- In the summer of 2016, a young employee of the Democratic National Committee was murdered in Washington, D.C. His death became fertile ground for conspiracy theories pedaled by some Americans, as well as some foreign intelligence services.

Today's guest cuts through the fog and gives us the truth about what happened that night and what those conspiracy theories have cost us.

He's Andy Kroll, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(light upbeat music) (moves to soft upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller with "Providence Journal."

- This week we're joined by Andy Kroll.

An investigative reporter at ProPublica, he's now the author of a meticulously well-researched book, "A Death on W Street: The Murder of Seth Rich and the Age of Conspiracy."

Andy, thank you so much for being with us today.

- Thanks for having me.

It's a real pleasure to be here.

- Well, and I think it's our privilege to have you on and to talk a little bit about this story.

I think it's important for all of us to remember that it begins with the murder of a young man, Seth Rich.

So can you, for folks who maybe have not paid as close attention as you have or haven't yet read the book, who was Seth Rich and what happened to him?

- Seth Rich was like so many 20-somethings who come to our nation's capital after college looking to find their place here in the center of the political universe.

They work as journalists or they work as activists.

They work for a political party.

They work for a polling firm.

They come here because they are political junkies or they care about a particular issue and they want to play some part, however small, in the larger story of our country.

Seth Rich was just one of those people.

He had come to Washington from Omaha, Nebraska, where he was born and raised.

He grew up watching "The West Wing" on repeat.

He tuned into CSPAN in his childhood bedroom for fun, memorizing the names and the states and the districts of the members of Congress.

I mean, he was really steeped in the world of politics and the world of policy.

He came to Washington, D.C. right after graduating from Creighton University, and eventually landed what he would say was a dream job working for the Democratic National Committee here in D.C.

It was a job that he loved.

He was working to expand voting rights and to try to get more people to register to vote in this country.

And he was on the cusp of fulfilling an even greater dream, a real-life "West Wing" moment, if you will, to work on the Clinton presidential campaign in 2016, when he was shot and killed walking home from a bar about a block from his house in July of 2016.

- And so that is not, unfortunately, where the story ends.

What is the story that the conspiracy theorists and the fabulists have told about his death?

- The story that gets told after Seth Rich is killed and what the police said then and have said since was an armed robbery gone horribly wrong, a classic case of wrong place, wrong time in a big American city.

What people online on the left side of the political spectrum and then on the right side of the political spectrum said was that something nefarious had happened here.

Seth Rich was not the victim of a senseless armed robbery that went wrong, he was the center of a political plot involving the presidential race, involving leaked emails from the Democratic party, involving the group WikiLeaks, the pro-transparency leak organization.

They say, these conspiracy theorists, that the Clintons put a hit out on Seth Rich because he was gonna expose their wrongdoing or that Seth Rich was this Edward Snowden-like figure who had leaked materials from inside his own employer, the Democratic National Committee, and that it was not, as cybersecurity experts and the intelligence community and so many others told us, Russian interference operations that disrupted the election, that it was actually this guy Seth Rich.

So this fairly normal 27-year-old political staffer in D.C. all of a sudden becomes this martyr, this rallying cry, this viral online phenomenon, despite, of course, there being no actual evidence to back up any of these fantastical theories about him.

- So part of the theory was that he had leaked a number of emails to WikiLeaks, and perhaps to other people as well.

What were those emails and how did they actually get out into the public realm, or pieces of it into the public realm?

- So if you cast your mind back to the summer of 2016, it's this chaotic, breaking news story every hour moment in the presidential race.

Hillary Clinton has just become the democratic nominee.

Donald Trump has come out of nowhere to become the Republican nominee.

It feels like this race is a once-in-a-lifetime political event.

And that is before WikiLeaks, this international, radical transparency organization led by Julian Assange, comes forward and says, "We have tens of thousands of documents from inside the Democratic party."

WikiLeaks publishes these documents just before the Democratic National Convention in July of 2016, and it causes all kinds of chaos.

The head of the party resigns, Debbie Waserman Schultz, the congresswoman, other senior executives resign.

