Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was murdered in New York last year and his killer was never found so his family hired a private investigator at the urging of a Fox News contributor.
The Fox News contributor who approached the Rich family offered to cover the cost of hiring an investigator, who is also a Fox News contributor, for reasons that now seem very apparent.
It appears the man who approached the family, Ed Butowsky, and the private investigator he hired, Rod Wheeler, took the job so they could spin the family's story into a conspiracy theory about Wikileaks and the murderous Clintons.
Wheeler said on Monday there was evidence to support the conspiracy theories, including that Rich had been in contact with WikiLeaks before his death — prompting a quick rebuke from both the police and Rich's family. [...]
Wheeler, who did not respond to request for comment from NBC News, revived Rich's murder by making explosive claims to a local Fox affiliate that Rich was in contact with Wikileaks before his death and that the local police and FBI were covering that up.
The police and Rich's family quickly condemned the report, but it still launched to the top of conservative news outlets like Fox News, among others.
The Rich family has responded in the strongest possible terms, referring to these theories as "fake evidence" and by saying there's a "special place in hell" for these depraved buzzards.
If you were wondering if Fox News could sink any lower, I think we have an answer. Fox News itself may not have commissioned the story, but they might as well have. Their contributors paid for this story that was run by the network and it came at the cost of deceiving the family of a murdered son.
And for what? So they could smear the Clintons more than six months after the election?
These are the worst people humanity has to offer. The moral rot of the American Right is total.