed Midyear Exam, in response to a referral from the intelligence community inspector general concerning Clintons unsecure server. The FBI predicated the opening of the probe on the possible compromise of highly classified Sensitive Compartmented Information. Emails classified at the SCI level were later found on Clintons server.

Some career FBI agents working on the case, which was tightly controlled within headquarters and deemed a SIM, or sensitive investigative matter, thought they had a slam-dunk case of obstruction, a key aggravating factor for prosecuting cases involving the mishandling of classified information or government records. All they had to do was get Combetta in a chair and pressure him to implicate the high-level Clinton surrogates who told him what they wanted done.

Several investigators believed "that Combettas truthful testimony was essential for assessing criminal intent for Clinton and other individuals, because he would be able to tell them whether Clintons attorneys Mills, Samuelson or Kendall had instructed him to delete emails, according to a 2018 report by the DOJ's inspector general.

But during voluntary interviews with FBI agents, Combetta falsely denied he haddeleted or purgedClintons emails from the server or back-ups, and insisted Clintonslegal team never requested that he do so.

Combetta refused to talk to investigators about the critical March 2015 conference call with Clinton's lawyers that precededhis purge ofevidence, the only topic he refused to speak about. So investigators and prosecutors agreed to givehim immunity and interview him again.Still,they never got his account of the conference call. A written FBIsummary of the interview, known as an FD-302 report, does not reference thecall, indicating that agents failed tofollow up on a key line of questioning in the investigation.

Investigators declined to pursue other aspects of the case as well. They obtained an email in which Combetta told a colleague he was part of aHilary[sic] coverupoperation and said he would elaborate later at a "party." Asked about it, Combetta claimed he was just joking; the FBIaccepted his explanation and did not appear to follow up with the colleague to learn what they discussed at theparty.

The FBI also accepted another explanation for why Combetta, using the screen name stonetear," sought technical assistance on theReddit forum on how to "strip out" the email addresses of a VERY VIP" client from a a bunch of archived email, in an apparent reference toClinton. (AfterInternet sleuths revealed stonetear was a name Combetta used in other forums,he began scrubbing his postsfrom the web.)

An FBI case supervisor told the inspector general that he believed Combetta should have been charged with false statements for lying multiple times, according to the IG report, but prosecutors refused to indict him. The FBI also obtained forensic evidence from the server that could establish that Combetta made the deletions, but prosecutors balked at charging him with obstruction.

Then-FBI Director James Comey personally agreed with the DOJ decision to give Combetta immunity ratherthan sweating him in a grandjury box, which typically is done with subjects who are lying, to get them to tell thetruth.

Comey was forced to defend the deal in an October2016 conference with FBI supervisors, who werehearingcomplaintsfrom rank-and-file agents that headquarters handed out immunity dealslike candy toClinton witnesses.Comeyexplained the bureau wasn't interested in prosecuting a small fish like Combetta, and sought only tomassage him for information to make a caseon Hillary Clinton, even though internal FBI emails reveal Comey already had decided to let Clinton off the hook. He did not explain why the contractor hadnt been pressured more with threats to bring charges against him for lying to agents, the traditional investigativemethod for getting such an uncooperativewitness to turn.

With respect to Combetta, we found his actions in deleting Clintons emails in violation of a congressionalsubpoena and preservation orderand then lying about it to the FBI to be particularly serious, DOJ InspectorGeneral Michael Horowitz said in hisreport. We asked the prosecutors why they chose to grant him immunity instead of charging him with obstruction of justice.

One DOJ prosecutor told Horowitzs investigators they wanted to make Combetta feel comfortable enough that he would eventuallycooperate on his own. Another said they weren't interested in prosecuting a bit player for lying and that doing sowould just bog down the investigation, which they were rushing to wrap up well before the November 2016 presidential election.

"I was concerned that we would end up with obstruction cases againstsome poor schmuck on the down that had a crappy attorneywho[was]hiding theball,the unidentified prosecutor said.

"And soat the end of the day, I was like, look, lets immunize him. Weve gotto get from Point A to Point B. Point B is to make a prosecutiondecision aboutHillary Clinton and her senior staff well before the election if possible, the prosecutor added. "And this guy with his dumbattorney doing somehalf-assed obstruction did notinterest me.So I was totally in favor ofgiving him immunity."

The prosecutors reported directly to then-DOJ counterespionage official David Laufman, who would later play a key role in the discredited Russiagate probe, including opening investigations on several Trump advisers and signing off on wiretap warrants targeting at least one Trump aide, even though he knew they were based on a fabricated dossier financed by the Clinton campaign.

Prosecutors also gave Clinton aides Mills and Samuelson immunity deals, over the objections of some FBI investigatorswho wanted to bringthem before a grand jury to explain their actions.

A handful of agents also argued for issuing a searchwarrant to seize their personal laptops, which they used to upload all the emails fromthe Clinton server and cullaway supposedly personal messages that they claimed were out of the reach of investigators. Instead,prosecutors opted to review the laptops through an unusual consent agreement, which restricted searches tocertain files and specific dates and nothing before or after Clintons tenure as secretary, which put anyemail exchanges with Combetta out of reach and required theFBI to destroy the hard drives after conducting thelimited search, according todocumentsoutlining the agreement.