There are some embarrassing, unflattering material in this WikiLeaks release, they called it the DNC leaks, but nothing on par with what WikiLeaks has published in the past.

This is certainly no "Pentagon Papers" or NSA revelations like Edward Snowden put into the world.

But this theory takes root that a murdered DNC staffer, Seth Rich, was the source of these emails, not a Russian intelligence operation, which is what cyber-analysts have told us, the intelligence community would go on to tell us, multiple government investigations, and so on and so forth.

It is undeniably a foreign, hostile interference operation on American soil that brings these Democratic party emails into the world through WikiLeaks, and later, of course, these emails from John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman.

But a different theory, again, takes root, saying, "No, that Russia is story is not real.

It was probably this guy Seth Rich," who, by the way, couldn't defend himself in the public domain because he was dead at that point and had been dead for several weeks.

So it's a competing theory challenging one of these huge stories to come out of 2016, namely Russian interference in an American election and in American democracy.

- So if this theory was true, and it wasn't, that he was the source of these leaks, why would he, according to the conspiracy theorists and others, why would he have to have been murdered?

- Because he was going to expose further wrongdoing or corruption or election rigging on the part of the Democratic party.

Now remember, we're sort of putting ourselves in the mindset of people who are connecting dots that don't exist, coming up with stories and narratives that had no actual factual underpinning, but were politically convenient.

And it's easy to see why supporters of then-candidate Trump would say, as they ultimately did, that, no, it was this DNC staffer, Seth Rich, who leaked these emails.

Because if that were the case, then this embarrassing story about a foreign country trying to disrupt the 2016 election and potentially help then-candidate Trump, that story goes away.

That story has no currency if it was instead the work of a young man inside of the Democratic party trying to expose the Clintons.

So there was a political convenience here, a narrative that served one whole side of the political spectrum in this country.

And you see this with conspiracy theories all of the time, that the evidence isn't there, the data doesn't make sense, there are no dots to connect unless you're gonna create them, but it hits the gut in the right way.

It feels right and it serves a purpose.

And so, in this case, even though there was no evidence to say Seth Rich had done this, it served a purpose.

It helped a candidate for President and it hurt the other candidate trying to challenge Donald Trump at the time.

- Yeah.

And it fits to almost to the letter T the intent of this show.

In essence, the Seth Rich conspiracy theory fit into existing narratives about the evilness and wickedness of the Clinton family, right?

That there were Clinton death lists of people who had been murdered, allegedly, by the Clintons because of the threat that they posed to their quest for political power.

In 2016.

I don't think we can dismiss just the potency and the ubiquitousness of those kinds of stories about the Clintons, and then along comes this story that fits neatly into those existing narratives.

- That's exactly right.

There's a moment in the book where Seth's former colleagues at the DNC ask the Clinton campaign if Secretary Clinton, Democratic nominee Clinton, would mention Seth in an upcoming major speech, her first speech, more or less, since she had clinched the nomination against Senator Bernie Sanders.

The Clinton campaign says, "Of course, this so tragic, what happened to this young DNC employee."

And Clinton goes on to mention Seth in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in this huge rally.

You know, international media have convened and descended on New Hampshire to cover this speech.

And Clinton mentioned Seth by name.

I capture this moment through the eyes of one of these former colleagues of Seth's back at the DNC.

This colleague was watching Clinton's speech, hears Clinton say Seth's name.

There's a very brief moment of gratitude for the democratic front runner remembering and paying homage to Seth.

But almost immediately, that feeling of gratitude curdles into a feeling of fear.

This employee thinks to herself, "Oh, my God, what have we done?"

Because, in that moment, she realized what you just said.

There was this whole history leading up to 2016 of people thinking that Clintons were these serial murderers and that there was this Clinton body count and that all of these deaths of people who had, in some cases, were friends, confidants, employees of the Clintons, and in some cases had interned in the Clinton White House giving tour guides for like two months, that they were all part of this long, murderous spree.

And that employee realized that exactly in the moment when Hillary Clinton said the name Seth Rich.

And I really think that moment explains so much of why this took off in the way that it did and why it continued and has lasted as long as it has to the point that, to this day, I'm getting emails from people saying, "Oh, your book is wrong.

