October 8, 2016


News and Views


My apologies for three days without a blog. Blowing rain came in under my balcony door and knocked out the power to all the wall outlets in my living room, so I had to read, read, read instead. The good news is that the air conditioner is on a separate line, so I did have some cool air. If you were in the storm, I hope everything went well for you.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/10/06/five-lessons-about-millennial-voters-from-a-philadelphia-focus-group/?wpisrc=nl_politics-pm&wpmm=1

Post Politics
Five lessons about millennial voters from a Philadelphia focus group
By David Weigel
October 6 at 4:06 PM


Photograph -- A year ago, students cheered Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders as he gave a speech at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. But Sanders did not win the nomination, leaving millennials less to cheer about. (Linda Davidson/The Washington Post)


PHILADELPHIA — On Wednesday night, the Harvard Institute of Politics pulled together a focus group of eight millennial voters from the Philadelphia area, and a small group of journalists watched. One of the millennials supported the Green Party presidential candidacy of Jill Stein. The rest professed to be totally undecided — despondent about the election, offended that they were being asked to choose between major party candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Most of the participants asked for anonymity. A few, including the Green-voting 27-year-old Amanda, offered up their first names and allowed a few follow-up questions. The small sample of voters, in one swing state, was illustrative just as the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs and Research poll had been — and with the same tantalizing power for Democrats. Unlike some of the white working-class men who are breaking for Trump, the millennials were onboard with the Democrats' 2016 agenda. But they were struggling to cast a vote. Among the lessons:

1. They agree with the Democrats on the issues. For the better part of an hour, the members of the group listed their most pressing policy concerns, from climate change to taxes to education to agriculture. When all the terms were written on a whiteboard, they were ask [sic] to list their top three, and for each, say which candidate they agreed with. Seven of the eight millennials ended up preferring Clinton on the issues; the eighth, as mentioned above, preferred Stein.

2. They despise Donald Trump. It's the second reason Democrats think millennials are the most gettable voters still not on board with Clinton. Asked to describe Trump with whatever words came to mind, every member of the group came up with a negative word: “All about himself.” “Bully.” “Evil.” “Racist.” “Misogynist.” “Bigot.” “Hot-tempered.” The only dissent came from a member of the group who thought Trump was “smart” in his approach to terrorism; no one else defended any aspect of Trump's campaign or persona.

Asked to assign terms for Clinton, the members of the group were more balanced. Among the terms: “Career politician.” “Experienced.” “Shady but knowledgeable.” “Untrustworthy but stable.” “Hard-working, corrupt, real-deal politician.” The harshest judgment came from Amanda, the Stein voter, who dismissed Clinton with the description “b----, liar, false.” In this group, “undecided” did not mean that Trump could earn a vote.

3. They're souring on Gary Johnson. No one in the group said that the Libertarian candidate was his or her top choice for president. Several did say they were considering voting for him. “One of the guys at work is all about Gary Johnson,” said Alex, 26. “He can't stop talking about him. Another member of the group said that Johnson deserved more media attention than he was getting.

But when asked to play word association, the focus group largely had indictments of Johnson, referring to the increasingly infamous incidents of Johnson stumbling over a foreign policy question, then dismissing the mistake as the result of a “gotcha.” Several members of the group called Johnson ignorant. Timothy, 26, called Johnson “uneducated and stoned.”

That, he admitted, was not enough of a reason to write Johnson off. Timothy — who said he would have liked to support a Republican nominee but that Trump was unacceptable — said he could ignore Johnson's problems and cast a protest vote, unless it seemed possible, on Election Day, that Trump would win.

4. They're counting on something — an assassin, impeachment — to prevent Trump from doing too much damage. Alex paralyzed the room with laughter when he floated a strange and “dark” idea. “If Trump wins,” he said, “he's probably going to be assassinated, and Mike Pence will become president.”

Alex, a Democrat who had voted for Barack Obama in 2008, had stayed home in 2012 and cooled on most politicians. He had come to like Pence for his demeanor, as seen at Tuesday night's debate. But the more important point was that a Trump presidency did not seem like a four- or eight-year proposition.