This is simply astonishing given the likelihood that evidence on the laptops would be of interest tocongressional investigators, formerSenate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and three other GOP congressional leaderscomplained in aletterto DOJ at the time.

In his talk at the FBI conference, Comey explainedthat he had to agree with prosecutors and defense lawyers to limit the search because ofhuge concernsthat attorney-client privilege and attorney work product could be discovered on the laptops, a concern that apparently didnot register in the broad,sweeping search of Trumps records. Agents scooped up at least 520 pages of attorney-client privileged informationduring their raid of Mar-a-Lago,according to a federal judge who has ordered an independent inspector to review the seized records forprivileged material.

Mills and Samuelson, who agreed to answer only a narrow scope of questions to prevent investigators from solicitingprivileged information,were later allowed to sit in on Clintons own interview, which the FBI conducted after Comeyhad already drafted a statement exonerating herof mishandling classified information and obstructing justice. Thedirector famously delivered the statement in a July 5, 2016, pressconference, proclaiming the FBI found no evidencethat Clintons emails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them.

Grassley says the FBI pulled its punches investigating Clinton in comparison to Trump, who he says is being harshly investigated andprosecuted for the same offenses.

Trump has not been provided the same (gentle) treatment given to Secretary Clinton and her associates,Grassley asserted in a recentstatement.

To be sure, the agency has used more intrusive methods probing Trump for similar allegations ofmishandling classified information andconcealing documents under subpoena.

Unlike the Clinton probe, where investigators and prosecutors sought to obtain evidence by consent whenever possible, the department has used a federal grand jury to issue subpoenas to Trump for thousands of documents, as well as surveillance video footage, from his Palm Beach estate. They also obtained a search warrant to raid his private office and family bedrooms. In addition to seizing more than 11,000 documents, agents confiscated some 1,800 personal items, including gifts, photo albums, clothing, passports, and medical and tax records, according to court records.

Clinton and her representatives were spared such heavy-handed tactics andindignities, the senator pointed out.

Even though Secretary Clinton and her attorneys did not hand over classified records in their possession, they were not subject to a raid similar to what occurred at Mar-a-Lago, Grassley said.

In the end, computer-forensics investigators and intelligence analysts were able to determine that at least 81 classified email chains were transmitted and stored on Clintons unclassified personal server. Their levels ranged from CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET/SPECIAL ACCESS PROGRAM, a highly sensitive designation which makes access to certain information restricted even to Secret and Top Secret clearance-holders without a need to know. By comparison, the FBI recovered 100 documents with classified markings from its raid of Trumps home. They range in level from CONFIDENTIAL to TOP SECRET.

In a court filing last month, DOJ said it developed evidence that presidential records held in a basement storage room at Mar-a-Lago may have been concealed or removed prior to a June visit by FBI agents to pick up classified documents, suggesting possible attempts to obstruct investigators.

Investigators issued a grand jury subpoena in May for the records and visited Mar-a-Lago on June 3 to pick them up. When they got there, the filing said, a Trump lawyer handed them a large envelope containing documents. Another lawyer acting as the official custodian of Trumps records certified in a sworn statement that they conducted a diligent search for classified papers in response to the subpoena. Over the next two months however, officials developed evidence that government records were likely concealed and removed from the storage room and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the governments investigation, DOJ said in its filing, without specifying what it believes was removed from the room, or by whom. The affidavit explained that this suspicion is why it sent some 30 armed agents back to Mar-a-Lago early last month to conduct a massive search of the property.

Prosecutors say the additional documents they found with classified markings cast doubt on claims by Trumps lawyers that they were fullycooperative with the subpoena. They aresaid to be focusing their investigation on Trump lawyer Christina Bobb, in particular, who allegedly acted as the custodian who signed the certification.

Bobb, who has not been charged with a crime, did not respond to requests for comment. Trumps legal team has told the court that the DOJ significantly mischaracterized the June meeting with Bobb and another lawyer, but did not elaborate.

Laufman, the top prosecutor in the Clinton case and a caustic critic of Trump in the media, believes Trump should also be worried and has significant criminal exposure to an obstruction rap. Either [his lawyers] wittingly lied or they got that assurance from their client, in which case Trump has jeopardy, Laufman, an Obama appointee and donor, told Politico.

But at this point, investigators can only speculate that documents were intentionally moved or destroyed to avoid compliance with subpoenas, which would be a felony. Legal experts note that prosecutors were careful to say in their filing that documents were likely concealed and that efforts were likely taken to obstruct the investigation, indicating they still lack solid evidence.

It is not clear from the filing if the FBI has evidence of intentional acts of concealment as opposed to negligence, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said.

By contrast, prosecutors had solid material evidence including emails, phone calls, work tickets and computer forensics that Clinton operatives conspired to not just conceal but actually destroy documents under subpoena in violation of Section 1519 of the federal criminal code, the same statute cited by the FBI in its warrant to search Mar-a-Lago. It bars the destruction or falsification of any documents or materials with the intent to impede, obstruct or influence an investigation.

