The headlines and extracts below, linked to web sources, permit a reader to follow the development of a story that was quite widely reported in the MSM until the very last part, which lets us hear Seymour Hersh in his own language on the subject.
The original Fox News story is headlined: Seth Rich, slain DNC staffer, had contact with WikiLeaks, say multiple sources. This story suggests that the DNC staffer, not Russia, was the source of those DNC email leaks in the early summer of 2016.
Then came the NPR story headlined: Behind Fox News' Baseless Seth Rich Story: The Untold Tale. This on August 1, 2017.
That tale is of a lawsuit, put this way by the Dallas Times: Dallas financier pushed fake Seth Rich story to divert attention from Trump-Russia probe, suit says.
In the NPR story the famous Seymour Hersh (the My Lai Massacre and the Abu Graib Torture stories where his; he was a reporter for the NYTimes and latterly wrote for the New Yorker) helps us understand that the Fox News story is rather dubious in so far as it references an interview with him: "I hear gossip," Hersh tells NPR on Monday. "[Butowsky] took two and two and made 45 out of it."
So it came as a great shock for me to listen to Hersh in his own words, obviously talking to the Butowsky mentioned above, go on quite passionately for six or seven minutes very strongly in support of the core claim of the Fox News story. He was not reporting gossip at all. He was evidently a source for the story.
That the MSM which carried the story with such gusto as far as they did, did not go on to report this final part of it (to date – 20170809) beggars the imagination of anyone not yet thoroughly cynical about MSM claims to objectivity and fairness. (On just that date a TruthDig columnist, Bill Blum, did produce a more thorough mention [not yet treatment] of the Hersh tape, but not one that actually looks at what Hersh does in fact so strongly claim. Like the rest of the non-Fox-leaning commenters, his angle on the story is the (pretty obvious) fact of Fox’s unconscionably conscious and deliberate creation of quotes to support a news-report claim (and its attribution of them to a reporter who protests to them about it).
You can follow the bouncing ball of this adventure in news reporting from the headlines below, which are linked to the original stories. At the end you will hear quite a thud.
The brown on pink voice print directly above is linked to the audio of Seymour Hersh that has been published on the Internet. The interview is referred to and quoted from at a little length in the Wheeler complaint. See above. The complaint mostly quotes Butowsky in the interview in order to show that his intentions are as alleged in the complaint, to assist in altering the public view of Russian intervention in the election of 2016 by an extensive collusion with Fox News and its reporter Zimmerman and the White House, including the President himself. However, it does quote Hersh from the interview and Hersh acknowledges its validity when he says he was recorded without his knowledge. When asked about his conversation with Butowsky by NPR, Hersh says, “I hear gossip. [Butowsky] took two and two and made 45 out of it.”
Here is a link to a website offering both the audio and a transcript of the audio. I provide the audio transcript without comment here. I have taken the liberty of spelling out the four-letter obscenities.
August 9, 2017. The Nation publishes an impassioned plea for some official response to the evidence from VIPS (see above) and also gives us a detailed and expanded exposition of just what that evidence is. That is, a prominent and respected national journal on the left of the political spectrum offers what seems to be overwhelming evidence that the DNC email “hack” was an inside job (and thus a leak) and could not possibly have come from Russian operatives. This is entirely consistent with the Seth Rich story from Fox News, the claims in the lawsuit by Rod Wheeler, and the obscenity-laced recording of Seymour Hersh.