“He's going to be in court most of the time as president,” said one focus group member who preferred to be anonymous. “He's going to get impeached.”

5. They're not necessarily thinking about all the powers a president would have. One of the questions that halted the group's discussion was simple: How was the Supreme Court affecting their vote? Several members of the group admitted that they had not considered this; when they did, as in the issue round, they preferred that Clinton appoint members of the court.


EXCERPT – “They're counting on something — an assassin, impeachment — to prevent Trump from doing too much damage. Alex paralyzed the room with laughter when he floated a strange and “dark” idea. “If Trump wins,” he said, “he's probably going to be assassinated, and Mike Pence will become president.”


It doesn’t surprise me that everybody laughed at his comment. As a group of Progressives, we have watched a spectacle like two ugly and dirty-fighting professional wrestlers jumping on top of each other, in a nauseating display; and then when asked who we “want to” vote for the question is ridiculous, and laughter is a great way to release tension. To me the only logical thing for me to do is vote against Trump by voting for Hillary, though I’m going to have to “hold my nose” to do it. I am also following my personal leader’s requests.

After the way Clinton conducted the competition between her, with her DNC cronies, against a clean and intelligent, but to some citizens, too left-leaning champion of the people, I feel as though I will never forgive her. I also have already removed the Democratic Party from my party declaration as a voter.

I hope Sanders’ “Our Revolution” group is going to be a viable Progressive party and run him or one of his surrogates for President every year, plus other open positions, from Federal to local, so we will have a real choice of our own true preferences. I could happily go with the Greens, except that their success rate doesn’t look as good as the following that Sanders can claim. I want a party that can put up a good fight and even win, and I feel that as long as Sanders is in the running under the umbrella of OurRevolution, he can do it.

I don’t like the negativity that this 2016 election has aroused in me, but unfortunately it’s a real life situation and not a neurotic feeling on my part. Sometimes you think they’re out to get you and other times, they really are! We desperately need leaders who will protect the society against the Alt-right, and those in the Republican Party who are just greedy and unscrupulous power seeking contenders, willing to back a Donald Trump if it helps them to get ahead.



http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/us/politics/hillary-clinton-speeches-wikileaks.html?_r=0

Leaked Speech Excerpts Show a Hillary Clinton at Ease With Wall Street
By AMY CHOZICK, NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and MICHAEL BARBARO
OCT. 7, 2016

Photograph -- Hillary Clinton spoke to reporters after at a rally in Harrisburg, Pa., on Tuesday. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Photo -- odesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, on the campaign plane last month. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
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Photograph -- John Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, on the campaign plane last month. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times


In lucrative paid speeches that Hillary Clinton delivered to elite financial firms but refused to disclose to the public, she displayed an easy comfort with titans of business, embraced unfettered international trade and praised a budget-balancing plan that would have required cuts to Social Security, according to documents posted online Friday by WikiLeaks.

The tone and language of the excerpts clash with the fiery liberal approach she used later in her bitter primary battle with Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and could have undermined her candidacy had they become public.

Mrs. Clinton comes across less as a firebrand than as a technocrat at home with her powerful audience, willing to be critical of large financial institutions but more inclined to view them as partners in restoring the country’s economic health.

In the excerpts from her paid speeches to financial institutions and corporate audiences, Mrs. Clinton said she dreamed of “open trade and open borders” throughout the Western Hemisphere. Citing the back-room deal-making and arm-twisting used by Abraham Lincoln, she mused on the necessity of having “both a public and a private position” on politically contentious issues. Reflecting in 2014 on the rage against political and economic elites that swept the country after the 2008 financial crash, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that her family’s rising wealth had made her “kind of far removed” from the struggles of the middle class.

The passages were contained in an internal review of Mrs. Clinton’s paid speeches undertaken by her campaign, which was identifying potential land mines should the speeches become public. They offer a glimpse at one of the most sought-after troves of information in the 2016 presidential race — and an explanation, perhaps, for why Mrs. Clinton has steadfastly refused demands by Mr. Sanders and Donald J. Trump, her Republican rival, to release them.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign would not confirm the authenticity of the documents. They were released on Friday night by WikiLeaks, the hacker collective founded by the activist Julian Assange, saying that they had come from the email account of John D. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman.