"Did Hillary Clinton violate 18 USC 1519 when emails from her private email server were destroyed during government investigation?Possibly, yes,saidDonald Skupsky, a lawyer specializing in government records-retention procedures.

"In December 2014, she did instruct her team to destroy remaining emails after 60 days. And ultimately, she never halted nor protested again any records destruction, he added. "Under 18 USC 1519, Clinton may have concealed and covered up the destruction of records."

Both the Trump and Clinton cases also invoke Section 2071, a federal statute which prohibits the willful concealment, removal, or destruction of federal records. But in investigating Clintons homebrew server scheme, prosecutors declined to pursue a Section 2071 charge because they argued the statute had never been used to prosecute individuals for attempting to avoid Federal Records Act requirements by failing to ensure that government records are filed appropriately, according to the IG report. Some legal experts say the same standard should apply to Trump, whom the DOJ said tried to avoid Presidential Records Act requirements.

Trump lawyer Jim Trusty said Trumps retention of allegedly classified papers is akin to an overdue library book and complained that Bidenadministration prosecutors are holding him to a different standard than anyone else because he is a Republican.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon earlier this month issued an injunction temporarily barring the Justice Department from using the seized material in its espionage investigation until a Special Master can review it for privileged and other information outside the scope of the probe.

Despite the order, the obstruction part of DOJ's probe can move forward. Among other things, investigators can continue to interview witnesses about whether subpoenaed documents were moved or concealed.

DOJ is in the midst of an ongoing criminal investigation pertaining to potential violations of the Espionage Act, as well as obstruction of justice, 18 USC 1519, and unlawful concealment or removal of government records, 18 USC 2071, DOJ chief counterintelligence prosecutor Jay Bratt stated in a recent court filing.

Read more from the original source:
Unpacking the Apparent Trump-Hillary Double Standard: For Her, the FBI Helped Obstruct Its Own Investigation - Longview News-Journal

Seth Rich was a young DNC staffer in Washington who was tragically murdered early one morning in 2016. Our WITHpod guest this week described him as smart, ambitious, telegenic and someone who might run a presidential campaign someday. In the absence of an arrest, questions remain about who killed Rich. Unfounded theories about the motives for his murder continue to circulate on social media, including ones that enmeshed the Clintons and other high-profile figures. The search for answers, and this age of widespread disinformation, is the subject of A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy, written by ProPublica reporter Andy Kroll. The true-crime story unravels this saga of murder, deceptions about what happened and the role of conspiracy mongers in disparaging Richs memory. Kroll, who actually knew Rich, joins WITHpod to discuss Richs life, death and what happened to his story once it got into the hands of numerous bad actors.

Note: This is a rough transcript please excuse any typos.

Andy Kroll: Someone you met at a party one time and thought to yourself, man that guy is going somewhere. He's smart, he's telegenic, he's ambitious. He's going to be running a presidential campaign in the next 10 years, no question. And then you find out he's dead, murdered not that far from where I live here in D.C.

So, I felt it on that personal level, but then when this local news story, this private family matter gets transformed into a political story, a viral meme, a hashtag, a billion threads on Reddit and 4chan, that's when the switch happened for me. That is when I felt these two separate worlds of mine collide, the personal, the day job and I thought I just have to know what the heck is going on here.

Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to the "Why Is This Happening?" with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

You know, I think one of the central experiences of our age is a sense of constant vertigo and dislocation as regards information about the world. First of all, there's just a lot of it, there's obviously too much of it to pay attention to. There's also a lot of things that are just wrong that are floating around. It's very hard to figure out what's wrong and what's right, sometimes a tweet will go viral, and it will turn out to be like satire or photoshopped or some random person like took something wildly out of context.

And then at a bigger level, you see entire media platforms devoted to untruths, whether that's about the election lie or about vaccine efficacy. And I mean, look, it's easy to get overly presentist about this. It's always hard to separate fact from fiction and things that are true from things that are not. The world is complicated and there's all kinds of stuff, like I love when there's like some big dispute in some country you don't follow, and you like you try to get into it. It's like, was the trial against Lula in Brazil like actually corrupt or like did he do the thing? And it's like, well good luck trying to figure that out, just come beaming in from 30,000 feet, particularly when you arrived in very contested debates.

That said, if you were to ask me, what's the moment where it felt like we veered off into a new level of surreality, disinformation, confusion, and vertigo, I think it's pretty clearly 2016. Like, the 2016 was really -- it really did feel like that year and that campaign and the rise of Donald Trump represented us moving off course that we were on. Not the course we were on was like amazing, like, well everyone agreed about the facts like, you know, like one of the major parties had been denying climate change for 20 years. But the level, the acuteness of almost deranged counterfactual narrative and disinformation was truly headspinning. It elevated to the highest levels. It moved from the margins to the center. It set the agenda often for mainstream discourse.

