Posted on 12/31/2020 7:36:49 AM PST by TigerLikesRoosterNew
The transcript of a July 15, 2020 : https://lawflog.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/2020.12.30-Exhibit-8-Hersh-depositionstamped.pdf
The National Security Agency is hiding records about murdered Democratic National Committee employee Seth Rich, according to one of my sources, who informed me yesterday that the records are classified as a special access program (the highest level of classification) because they include intercepted communications between Mr. Rich and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
Meanwhile, I’ve been authorized to release the transcript of a July 15, 2020 deposition of Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Sy Hersh, wherein Mr. Hersh is forced to admit that he did speak with a senior intelligence official about an FBI report about Mr. Rich and Wikileaks. That contradicts much of what Mr. Hersh has said publicly since early 2017 (more on that below).
As my regular readers know, Mr. Rich was murdered in Washington, D.C. on July 10, 2016, and shortly thereafter Wikileaks published thousands of DNC emails that were very embarrassing to then-Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. On August 9, 2016, Mr. Assange intimated that the DNC emails were obtained from Mr. Rich, not Russian hackers.
If you doubt my source, recall that three weeks ago — after three years of denials — the FBI was finally forced to admit that it had thousands of records about Mr. Rich, as well as his laptop. Meanwhile, virtually no one in official Washington has lifted a finger to help.
On May 7, 2020, for example, I sent a letter to Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell asking him to de-classify the NSA’s records about Mr. Rich, and I copied the letter to Republican Senators Chuck Grassley, Lindsey Graham, and Ron Johnson, as well as Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee. Mr. Grenell left office shortly thereafter, so I sent it with a cover letter to current Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe on June 2, 2020.
To date, no one has responded to the letter. Absolutely no one. And for reasons that I do not yet fully understand, none of the Republicans in Congress (or even in the Trump Administration) are willing to go anywhere near the subject of Seth Rich. It’s like the last bus stop before Pizzagate (maybe I need to start looking into that, too). [Continued on p.2]
In a conversation recorded in 2017, Mr. Hersh told my client Ed Butowsky about an FBI investigation concerning Seth Rich and Wikileaks, but he then spent the next three years trying to disavow what he told Mr. Butowsky. See, e.g., Andy Kroll, “Killing The Truth,” August 16, 2020 Rolling Stone (ironically, few have spent more time “killing the truth” than Andy Kroll and Rolling Stone). In the July 15, 2020 deposition, however, he reluctantly admitted that he did discuss the FBI investigation with a senior intelligence official whom he had known for more than 30 years. See, e.g., pp. 198-199 of the transcript.
It’s a long deposition, and I find it disappointing that Mr. Hersh was so evasive when questioned. I’m a former journalist, as my readers know, and I understand the need to protect sources, but it is almost as if Mr. Hersh ran away from the story because it was so radioactive. Even at the time of the July deposition, he seemed to believe what his source told him, yet he had zero interest in pursuing the story.
I sought permission to release the deposition because I wanted to use it as an exhibit in Huddleston v. FBI, Case No. 4:20-cv-447-ALM (E.D. Tex.), the case where the FBI reluctantly admitted that it has thousands of records about Seth Rich. According to the court’s October 23, 2020 scheduling order, the FBI was supposed to produce the records two days ago. On December 16, 2020, however, the FBI asked the court for what amounts to an indefinite delay.
This morning I filed an opposition to the FBI’s request, and I attached the deposition of Mr. Hersh. Below I’ve posted links to all of the exhibits. As I explained to the Huddleston court, the FBI has a long history of deception and delay, and it perpetrated a fraud on at least two federal courts while hiding the Seth Rich records.
If you have any tips, please send them my way.
FBI changes story, finally admits it has thousands of pages of documents about Seth Rich
December 9, 2020 by Ty Clevenger
After three years of claiming that it could not find any records about murdered Democratic National Committee employee Seth Rich, the FBI admitted today that it has thousands of pages of information about him, further admitting that it has custody of his laptop.
So what changed between then and now? Here's an excerpt from the email that I received this morning from an attorney representing the FBI against my client, Brian Huddleston, in Huddleston v. FBI, Case No. 4:20-CV-00447 (E.D. Tex.):
FBI has completed the initial search identifying approximately 50 cross-reference serials, with attachments totaling over 20,000 pages, in which Seth Rich is mentioned. FBI has also located leads that indicate additional potential records that require further searching. At this time, FBI anticipates processing only the pages where Seth Rich is mentioned, along with perhaps another page or two in each situation to provide context. The issue right now with this batch of documents is the amount of labor required to ingest all of the material so that the responsive pages will, first, be in a page format, secondly, can be identified from among the thousands of non-responsive pages, and finally, be processed.