In a statement, a Clinton spokesman, Glen Caplin, pointed to the United States government’s findings that Russian officials had used WikiLeaks to hack documents in order to sway the outcome of the presidential election, suggesting that the leak of Mr. Podesta’s emails was also engineered by Russian officials determined to help Mr. Trump. Mr. Caplin noted that a Twitter message from WikiLeaks promoting the documents had incorrectly identified Mr. Podesta as a co-owner of his brother’s lobbying firm.

But Clinton officials did not deny that the email containing the excerpts was real.

The leaked email, dated Jan. 25, does not contain Mrs. Clinton’s full speeches to the financial firms, leaving it unclear what her overall message was to these audiences.

But in the excerpts, Ms. Clinton demonstrates her long and warm ties to some of Wall Street’s most powerful figures. In a discussion in the fall of 2013 with Lloyd Blankfein, a friend who is the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Mrs. Clinton said that the political climate had made it overly difficult for wealthy people to serve in government.

“There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives,” Mrs. Clinton said. The pressure on officials to sell or divest assets in order to serve, she added, had become “very onerous and unnecessary.”

In a separate speech to Goldman Sachs employees the same month, Mrs. Clinton said it was an “oversimplification” to blame the global financial crisis of 2008 on the U.S. banking system.

“It was conventional wisdom,” Mrs. Clinton said of the tendency to blame the banking system. “And I think that there’s a lot that could have been avoided in terms of both misunderstanding and really politicizing what happened.”

And she praised a deficit-reduction proposal from President Obama’s fiscal commission that called for raising the Social Security retirement age, saying that the commission’s leaders “had put forth the right framework.”

Such comments could have proven devastating to Mrs. Clinton during the Democratic primary fight, when Mr. Sanders promoted himself as the enemy of Wall Street and of a rigged economic system.

Several of the most eye-popping passages ultimately express more nuanced explanations of her views. When Mrs. Clinton describes herself as “far removed” from average Americans and their finances, she had just finished describing her growing appreciation for how “anxiety and even anger in the country over the feeling that the game is rigged.” And she reminds the audience that her father “loved to complain about big business and big government.”

The Clintons have made more than $120 million in speeches to Wall Street and special interests since Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001. Mrs. Clinton typically earned $225,000 for speeches, though she sometimes donated her fees to her family foundation.

“I kind of think if you’re going to be paid $225,000 for a speech, it must be a fantastic speech,” Mr. Sanders said during the primary, “a brilliant speech which you would want to share with the American people.”

As her race against Mr. Sanders — who now campaigns for Mrs. Clinton — grew unexpectedly contentious and close, Mrs. Clinton sought to portray herself as deeply skeptical of Wall Street and eager to punish its wayward leaders.

“I believe strongly that we need to make sure that Wall Street never wrecks Main Street again,” Mrs. Clinton said in January. “No bank is too big to fail, and no executive is too powerful to jail.”

As she sought to burnish her image as an advocate of working America, Mrs. Clinton declared her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Mr. Obama’s 12-nation trade pact, and distanced herself from Nafta, which her husband signed into law.

But in a 2013 speech to a Brazilian bank, Mrs. Clinton took a far different approach. “My dream,” she said, “is a hemispheric common market, with open borders, sometime in the future.”

Some of her paid remarks embrace the view that the public can benefit when Wall Street partners with government. When it comes to writing effective financial regulations, Mrs. Clinton said, “The people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.”

Foreign hackers — authorized by Russian security agencies, according to national security officials — have successfully penetrated the operations of the Democratic Party and its candidates over the past year. They broke into the email servers of the Democratic National Committee, revealing embarrassing internal messages in which party leaders who were supposed to be neutral expressed their preference for Mrs. Clinton even as she was campaigning against Mr. Sanders. And Mr. Assange is an avowed critic of Mrs. Clinton who has made clear that he wishes to hurt her chances of winning the presidency.