And there's one particular example of that, that is in some ways a microcosm, in some ways a kind of allegory, and in some ways just an actual example of this phenomenon, which is the death of a DNC staff named Seth Rich. Seth Rich was a young, DNC staffer who tragically was murdered in Washington D.C. late one night in 2016. A private tragedy, an awful, awful, awful thing to happen, brutal for his family and friends and the people who love him, that then got pulled into an updraft of conspiratorial insanity that basically pointed to him as a central figure in this grand conspiracy.

My guest today is someone who wrote a book about this chronicle, about Seth Rich, his life, his death, his legacy, and what happened to his story once it got into the hands of all kinds of bad actors. It's an incredibly well-told tale. It's very humane and empathetic and also really provocative and an incredible tale about what it means to live and die in the informational universe we live in now. His name is Andy Kroll. He's a reporter of ProPublica. I've known him for a long time. He's a great reporter, and the book is called, "A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy." And Andy it's great to have you in the program.

Andy Kroll: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris Hayes: Just talk to me first about the origins of this because you knew Seth Rich. This starts as a personal story, not a reporting story. So, just tell us a little bit about who he was, how you knew him and what happened.

Andy Kroll: It was a strange experience for me as a reporter. When you start on a big story, let alone a book, it comes from a source that you have or a particularly intriguing piece of information you read in the news, a tip that comes across the transom, and you take it in, absorb it and pursue it with your investigative reporter hat on.

But for this story, it was a text message from a friend of mine, someone who has nothing to do with journalism, nothing to do with politics, anything like that, just a buddy, with a link to the local news story that said Seth had been killed on July 10th, 2016 in this tragic matter of a wrong place, wrong time situation.

And for a couple of weeks there, I followed the news of what had happened to Seth as the details trickled out, as memorials happened and the funeral took place back in his hometown of Omaha, as not a journalist but a peer or someone who traveled in similar social circles. It's like someone you met at a party one time and thought to yourself, man, that guy is going somewhere.

Chris Hayes: Yes.

Andy Kroll: He's smart, he's telegenic, he's ambitious. He's going to be running a presidential campaign in the next 10 years, no question. And then you find out he's dead, murdered not that far from where I live here in D.C., so I felt it on that personal level.

But then, when this local news story, this private family matter gets transformed into a political story, a viral meme, a hashtag, a billion threads on Reddit and 4chan, that's when the switch happened for me. That is when I felt these two separate worlds of mine collide, the personal, the day job, and I thought, I just have to know what the heck is going on here. I have to know how this has happened.

There is this moment when the personal and the journalistic collided. I remember sitting at my desk in August, probably, of 2016 and I saw #sethrich trending on Twitter. I thought to myself, what the heck is going on? How is that possible? I had followed some of the small conspiratorial chatter that had popped up right after he'd been killed, but not at this level, nothing had blown up in the way that I was now seeing it blow right before my eyes. And really from that point onward, August of 2016, I've been chasing the story, reporting on it, trying to understand again what happened, how this could happen, and eventually got to a point where I thought, I can't fit this into a story or two or three. This is really a book, and that's what led me to write the book.

Chris Hayes: Tell me about who Seth Rich was. What was he doing for the DNC and what do we know about the circumstances of his death?

Andy Kroll: Seth was from Omaha, Nebraska, a Democrat in an overwhelmingly Republican state. He grew up weaned on The West Wing, on watching C-SPAN in his free time in his bedroom at home. He was a total political nerd, a junkie. He followed Congressional races and redistricting fights in his home state the way we follow sports scores and eventually how our college did on a football game over the weekend. He was obsessed with this stuff.

He moved to Washington the first chance he got after graduating from Creighton University again in Omaha, and he wanted to be in the middle of the action. He was like so many people who flocked to Washington after college. They want to make their mark. They want to make a difference in the world. They want to play some small part and maybe someday a bigger part in the story of the country and its government and that was Seth.

He described himself as a patriot. He wore crazy stars and stripes outfits on 4th of July, in part as a sort of winking gag with his friends, but in part also because he believed that stuff. He was earnest about how much he loved his country, how much he cared about American democracy. When he was killed, he was working for the DNC in the voter expansion department. He was the only non-lawyer on the team of lawyers, trying to figure out ways to expand the franchise basically, how do we find Democratic votes, wherever they are, and get them to vote? How do we find people who aren't registered, get them to register, so that they can vote?

He really believed in voting is the lifeblood of the country and that regardless of whether you're a Democrat, you're a Republican, the country was at its best when everyone was participating, everyone is voting, everyone's voice was heard. That was what he was doing on the day he was killed. He was about to accept the job on the Clinton campaign, doing similar work, and that would have fulfilled a dream of his. He always wanted to work on a presidential campaign and he was maybe a week or two away from that when he died.

Chris Hayes: How old was he?

Andy Kroll: Twenty-seven years old.

Chris Hayes: And he had been at the DNC for a few years at that point?

Andy Kroll: Yes, he had been there for two and a half, three years at that point. He had been through a bruising midterm election, which I think opened his eyes to the less savory parts, the less glamorous parts of working in politics. I think he had come to see that politics in real life is not The West Wing and not everyone is walk and talks and quippy one-liners and the idealism of President Bartlet.