FBI is also currently working on getting the files from Seth Rich's personal laptop into a format to be reviewed. As you can imagine, there are thousands of files of many types. The goal right now is to describe, generally, the types of files/personal information contained in this computer. Furthermore, the FBI will continue to evaluate the responsiveness of these files under the FOIA.
In summary, FBI has made significant progress in the search, but there is still much work that lies ahead, including (1) ) processing the approximately 50 cross-references (with thousands of pages to ingest and sort through), 2) undertaking some level of review of the personal laptop, and 3) completing all remaining searches.
Unfortunately, these efforts are hampered by FBI FOIA office's reduction to a 50% staffing posture due to Covid.
In light of the status of this search and the work left to be done, we propose an additional 3 months to complete the tasks described above. At that time, we will propose a production schedule and briefing schedule.
I would like to provide this status update to the Court with the proposed schedule. Please let me know if you would like to file something jointly with the Court, or if you would prefer that I file this and you can respond accordingly.
In his 2018 declaration, Mr. Hardy also testified that the Metropolitan Police Department in D.C. was solely responsible for investigating Mr. Rich's murder. So why does the FBI have Mr. Rich's laptop rather than MPD? And after fighting tooth and nail to hide this information for so long, why is the FBI coming clean now? [Continued on p.2]
There are reasons why I've refused to let go of this story, but unfortunately I cannot discuss most of those reasons publicly. On October 12. 2020, for example, I sent a letter to Attorney General Bill Barr and Special Counsel John Durham about evidence that is covered by a protective order but very pertinent to the “Russian collusion” investigation (the letter is misdated “2019”). Read the letter for yourself, and then ask yourself why Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham have ignored it. In particular, ask yourself why Mr. Durham refuses to investigate anything related to Seth Rich.
And why is Fox News working so hard to kill this story? I wish I could say more about Fox's behind-the-scenes treachery — and someday hopefully I will — but rest assured that Malia Zimmerman's May 17, 2017 story about Mr. Rich was fully vetted by senior Fox management. I repeatedly encouraged Fox's attorneys to postpone settlement discussions with Seth Rich's parents until I obtained the FBI records (my client, Ed Butowsky, was a co-defendant with Fox), but Fox was hellbent on settling the case in October / November. That's around the time Rupert Murdoch publicly joined forces with Joe Biden. Fox had a very strong defense, yet it rolled over and played dead, settling the lawsuit and then firing Ms. Zimmerman. Sooner or later, the full story will come out, and it will be very ugly for Fox News and the Murdoch family.
Speaking of bad journalism…
Well-known journalists like David Isikoff at NPR, Andy Kroll at Rolling Stone, and Michael Isikoff at Yahoo!News have been acting more like government propagandists where the Seth Rich story is concerned, and they have not hesitated to smear people (like my client, Mr. Butowsky) who dare to question the official narrative. Consider this excerpt from a November 24, 2020 hit piece by Folkenflik:
Behind the scenes, [Zimmerman's] reporting depended heavily upon the involvement of investment advisor Edward Butowsky, then an unpaid Fox News commentator. In public, the story relied upon quotes from a private investigator that he never said, as both Zimmerman and Butowsky later acknowledged in a taped conversation.
The second sentence is entirely fabricated, because the “taped conversation” never happened. In fact, the private investigator, Rod Wheeler, had approved the quotes in writing before the story was published. Worse, Folkenflik knew all of that because he spent more than two years in litigation with my client, Mr. Butowsky, and he had access to all of the evidence.
I never intended to be a defamation lawyer — I'm a former journalist, after all — but people like Folkenflik, Kroll, and Stone have changed my mind. For the sake of the country, we need to start suing dirty journalists into bankruptcy.
If you know something, say something
If you have any tips, send them my way. If you're inside the government, we can form an attorney-client relationship or I can put you in touch with a whistleblower attorney.
Good grief! The corruption in D.C. is just breath taking. Damn, is everyone up there crooked?
If I hazard a guess, after excluding the certifiably malicious, the corrupt, and the co-opted, you are left with a small number of honest people. A few of them are high profile (e.g. Rand Paul) but others are virtual unknowns on the fringe of political circle in DC. Public probably have never heard of them.
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