Half of all registered voters said it bothered them “a lot” that Mrs. Clinton had given numerous paid speeches to Wall Street banks, according to a Bloomberg Politics poll in June.

Asked in an interview that month if the practice was self-defeating, given the anger over income inequality, Mrs. Clinton responded that her predecessors as secretary of state had given paid speeches, too.

“I actually think it makes sense,” she said. “Because a lot of people know you have a front-row seat in watching what’s going on in the world.”



EXCERPTS -- In lucrative paid speeches that Hillary Clinton delivered to elite financial firms but refused to disclose to the public, she displayed an easy comfort with titans of business, embraced unfettered international trade and praised a budget-balancing plan that would have required cuts to Social Security, according to documents posted online Friday by WikiLeaks. …. Citing the back-room deal-making and arm-twisting used by Abraham Lincoln, she mused on the necessity of having “both a public and a private position” on politically contentious issues. …. Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that her family’s rising wealth had made her “kind of far removed” from the struggles of the middle class. …. In a discussion in the fall of 2013 with Lloyd Blankfein, a friend who is the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Mrs. Clinton said that the political climate had made it overly difficult for wealthy people to serve in government. “There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives,” Mrs. Clinton said. …. “I kind of think if you’re going to be paid $225,000 for a speech, it must be a fantastic speech,” Mr. Sanders said during the primary, “a brilliant speech which you would want to share with the American people.” …. And she praised a deficit-reduction proposal from President Obama’s fiscal commission that called for raising the Social Security retirement age, saying that the commission’s leaders “had put forth the right framework.” …. When Mrs. Clinton describes herself as “far removed” from average Americans and their finances, she had just finished describing her growing appreciation for how “anxiety and even anger in the country over the feeling that the game is rigged.” …. “I kind of think if you’re going to be paid $225,000 for a speech, it must be a fantastic speech,” Mr. Sanders said during the primary, “a brilliant speech which you would want to share with the American people.”


Raise the social security retirement age??? This article tells so many disgusting things that she has said, that I am both furious at her and embarrassed for her. It also makes it more and more difficult for me. I do wonder if she’s going to win after all even if I do vote for her. I love Sanders’ comment, that for $225,000 a speech it must be a darned good one, and why in the world didn’t she want to share the contents of it with joy rather than stubbornly resisting it. Having read this article, I know exactly why.

I know some people hate Assange, but I really do like him. I’ve been watching the kind of things that he has released, and I tend to feel he is working for justice. He isn’t just an exceptionally bold whistle blower, he’s really committed to fairness and honesty in politics. I do hope Bernie will get another crack at the presidency sooner rather than later – so late that he will be too old to qualify.

Meanwhile, I remain SICK AND SAD after reading these comments from her. I particularly hate the idea that she believes politicians not only DO have, but SHOULD HAVE “a public position” and a “private one.” It’s so much like Trump’s recent comment that his having paid no taxes for so many years now (I forget how many) makes him SMART. There really is a shocking difference between those wealthy people -- who are “removed” from the problems of their social and economic inferiors -- and us who will never see financial comfort, unless of course we win the lottery. I play one $1.00 ticket about once a week. I know I won’t win, but it gives my feelings a little boost.



http://www.bizpacreview.com/2016/10/02/wednesday-hillary-clinton-done-reports-julian-assanges-announcement-tuesday-will-finish-396507

‘Wednesday Hillary Clinton is done’: Reports Julian Assange’s announcement on Tuesday will finish her
October 2, 2016 | Tom Tillison

Is it the October surprise?

MSNBC’s Jesse Rodriguez posted what could be interpreted as an ominous reemark on social media last week regarding Julian Assange.

…ominous if you’re with Team Hillary.

According to the “Morning Joe” senior producer, the founder of the whistle-blowing platform WikiLeaks will be making an announcement from his balcony next Tues, October 4.

Assange appeared on Fox News just a few weeks ago and repeated previous claims that his organization has significant documentation that could be damaging to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

He said that WikiLeaks may release some “teasers” from the collection of documents “reasonably soon — as early as next week.”