He loved that show but was also coming to grips with the fact that, that's not exactly how politics works, certainly not how politics worked in 2016, as you described earlier/ But he still wanted to work in voting. He wanted to continue this passion of his, something again that he had been passionate about since he was in high school.

Chris Hayes: So, he's coming home from a bar one night, which is something that I've done in Washington D.C. I have to say that someone I knew, Brian Beutler who now is at Crooked was shot and was in critical condition under extremely similar circumstances back when I was living in D.C. You know, it was someone I knew. They were walking down a block I'd walked down. They had come back late at night. Brian survived, it was extremely traumatic. He's written about it.

But this sounds like a somewhat similar situation basically, like random street crime as far as we can figure.

Andy Kroll: I remember hearing when Brian was shot all those years ago, and I thought about it when I first heard about Seth, walking home 2:00, 3:00 in the morning anywhere in D.C. can be a problematic situation through no fault of the person's own. Seth lived in a neighborhood in D.C. called Bloomingdale, Northwest, but just barely so, kind of hugs North Capitol Street, the big North-South Corridor here.

Bloomingdale at the time had been plagued by armed robberies all summer long. Weirdly same MO as well, two guys, one with a gun, robbing people for their valuables, especially their iPhones, and you can see this in the police reports, which I pulled and compiled for the book. The two guys would stop people, usually people who were talking on the phone, which Seth was doing at the time he was killed. They would ask for the phone but they would say, disable the Find My Phone tracking app, and then gives us your phone with the gun pointed --

Chris Hayes: Right.

Andy Kroll: -- at their face. And the police have said all along that Seth's murder and the circumstances of it certainly sound a lot like all of these other armed robberies that were happening in Bloomingdale, in Seth's neighborhood. The neighborhood had also been ripped up because they were putting a tunnel underneath it. It floods all the time, so they're trying to fix this problem. And so it's kind of an open-air maze, there's fences everywhere, lights were knocked out. It was just not a good place to be walking around that late at night, talking on the phone.

And from the day that this happened, and from the day that the police announced that Seth had been killed, they said this was an attempted robbery, maybe Seth tried to fight back, maybe there was some kind of altercation. There were some markings on him that suggested that there were, and he was shot several times and did not survive that attack, which unfortunately happens all the time in major American cities. But the details of this crime would fuel so many of the conspiracies that would come afterward, in part because people were looking for a reason to doubt. They weren't looking to buy the official story from the police.

Chris Hayes: Well and it also was a homicide that was not solved. I mean it was not cleared at the time that when the conspiracy theories take off, but that too was extremely common in major American cities and D.C., sort of a shocking percentage of homicides go unsolved.

Andy Kroll: Right, right, that's right. And this is unfortunately one of those cases, the murder is unsolved to this day. The investigation is active but now we're going on six and a half years or so, six-plus years. The police haven't announced suspects. They haven't announced any leads yet, even though the investigation is active. And that alone fuels these theories that come --

Chris Hayes: Right.

Andy Kroll: -- afterward.

Chris Hayes: Right, and part of my point there is that I think part of that is people's unfamiliarity with how shockingly and awfully common it is for people in the West Side of Chicago, in Anacostia Washington D.C., in all kinds of neighborhoods throughout America, particularly neighborhoods that are poor and predominantly non-white, that murders happened without being solved. That happens quite a bit.

When I think I've seen, you know, when I've seen this sort of conspiracy theories like this extra air of mystery that is unsolved, it's like, yeah, a lot of murders in America are unsolved. So, this happens. It's a horrible tragedy obviously and profoundly upsetting for his family, for his friends from around him.

What are the first inklings that this is going to move from a private and terrible tragedy to something else?

Andy Kroll: It's remarkable how fast those initial inklings appear. I went back and almost like a social media archeologist of sorts, retraced as best I could, the origins of these theories about Seth. What I found really interesting was that they began on the far left end of the political spectrum before they eventually moved and would really take off on the right end of the political spectrum.

And you got to go back to, again, this chaotic, insane year of 2016, this presidential election like no other. In the summer of 2016, one of the biggest stories was the state of the Democratic Party and the near civil war between supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders, more on the progressive side, and supporters of Secretary Hillary Clinton, the more centrist establishment Democratic camp.

Clinton had just about sewn up the nomination. She would be named, crowned the nominee at the convention a couple of weeks after Seth was killed. But the animosity, the tension within the party at the time that Seth was killed was at a fever pitch. That is where the Seth Rich conspiracy theories first took hold. It took hold among Sanders supporters and supporters of then Green Party candidate, Jill Stein, to give you a real throwback, shout out here.

And there was speculation among these folks that Seth had been a whistleblower of some kind, that he had been trying to expose the DNC's wrongdoing as it related to Bernie Sanders, that he was somehow a Sanders supporter who is going to blow the lid on how the DNC had stolen the nomination or rigged the nomination process for Clinton and against Sanders, and that's the origin.

People forget that. It's easy to forget it because there's really only a window of a couple of weeks there before these theories would explode on the opposite end of the spectrum but that is where it started within the party. People who were thinking that Seth was this Bernie bro, for a lack of a better way to put it, who was angry about what he had seen in terms of the treatment by the DNC of Sanders.