Seth Rich did it.

I know it.

I believe it.

The Clintons kill all of these people and they killed him too.

I don't care what you have to say and all the reporting that you put in your book."

- You know, so I can't remember the moment in 2016 when I first heard Seth Rich's name and I don't remember if I had seen something on Twitter and then sought it out, But I do remember Fox News and I do remember sort of a nightly drumbeat of this, not always pushing a conspiracy, but raising questions and sowing doubt.

Can you talk a little bit about how these conspiracy theories move from the dark corners of the internet to mainstream media?

- I think there's this notion that Fox News is, in some cases, the originator or the creator of something like the Seth Rich conspiracy theory or the, quote, unquote, great replacement theory about immigration to the United States, different things that you hear about on Fox.

But that is not the case, and that is something I learned in the course of reporting this book and I think is also a larger lesson about media and how it works in the social media era.

These claims about Seth Rich originated in the darkest, weirdest corners of the internet.

They originated in places like Reddit and 4chan and strange interactions with kind of anonymous, suspicious characters on Twitter.

And they go from there to blogs that are, you know, conspiracy minded.

And then, they jump from there to sort of pro-Trump forums, more, I wouldn't say reputable, but more well-trafficked sites.

And then from there, they jump to what you might call mainstream media like Fox News.

Fox is the ultimate validator, in a sense.

It is the ultimate megaphone.

It's the center of the universe of conservative media for sure, but it is not where stories start.

It is where stories, in some cases, if not end, it is where they reach their highest volume.

That was absolutely the case with this Seth Rich story.

I think that Seth's family believed that if they could correct the record enough and if they could try to beat back these wild theories and stories about Seth before it reached a place like Fox News, then they could contain it.

But once Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, Fox News and Fox Business and the whole Fox News empire got its hands on this story and decided to broadcast it out into the world to a combined millions, if not tens of millions of viewers, there was no putting that genie back in the bottle.

And it was really that moment that Seth Rich's family, and especially his parents, Joel and Mary, realized that there was nothing that they could do to change the story in the court of public opinion.

They had tried everything, given interviews, told stories, talked about Seth over and over and over and over again.

But now they realize the only recourse they had when Fox News takes up a story like this was to take their case to the court of law, which is ultimately what they did.

- So you talk about Fox News as a validator, and I think that's a very insightful description of Fox News.

There was one report, however, that Fox News broadcast that was later retracted that played a very, very critical role in the Seth Rich conspiracy case.

Talk about that report, how it came to be, and why it was ultimately retracted.

- In May of 2017, Fox News published on its website what looked like a reported story confirming what so many people had speculated about and promoted theories about online up to that point, that Seth Rich, not Russia, was the source of those leak DNC emails that WikiLeaks had published in 2016 and that we were just talking about a moment ago.

This story, it's hard to understate the impact of this story.

It truly goes viral.

It's on the front page of the Drudge Report.

It is discussed and promoted on Fox News pretty much all day long the day it comes out and on Sean Hannity's primetime show multiple nights in a row after the story comes out, this sort of what looks like a reported story saying that Seth was this leaker.

The story travels around the world.

At one point, the Chinese Communist Party's Twitter account is repeating the supposed findings of this Fox story.

And then, almost as soon as the story comes out, it begins to fall apart, because the FBI, the Washington D.C. police, the rich family, even a story, excuse me, even a source quoted in the story essentially backtracks and says, "Oh, I didn't say those things that they're quoting me as saying."

And within a week of the story coming out, it is retracted entirely by Fox News, which said that it didn't meet its editorial standards initially and that it was not, you know, up to the supposed quality that I guess Fox News asks of its journalism.

And it's one of the biggest scandals, really, in the history of Fox News.

What I do in the book, however, is take the reader on a blow-by-below journey of how this scandalous story came to be.

And, I mean, it's really an incredible tale and I won't go into too much detail, but what I will say and what's always struck me about this particular part of this story is you've had conservative commentators and conservative media for I don't know how long criticizing independent journalists, criticizing reporters who are trying to do the actual work of fact-based, honest journalism, saying that they're biased, saying that they're making it up, saying that they can't be trusted.