UPDATE: There have been reports that the balcony announcement ( not necessarily the October Surprise itself) has been cancelled due to “security concerns.”

Assange’s group leaked nearly 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee that showed the party effectively rigged the primary against Clinton rival Bernie Sanders. The revelation resulted in the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Donald Trump pit bull Roger Stone was quick to speculate on a possible end result of Assange’s reported announcement, posting on Twitter that Hillary Clinton is “done” on Wednesday.

Social media users seemed to like Stone’s prognostication:

Of course, considering the unusual string of bad luck that has befallen others who may or may not have had damaging information about the Clintons, social media users begged Assange to be careful.

Here’s a sampling of responses from Twitter:

Tom Tillison
Tom is a grassroots activist who distinguished himself as one of the top conservative bloggers in Florida before joining BizPac Review.



IN CASE YOU’RE WONDERING, FOX IS THE M O S T RELIABLE SOURCE FOR THIS STORY, SO MAKE YOUR OWN JUDGEMENT ABOUT IT. IT IS TITILLATING, HOWEVER, TRUE OR NOT.


http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/10/02/report-wikileaks-cancels-highly-anticipated-tuesday-announcement-due-to-security-concerns.html

Report: WikiLeaks cancels highly anticipated Tuesday announcement due to 'security concerns'
Published October 02, 2016 Heat Street

Photograph -- Julian Assange speaks from the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. (AP)


Wikileaks has abruptly canceled a much-anticipated announcement on Tuesday, according to NBC News. The announcement had been expected to be founder Julian Assange’s long-promised document dump on Hillary Clinton.

NBC’s Jesse Rodriguez reported that the Tuesday announcement — which was to come from the balcony of London’s Ecuadorian Embassy, where Assange has sought sanctuary for years – was canceled due to “security concerns”.


Jesse Rodriguez ✔ @JesseRodriguez
Due to security concerns at the Ecuadorian Embassy, Julian Assange's balcony announcement on Tues has been cancelled, per @wikileaks
12:50 PM - 30 Sep 2016

Jesse Rodriguez ✔ @JesseRodriguez
Julian Assange set to make an announcement from his balcony in London next Tuesday, according to @WikiLeaks
12:15 PM - 27 Sep 2016


Wikileaks has not said when it will now make its “announcement.”

Assange appeared on Fox News last month, repeating his assertion that Wikileaks has damaging documents on Clinton and suggested WikiLeaks may soon release “teasers.” More than three weeks later, that release has yet to take place.

Clinton’s more fervent opponents have hoped for weeks that the promised document dump would be an “October surprise” – damaging and revelatory emails or the like — and inflict a mortal wound on her campaign. There’s no evidence however that such damaging information even exists.

It was only this summer that Assange’s group leaked thousands of embarrassing emails from the Democratic National Committee which showed their disdain for Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. The uproar over the disclosures forced DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz to resign in disgrace on the eve of the Democratic National Convention.

The political provocateur and bomb-thrower Roger Stone, a fervent Donald Trump supporter, predicted Sunday morning that Wikileaks’ revelations would doom Clinton’s campaign.

Follow
Roger Stone @RogerJStoneJr
Wednesday@HillaryClinton is done. #Wikileaks.
12:52 AM - 2 Oct 2016
3,095 3,095 Retweets 4,087 4,087 likes

It’s unclear if Stone was aware that Wikileaks, according to NBC News, has canceled their Tuesday announcement.

Assange and his supporters have long claimed that his personal safety is at risk due to the danger he (supposedly) represents to Clinton’s presidential ambitions. In August, liberal commentator Bob Beckel suggested in a TV appearance that Assange be murdered, proclaiming that someone should “shoot the son of a bitch!”


Follow
WikiLeaks ✔ @wikileaks
Hillary Clinton strategist Bob Beckel called for WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange to be assassinated. #DNCLeak
10:25 AM - 10 Aug 2016
20,083 20,083 Retweets 13,691 13,691 likes


Assange himself has also recently hinted publicly that low-level DNC staffer Seth Rich, who was murdered this summer in Washington DC, had been the source for Wikileaks’ document dump on the DNC. And that Rich’s alleged role in the leaks was linked to his death.