Chris Hayes: And not just online, not just in threads and Twitter and those kinds of places the people are saying and the implications that it was a hit, right, that he's killed to keep him quiet, to stop him from spilling the beans about DNC wrongdoing.

Andy Kroll: That the Clintons or their emissary, someone working on behalf of the Clinton family had ordered a hit on this DNC staffer because he had tried to expose fraud, wrongdoing, nefarious backdoor dealings of the DNC, that's exactly right. You see this stuff popped up on Twitter. I mean I found tweets and some of them are still there to this day, within minutes of the official announcement, the news breaking on Monday, July 11th, that Seth had been killed. I mean there was no sort of period for percolating or --

Chris Hayes: Right.

Andy Kroll: -- moments where people are trying to figure out what do we say. I mean this was a reflex. This was almost immediate on Twitter, on Reddit, anywhere where there were sort of congregations of Sanders and Stein supporters.

Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.

Chris Hayes: To the best of your knowledge, this is just random and essentially organic, right? I mean these are just people who are in an extremely paranoid mindset. There's of course like lineage of the conspiracy theory against the Clintons that goes back to Vince Foster's death and the Clinton body count. And the idea, you know, Vince Foster of course, a friend of Bill and Hillary who worked in the White House which occasion (ph) all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories that went very mainstream, particularly in Republican Party that he had been murdered. He had been whacked by the Clintons.

And there's this idea of like a Clinton body count where the Clintons just go around like having people killed. This was in the ether before Seth Rich and I think it's sort of a necessary context to understanding why anyone is making this particular leap.

Andy Kroll: The only part of the book where I stepped out of the main timeline, where I --

Chris Hayes: Yes, exactly.

Andy Kroll: -- jumped backward from the blow by blow on the book is this really sort of fascinating moment where it's a few days after Seth had been killed, the funeral just happened. Hillary and Bernie are about to appear on stage for their first sort of moment of reconciliation after Clinton had won the nomination effectively. Seth's old colleague, the DNC, thought to themselves, well hey, wouldn't it be great if Hillary said something at this event to remember Seth. Everyone is going to be watching. Media is descending from around the world on little ports of New Hampshire.

Can she like work Seth's name in the speech? She does, and I quote someone who had worked with Seth at the DNC saying, we watched Hillary Clinton say this and the gratitude that this person felt almost immediately melted away into a oh my God, what have we done, knowing that in the ether there's this long history, a lineage is a great word for it of Clinton conspiracy theories and that's the chapter in the book where I jumped back. I actually found this story that I haven't even known about going to the book, about a woman with intern in the Clinton White House.

Chris Hayes: Yup.

Andy Kroll: Very briefly, it was Caity Mahoney. She was an intern. She worked in like the tour guide office and then had left. She was working at Starbucks in Georgetown, a tiny neighborhood here in D.C. and was killed in an attempted armed robbery, noting was taken. She and two other colleagues were pretty brutally murdered by a robber, and then for several years the murder went unsolved, and she became the latest addition to this Clinton body count, that's next to Vince Foster, next to Ron Brown, the former Commerce Secretary, next to all of these people from Arkansas that no one had heard of but had somehow been attached to this Clinton body count list.

And I did that in the book because I feel like people needed to know. Why would folks on the internet immediately jump to the Clintons did this? Why would they immediately suspect a political hit job? I mean that is quite an accusation to make and yet people had been making it, the American politics --

Chris Hayes: Exactly.

Andy Kroll: -- 20 (ph) years at that point.

Chris Hayes: One of the things that you start to see there and you do this in that chapter is you start to see the sort of magnetic logic of conspiracy which is once you start looking for it, once the way you reasoning is, let's find anyone who had any brush of the Clintons who died an untimely death. You start to see this pattern emerged. Now the pattern is nonsense because the pattern could emerge for anyone.

That was how you started to look into someone, right? You're reasoning backwards. It's a deficient means of understanding the world and yet it does have kind of magnetic draw. And so with this already established, there's this kind of vortex pull, right, when Seth Rich dies, that this is a ready-made story there that people picked up immediately.

Andy Kroll: And then it gets to the underlying appeal of conspiracy theories writ large. You're confronted with an event that you find confusing, you don't understand, you're skeptical of what the people in power are telling you happened in this particular instance. Obviously, with trust in any institution on a constant decline, it seems like people are prime to doubt what the official story is. And so, they go looking for alternative explanations. They "do their own research" as we like to hear from conspiracy theorist all the time.

And in this case, it's so easy to make the leap from he was shot and killed, it was an armed robbery gone wrong to no, no, no to the nation's capital, this guy worked for the crooked DNC as so many people like to say it at that point in time. The Clintons have a history of doing this. Of course, something more was going on here. And you know you said a second ago, Chris, presumably this was organic. This was real people doing this.

You know, I found some data in the course of reporting a book showing that, yes, there was some back (ph) activity or the Russian Internet Research Agency came along a month or two after Seth was killed and they amplified some stuff. But this was not a creation of the Russians or the Chinese or some domestic troll farm. I've interviewed people. I interview them for the book who were among the earliest to say, this was a hit. This was politically motivated.

