via @jonzgreenberg
People who work in politics and suffer violent death are not often left in peace by conspiracy theorists. These aides and staffers don’t simply die, the theories go -- they die for a reason.
The story of the 2016 shooting death of Democratic party worker Seth Rich has followed that pattern, with one important difference. A recent lawsuit alleges that Fox News and the Trump administration fueled an unsubstantiated narrative that Rich was the source of hacked Democratic National Committee emails that showed up on WikiLeaks.
The suit’s message is that both Fox News and the White House used the Rich story in an effort to neutralize the findings of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia was behind the stolen emails.
If true, this would raise serious questions about the role of the media and the government in spreading fake news.
But what do we really know at this point, and how much insight does the lawsuit really offer? We set out to separate the facts from the speculation.
Keep reading Jon Greenberg's report from PolitiFact.
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