There has been no evidence linking Rich to the leak and no evidence that his murder was anything more than a botched robbery.

Nonetheless, the cancellation of Tuesday’s Wikileaks announcement already has anti-Clinton conspiracy theorists working up a frantic stew of speculation.

27 Sep
Jesse Rodriguez ✔ @JesseRodriguez
Julian Assange set to make an announcement from his balcony in London next Tuesday, according to @WikiLeaks
Follow
Challenger ✔ @bakedinapie
@JesseRodriguez @wikileaks L'assange au balcon pic.twitter.com/mPtoJurJ8g
12:59 PM - 27 Sep 2016



http://www.newsweek.com/seth-rich-murder-dnc-hack-julian-assange-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-492084

SETH RICH: INSIDE THE KILLING OF THE DNC STAFFER
BY JEFF STEIN ON 8/20/16 AT 4:34 PM
N IN THE MAGAZINE 9/16/16

Photograph -- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange fueled the conspiracy theories by offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in the Seth Rich case. MIKHAIL VOSKRESENSKIY/SPUTNIK/AP


It was closing time at Lou’s City Bar when Seth Rich drained the last of his Bell’s Two Hearted Ales and started walking into the muggy night in a trendy neighborhood of northwest Washington, D.C. At 2:30 a.m. on July 10, the torrid heat that had gripped the city for weeks had eased slightly, with temperatures slipping into the low 70s. Maybe it was the relative cool that prompted him to walk through several dark, dicey blocks to his apartment in Bloomingdale, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood a mile away. Or maybe he thought the walk would do him some good after venting to his longtime bartender about his unsuccessful efforts to reconcile his love life with his 12-hour days at the Democratic National Committee.

Whatever the reason, Rich, 27, a normally upbeat computer-voting specialist at the DNC, would soon leave family and friends grieving. And his decision to walk that night would become part of a wild election-year conspiracy theory that once again portrays Hillary Clinton and the Democrats as murderous criminals. At 4:19 a.m., police patrolling nearby responded to the sound of gunfire in Bloomingdale and found Rich lying mortally wounded at a dark intersection a block and a half from a red-brick row house he shared with friends. He had multiple gunshot wounds in his back. About an hour and 40 minutes later, he died at a local hospital. Police have declined to say whether he was able to describe his assailants. The cops suspected Rich was a victim of an attempted robbery, one of many that plague the neighborhood. Strangely, however, they found his wallet, credit cards and cellphone on his body. The band of his wristwatch was torn but not broken.
Sethrich

Seth Rich, a normally upbeat and much-loved 27-year-old computer-voting specialist at the DNC, was murdered in July near Bloomingdale, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in a once-blighted area of Washington, D.C.

SETH RICH

And that was enough to fire up the right-wing Twitterverse with yet another round of Clinton conspiracy theories, this one claiming that Rich was murdered—at dawn—as he was on his way to sing to the FBI about damning internal DNC emails. Such sinister notions might have evaporated had not Julian Assange hurled a thunderbolt into the affair a few weeks later. The WikiLeaks impresario, still penned up in Ecuador’s London embassy as he dodges a rape allegation in Sweden, announced he was offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in the Rich case. He hinted darkly that the slain man had been a source in his organization's recent publication of 30,000 internal DNC emails. The fallout from that embarrassment had led to the firing of several top Democratic Party officials. “What are you suggesting?” a startled interviewer from Dutch television asked him.