Some of them interestingly have backed away from it in the time since, like I quote a long Reddit thread that was posted again within hours of Seth's murder by a young man in Florida. And I tracked him down and talked to him, and in that case, he said I was just, again, trying to do my own research. I didn't necessarily trust mainstream media. He was a Sanders supporter. He thought that he could advance a story in a way that felt authentic to him.

And you know, five years later, four years later whenever I talked to him, he felt some regret about that, when I talked to him. But I have also talked to people who to this day say, nope, definitely it was a hit, way too many questions, doesn't add up, don't believe the police, you know, your book is nonsense.

Chris Hayes: Right. And I think this point those interviews are fascinating by the way and I was so glad you did them because I do think there's a little bit of a comforting fiction we tell ourselves about disinformation being some product of Russian interference. And clearly it is something that they have pushed and something they amplified, and it isn't a very effective means of like messing with the population but there's just a massive organic part of it too which is like people believe crazy stuff.

They get together in the internet and they goad themselves into believing crazier and crazier stuff and then in the case of where (ph) going to get to, it can get amplified, people with really big platforms. So, all of these is happening immediately after, it's working on the already well-established universe of Clinton conspiracy theories, about them as essentially serial murders who have like hit squads. This is July 10th, July 11th news. When is the first WikiLeaks?

Andy Kroll: August 10th, 2016, a month later.

Chris Hayes: So, it's a month later and that happens right before the DNC. It's timed very obviously to kind of like blow up the DNC, and I remember that because I was in Philadelphia, and it goes off. The first one happens right when, the first posting of WikiLeaks of the purloined e-mails of the campaign manager, John Podesta, right, are posted by WikiLeaks right when Trump is facing the worst crisis of his campaign which is the leaked Access Hollywood tape which he says you can just grab them by the P-word.

It's really disgusting, huge condemnation, people are fleeing him. This is obviously timed to counteract that and it's also right before the convention. What does the appearance of WikiLeaks and the WikiLeaks' e-mails do the Seth Rich conspiracy theorizing?

Andy Kroll: If there was a single moment that happens in the larger arc of the story that if it didn't happen would change the course of history, at least as it relates to Seth Rich and his family. WikiLeaks and Julian Assange's intervention would be that flashpoint. When you laid out this timeline, I'll add a couple of dots to it. You have WikiLeaks releases these stolen e-mails we now know taken from inside the DNC right before Philadelphia.

I was there too. I remember the look of sort of barely contained terror and fear in the eyes of most DNC employees I encountered in Philly. You have the release of Podesta e-mails right after Access Hollywood, very clearly intended to distract and deflect from that. And what you have in between those two things is this really critical moment in the Seth Rich story, critical moment in the book. Julian Assange is giving an interview to a Dutch TV station. To the interviewer's credit, he's pressing Assange, where did you get these stolen e-mails at the time, the DNC e-mail specifically.

You know, cyber security experts are saying this is most likely Russian-relate that some kind of hacking group affiliated with Russia took them and gave them to you. Assange is denying, he's deflecting, he's disingenuous and in this Dutch interview, he says, well, don't you know, he says this out of nowhere without prompting, without any suggestions. So, clearly, he had it in his mind. He says, well, there was this young DNC staffer who was murdered in Washington D.C. recently. Our source get concerned when they see things like that.

Chris Hayes: Oh so despicable.

Andy Kroll: Yes.

Chris Hayes: It's just so despicable. It is an unbelievably despicable thing to do.

Andy Kroll: Yes and I had never thought about Julian Assange and WikiLeaks the same since this moment. Obviously --

Chris Hayes: Yes, same here.

Andy Kroll: -- Unique have written a whole book about this, but it's clear what Assange is doing there but the effect of that online is an explosion of tweets, Reddit posts, memes, Instagram post, everything under the sun saying, Julian Assange just pointed a finger at this guy, Seth Rich. This Russia story is nonsense.

Chris Hayes: The Russian story is nonsense, right. So, there's a few things going on here, right? The DNC leak happens. When do they first start posting the DNC e-mails?

Andy Kroll: Right before the DNC convention, so that's like late July 2016.

Chris Hayes: Right. And it's after those e-mails start to come out that he gives his interview and --

Andy Kroll: Correct.

Chris Hayes: -- at that point there's already people inside the DNC who are like we know, you know, they had hired CrowdStrike, they had hired other outside firms to look at there, like we know this was foreign penetration, like we have a pretty good sense it's the Russians. These are not and those people doing that are not like FBI or government officials. These are just people who don't have a dog in the fight, right? They're brought into like basically run an audit and they're like, "Yeah, we kind of had figured it out where this came from."

And so, it becomes pretty clear that like the Russians have had to be in CE as a form of political interference. They've somehow gotten into Assange, and Assange is now publishing this which is completing the operation on behalf of the Russians whether he knows that or not. We don't know, right, if he knows where it comes from so I'm just going to give it to him.

