On Tuesday, the document archive and anonymous disclosure platform WikiLeaks offered a USD $20,000 reward for information leading to the capture and conviction of the person or persons who killed Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staffer who was murdered in Washington, D.C. on July 10.
ANNOUNCE: WikiLeaks has decided to issue a US$20k reward for information leading to conviction for the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 9, 2016
While District police have said that the 27-year-old Rich was shot twice in the back as part of a late-night robbery attempt, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has suggested that Rich might have been killed by persons close to the Clintons for crossing the powerful couple.
While no evidence has come to light that might suggest political motivations for Rich’s killing, and while the deceased’s family has requested an end to conspiracy theories, the WikiLeaks Twitter account has featured a litany of links and tweets suggesting that Rich was a source for the website’s July leak of DNC emails, and that he was killed for his role as such.
Assange, an Australian national, has been living at the Ecuadorian embassy in London since June 2012. In August of that year, Ecuador granted him the political asylum for which he had applied. However, British authorities have said that if Assange steps outside of the embassy, they will extradite him to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning stemming from rape and molestation accusations made by two women with whom he reportedly had sex in 2010.
The Rich controversy is the latest in a long line of incidents for which WikiLeaks has come under fire this summer, including a perceived vendetta against Hillary Clinton.
(Via Talking Points Memo)