“I am suggesting,” Assange said, “that our sources, ah, take risks, and they, they become concerned to see things occurring like that.” His organization later “clarified” on Twitter that “this should not be taken to imply that Seth Rich was a source for WikiLeaks or to imply that his murder is connected to our publications.” But Assange had already lit the fire. No matter that the Metropolitan Police Department issued a statement saying there was "no indication that Seth Rich's death is connected to his employment at the DNC.” Right-wing media outlets continued to churn up sludge from the tragedy. Police Chief Cathy Lanier, normally cautious, may have inadvertently aided their cause during a crime-scene press conference on August 5, when she said, “Right now, we have more questions than answers.” No suspects have been arrested, despite the MPD’s $25,000 reward for information. The slain man’s parents, Mary and Joel Rich of Omaha, Nebraska, are distressed by the apparent political exploitation of their son’s death by Clinton’s opponents. Seth Rich had just accepted a promotion from the DNC to a position in her campaign, they say, and he was devoted to getting her elected. “It’s unfortunate and hurtful,” his parents say, in a statement to Newsweek, “that at the moment a murderer remains at large, there remains unfounded press speculation about the activities of our son that night. We should be focusing on the perpetrator at large.”

Terror in the Neighborhood Residents of Bloomingdale, which is about 20 blocks north of D.C.’s Union Station, had long been complaining about a surge in crime. One area resident tells Newsweek her house had been burgled a few years ago while she and her husband were inside. Two other residents who would volunteer only their first names, Jonathan and Kevin, say there were “definitely a lot of muggings and robberies” in the area. Another resident complained on the neighborhood blog about “a small group of guys with a silver handgun terrorizing this neighborhood for weeks with minimal response from public officials.” Residents were particularly incensed about a deterioration in security over the past two years related to a massive D.C. water department tunnel construction project just steps from where Rich was slain. High fences around it left the street occluded, with “hiding places for criminals and [no] sight lines for neighbors,” one resident wrote. Meanwhile, sources involved with the DNC’s investigation of a foreign hack of its files last year rule out the notion that Seth Rich had any role in the affair. “There was no indication that any insider was involved in this,” says one source, demanding anonymity in exchange for discussing the sensitive and ongoing investigation. “Every indication is this was a remote attack from a foreign government—the Russians. There is no indication that…there was any nefarious action taken by any employees in that environment.”

Nor is there any evidence Rich downloaded and printed out the DNC’s internal emails, the source says: “This is a very sophisticated actor. This is not some kid coming in and downloading documents and handing them to somebody. ”The Kremlin has denied any involvement in the DNC hack. Assange has declined to discuss who gave him the material. He has also threatened to release far more material in the coming weeks and months. Assange has an agenda here, the source adds: to damage Hillary Clinton, which tracks with Moscow’s apparent desire to see Donald Trump elected. “This is a match made in heaven,” he says. “Assange has the vehicle to leak it, and the Russians have the vehicle by which to provide him with the data.” I Never Saw Him Drunk’ In the weeks since Rich’s killing, the police presence in Bloomingdale has been beefed up “a lot more,” a local resident tells Newsweek, asking that her name not be used because she is a reporter herself. But “the biggest difference” in the improved security situation, she adds, was the addition of lights along the D.C. water department tunnel construction site. All of that is too late, of course, for Rich, his family, his colleagues and his friends, who gathered August 3 at Lou’s City Place to honor his memory. “We had a microphone,” Joe Capone, the general manager, said at Lou’s. “His parents were here. They brought a video that we played. People got up and said some words about Seth and what a great guy he was and how they missed him.” Capone pointed to Rich’s usual seat at the corner of the L-shaped bar. “He was a great guy,” he said. “Just a couple-of-beers kind of guy.” One news account describing Rich as despondent and drunk the night he was killed, penned by an avowed right-wing journalist in the conservative London Daily Mail, missed the mark, he said. “That was just not Seth. I never saw him drunk or even tipsy.” As he spoke, Capone gazed at the corner seat and smiled sadly. It was now occupied by somebody else.



I’m personally in favor of whistle blowing when an important injustice exists, as it certainly did at the DNC over their underhanded and dastardly deeds at the Convention this year. When the BIG BOYS are involved, I do believe that they will threaten, bribe, and yes, physically attack or kill their rivals, not ALWAYS, of course, but more frequently than we "good people" want to think. If there is nothing legitimate behind this last promise of more “information,” then shame on Mr. Assange. If, however, there really is more, I want to hear it. Let’s come clean completely. Assange's release of her Wall Street speech contents may be this mystery document. It certainly is a shocker.