What I found in more or less dissecting how this explosive Fox news story came to be is that Fox, in this case, did all the things that conservative media have accused so many of the rest of us of doing for so long.

You know, as I discovered in my reporting, essentially, the story was written, this explosive story connecting Seth to WikiLeaks, was written in full form.

And then, the reporter who was on the story, one of her, quote, unquote, sources, and then this Fox News commentator who was kind of egging her on and was also sort of pretending to be a good Samaritan to the Rich family, holding himself out as a good person while helping Fox News, the reporter had a story and then tried to find the factual material, tried to confirm the story after it had been written, which is, of course, not how journalism works.

When looking for the evidence when already the conclusion had been set, baked, and ready to go.

And I just thought that that was such a revealing peek inside of how Fox News behaved in this really telling moment in the company's history, and, really, a behind the scenes look at maybe the most powerful media organization in the country.

- Andy, do you have a sense of what motivates big media companies to do?

Is it simply, are they taking a partisan hand?

Is it about viewership and entertainment because it's not news?

What is it that motivates a company like Fox News to go down this path?

- I think the most revealing character in this particular part of the story and the person that I was most fascinated by on this path was Sean Hannity, a longtime talk radio host, longtime Fox News primetime host, obviously one of the loudest voices in all of conservative media, if not all television media in general.

All the reporting that I did about Hannity, what he was like in Fox, on camera and off camera, and why he was so drawn to this story left me with the conclusion that Hannity saw himself just as much as a defender of the then-President Donald Trump, someone who he was on very good terms with, by some accounts, spoke to on a nightly basis as a shadow chief of staff in the words of people who've reported on Hannity and Trump's relationship.

He saw himself as someone who went on television each night and went to bat for the president, fought for the President.

Now, that, of course, is not what a journalist does.

That's not even what a opinionated commentator does.

You're not there to simply defend or explain away the actions and the words of a sitting president.

That's why the president has a press secretary, a communications director, an entire press office right there in the White House.

But Sean Hannity was that defender for Donald Trump.

And so, getting back to what we said earlier about a story that feels so good you want it to be true, you wanna will it into being, Sean Hannity saw the Seth Rich story, certainly he saw the story that his own network had reported as the ultimate clearing, the ultimate, what's the right way to put it?

Sort of the ultimate piece of exculpatory evidence for Donald Trump.

And Sean Hannity wouldn't let that story go, even as his own employer, Fox New, was internally scrambling to figure out why was this reported story falling apart?

Why were these sources challenging, debunking, or backing away from the story?

At the same time that that's happening, Sean Hannity is out there night after night talking about how this story, if true, and he's always very careful to say if true, or, "I'm just asking questions," but you know what he's coming from, this story could get Donald Trump off the hook, remove the cloud from over his presidency, and he was free and clear.

- So, Andy, we have about two minutes left, and this question could be a whole separate show, but what does the Seth Rich case tell us about the state of American democracy today?

- It tells us that we live in a time when it can feel like the loudest voices, the fastest opinions, the most extreme point of view can win out over the facts, the science, the data, just because it's loud, it's extreme, it's over the top.

Truth moves slowly, and innuendo, conspiracy theories, false narratives move a lot faster than truth does.

And I think, for your viewers out there, it's always important to remember that the thing you see on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, that is ricocheting around your network, among your friends, your old high school classmates, there's a decent chance that that's not accurate or not fully true because it's so easy for a story that feels right to take off versus a story that is vetted, accurate, honest, nuanced, and balanced.

And so I think if there's one thing people can take away, it's to remember that the truth is hard.

The truth doesn't always make you feel good in that spot in your gut, but the truth is the essential fabric of a democracy that works.

It's the way your government will work for you.

It's the foundational element of this country that we live in.

And just remember that it isn't always the thing that makes you feel good, but it is so vital to hold onto, especially in times like these.

- Andy, this is, just as I said, a wonderfully researched and detailed book.

Thank you so much for spending some time with us.

He's Andy Kroll.

The book is "A Death on W Street."

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

(light upbeat music) (light upbeat music continues) (upbeat music)