Talk About Stepping on Your Own Dick

     "We are a family who is committed to facts, not fake evidence that surfaces every few months to fill the void and distract law enforcement and the general public from finding Seth's murderers," a spokesman for Seth Rich's family said today.
     Great. Now Trump's got them doing it with the "fake news" accusations.
     But the Rich family's denial of what's come out today is highly unusual because they've thrown their own private dick under the bus. That private eye's name is Rod Wheeler, a retired DC-area homicide detective who was ostensibly paid for by a right wing businessman named Ed Butowsky, according to the family's spokesman, Brad Bauman. Butowsky, a parttime Fox talking head, of course denies the connection.
     So the problem is the family's denying the findings of their own private eye and still seem to be holding out hope that the DC Metro Police are still invested in discovering who Rich's killer was. What the poor, deluded family doesn't realize is that the DC police closed the investigation as soon as they got to the crime scene.
     Rich, you may recall, was gunned down on a deserted street in Washington, DC late one night last July. The Keystone Kops quickly judged that the DNC staffer was simply the victim of a robbery gone wrong. But how many armed street robbers will shoot a person twice in the back then run away before stealing anything?
     Rich, who was still alive when the first police arrived on the scene, retained on his person his wallet with his money and credit cards, his cell phone, his watch and a necklace. As with the Finders non-investigation in the late 80's, the DC police shut this case down faster than you can say DNC. In fact, one of Wheeler's findings was being told by a DC detective that they were told to stand down and not investigate Rich's murder any further, which just prompted the DC police to take to their Twitter account and deny it.
     And, for a guy who was ostensibly working not to find a grieving family's loved one's killer but spreading lies, he was awfully specific in the numbers he was giving: He claims to have discovered on Rich's laptop incontrovertible evidence that he'd been in touch with Gavin MacFadyen of Wikileaks and that he'd disseminated 44,053 DNC emails and 17,761 attachments to MacFadyen.
     Rich and MacFadyen are both dead.
     Among the treasure trove of emails that those still inexplicably loyal to the so-called Democratic Party still claimed to have been hacked by the Russians are numerous instances all but proving the DNC hamstrung Bernie Sanders in his quest for the Democratic nomination. After all, why would the DNC wish for news like that to get out?
     And if Hillary's thugs had him killed, they were too late. The emails had already been sent off and Wikileaks began publishing them 12 days after Rich's murder.
     Those who wish to pin this on the DNC, on Wasserman Schultz or on Hillary have a long ways to go. There isn't the slightest shred of evidence linking anyone in the DNC to this particular homicide. But the timing is as suspicious as the DC police stonewalling one of their own in his investigation and hastily pronouncing Rich's death as a mere robbery gone awry.
     Rich's death and the circumstances surrounding it have all the sleazy elements of a George Pelecanos thriller. Except in a Pelecanos novel, the bad guy usually gets caught.