And he goes on, this Dutch TV, to deflect attention away from the Russians and put it on Seth Rich and in doing so, A. Implying that he was murdered; B. Also implying that Seth Rich was this kind of whistleblower who had secretly been a source and then finally doing the thing that, if they were true, is the most irresponsible thing that you could possibly do for any journalist or anyone which is protecting sources. Like, you would never in a billion years say anything about who your source is if they give you something important.

So, all of that together, it just like the peak of disingenuousness and it's disgusting and that you say in the book, that's the moment where it blows up. It goes from like people saying on the internet to like a thing.

Andy Kroll: And I retraced the hours and days after the Assange interview because it was a little case study of how this tantalizing piece of disingenuous spin could go from the mouth of Julian Assange to the front of the Charge Report which obviously needs its firewall of the internet at that point, that becomes the subject of hundreds of thousands of tweets that ends up on Fox News the following night. You have Eric Bolling who was sitting in for Bill O'Reilly at the time just come out and say, plain as day, that Seth Rich had been killed in a hit. This was not an attempted robbery. This was a hit. That was Eric Bolling said on primetime Fox News after the Assange.

This is the first blow on the first Superspreader Event if you will of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory.

Chris Hayes: And Bolling says it's on Fox News. This is the first time that it gets introduced into the like the cable news Fox-viewing audience, right?

Andy Kroll: That's right, yup.

Chris Hayes: And he says this, I mean, it's just a crazy thing to say. I mean obviously, it's Fox News, it's Eric Bolling so, you know, not surprising but just a, like to say that there was a hit against someone is like a really freaking serious accusation to make.

Andy Kroll: I mean, one thing I started to struggle with in the book, and I feel like I got lost in the contemporaneous coverage of the story, people are making accusations all the time related to Seth Rich and I was always having the sense of, do you understand how serious the thing you're saying actually is? Do you realize the gravity of what you are accusing someone of doing or claiming had happened?

Yes, Eric Bolling, people forget the Bolling comment because it happened so early and because the later Fox News involvement in the Rich story which is so much more of a scandal, so much more of a bluff but yes, during the 2016 campaign a Fox News host was saying this was a hit, that there was a political crime, the murder of a democratic staffer in the middle of campaign for some related crime or some attempt on the part of this guy, Seth Rich. You know, I think people forget about it but Fox had been all over this almost from the beginning.

Read this article:
Discussing the death and life of Seth Rich with Andy Kroll: podcast and transcript - MSNBC

On Late Night with Seth Meyers, Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton commented on Trumps possession of classified documents and having them at his country club. In early August, Donald Trumps country club Mar-a-Lago was raided by FBI agents due to his possession of classified top secret documents, some dealing with nuclear security measures.

CLINTON: I don't care what political party you are, but come on, cut the hypocrisy. This is a threat to our national security that somebody would actually have in his country club storage room, his desk, his bedroom top secret information and you have to ask yourself, why? What was he going to do with it? Who is he giving it to? Or what had he already done to it? And so let the investigation go forward and lets, you know, find the facts. Unlike those guys, I'm not saying lock him up, I'm saying, let's just find the facts and follow the evidence wherever it goes.

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Hillary Clinton on Trump stealing classified documents: "Cut the hypocrisy, this is a threat to our national security." - Yahoo News

Clinton also said she appreciated the queens warmth and sense of humor and fondly recalled time spent on a royal yacht with her during commemorations for the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994. Clintons husband, Bill Clinton, was one of 13 presidents with whom the queen met during her long reign, starting with President Harry S. Truman.

The former first lady also said that she admired the queens dedication to her obligations.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, center, talks with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, left, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, right, during a reception at London's Buckingham Palace for world leaders attending the G-20 summit.|Pool photo by John Stillwell

I admired her devotion to duty and her sense of obligation to the people of her nation, she said, and she was never wavering from what she said when she first became a very young queen.

Host Dana Bash asked Clinton if the two had ever discussed what it was like to be a female leader in a world full of so many male presidents and prime ministers.

I cant say that I talked at any length, she said. Sometimes there would be, you know, a wry exchange about how, as a woman leader, you always had to have your hair done. Of course, she always looked perfect, unlike some of us. She had a sense of style that really stayed with her.

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Hillary Clinton fondly recalls time spent with Queen Elizabeth II - POLITICO

In a low-quality Facebook video of what appears to be a White House press conference, a woman standing by the lectern in a red suit blows up a brown paper bag and pops it, creating a loud bang. She cackles as men rush to protect a person we can only assume is the president of the United States.

Though the man standing behind the lectern in the Aug. 5 video doesnt sound like former President Bill Clinton, he resembles him. And the red-suited woman resembles his wife, former Secretary of State and former first lady Hillary Clinton.

The Facebook post sharing this video was flagged as part of Facebooks efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook.)

The name of a website appears on the Facebook video culturepub.fr. Searching for the words "culturepub," "clinton" and "bag," we found another version of the video on the French site.

There, the clip is much lighter and clearer, making it obvious these people arent the Clintons. And in French, the video is clearly labeled as a parody.

We rate claims that this video shows the real Clintons Pants on Fire!

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No, this isnt a real clip of Hillary Clinton popping a paper bag - PolitiFact