| The unsolved mystery behind the deaths of DNC data expert Seth Conrad
Rich and lawyer Shawn Lucas is deepening due to non-disclosure of forensic
findings by the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department, whose
chief Cathy Lanier is a member of the national intelligence establishment
with a master’s degree in security studies from the Naval Postgraduate
School in Monterey.
Key evidence is being suppressed by an intelligence community that may
well be involved in recent assassination incidents and acts of political
terrorism, including the nighttime attempt to penetrate the Ecuadorean
Embassy in London, sanctuary of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. It was
a reminder that Seth Rich was murdered under the cover of night.
With access to autopsy reports, independent journalists are left just
one method for probing these cases, and that is a reexamination of the
divisive issues associated with these deaths. The Rich and Lucas cases
are very much linked to the political struggle between progressive reformers
and the centrist establishment in the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
The cover-up in the nation’s capital points toward the Obama White House
and very possibly implicates the Executive Office in direct involvement
in the death of those two whistle-blowers and probably more during this
presidential election campaign. Nothing is sacrosanct in these troubled
times, especially not an administration that authorized targeted killings
of American citizens.
The denials from the Washington D.C. bureaus of the mainstream media has
stripped away any pretense of press freedom, especially when ousted DNC
chairwoman Deborah Wasserman Schultz and presidential candidate Hillary
Clinton remain under widespread public suspicion despite the media blackout.
The alternative online news, except for a few brave editors and commentators,
has been increasingly manipulated by major search engines and the likes
of Facebook and Twitter with censorship of conversations and the denigration
of honest questioning as conspiracy theories. Why are the media so afraid
of truth-seeking when it’s their constitutional duty to uncover the facts?
Lawsuit against the DNC
Despite the paucity of details about his death, the litigation context
makes it somewhat easier to start with the loss of Shawn Lucas, found
dead inside his bathtub on August 2, three weeks after the gunshot killing
of Seth Rich.
Lucas’s background as an attorney remains obscure. His only notable media
presence is the video showing him serving notice for a lawsuit at the
DNC headquarters in Washington D.C.. The law case itself has been ignored
by the mainstream press and the internet media, even though the legal
briefs available online offer piercing insights into the grievances against
the Clinton campaign, which presumably had a hand in his demise.
Pam and Russ Martens at the wallstreetparade.com
blog have produced an informative essay series on the lawsuit against
the DNC filed by the Miami-based Beck & Lee law firm. The plaintiff’s
complaint Wilding v. DNC, filed on June 28 (before the Wikileaks release
of DNC staff emails) in the federal court for the Southern District of
Florida, can be downloaded from several websites.
The Martens duo explain: “Adding to the growing interest in the lawsuit,
a 38-year-old process server, Shawn Lucas, who served the lawsuit on the
DNC at their Washington, D.C. headquarters on July 1, was found dead last
Tuesday in his bathroom of still-to-be-determined causes. The Lucas death
came just nine days after an attorney for the Sanders’ plaintiffs, Jared
Beck, released a YouTube video outlining the serious allegations it plans
to make against Perkins Coie in court.”
Cynical Power Players
The kingmaker law firm Perkins Coie is headed by senior partner Marc
Elias, who is described by Politico.com
as one of the top “power players behind Hillary Clinton’s campaign” (a
list well worth examining for prime suspects in other high crimes of state).
Chris Street for Breitbart adds “The WikiLeaks release of hacked emails
appears to show that the huge Perkins Coie law firm, while representing
both the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign,
provided strategic advice to hurt Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.”
The legal complaints against Wasserman Shultz include fraud, negligent
misrepresentation, unjust enrichment, and breech of fiduciary duty. The
class action suit demands reimbursement of USD 228 million raised by the
Sanders campaign along with a share of USD 128 million in contributions
to the DNC. The heist by the Hillary Victory Fund, involving money transfers
from DNC to state campaign offices and 100 percent kickbacks, is a transparent
fraud involving grand larceny, punishable with a long prison term. The
Sanders campaign has aptly characterized the hustle as “money laundering”.
Hillary on the Defense
Among the WikiLeaks emails released on July 22, one shows that Perkins
Coie, which orchestrated the rearguard tactics for the DNC and its chair
Wasserman Schultz, was simultaneously giving legal advice to the Hillary
Clinton campaign. Marc Elias advised bluntly: “the DNC should push back
directly at Sanders and say that what he is saying is false and harmful
to the Democratic party.” Elias was unashamedly advocating perjury during
the preparations for a courtroom defense against a Sanders lawsuit (since
dropped due to his campaign being implicated in the VoteBuilder/NGP VAN
intrusion affair, which looks to have been an entrapment scheme).
On the day after the Wikileaks dump, Wasserman-Schultz resigned, just
48 hours prior to the opening of the Democratic National Convention in
Philadelphia, but the Florida-based lawsuit did not go away with her.
Perkins Coie contrived a lame attempt to block Wilding v. DNC on the technicality
that the DNC staffer was too low-ranking to accept the summons. Now that
the notice server is dead, it’s her word versus Shawn Lucas. Cockroaches
have been killed for better reasons than that. If the judge invalidates
the serving of notice, the court case would be delayed until after the
November 8 elections, thereby covering Hillary Clinton with immunity.
Marc Elias is not just a lawyer, he is an diabolically clever operative
and insider with far-reaching intelligence connections, which has defended
the worst of Wall Street. In a 2010 press release, Perkins Coie boasted:
“the political law practice at Perkins Coie LLP, recently took on possibly
the biggest client in the world: President Barack Obama.”
Here it should be noted that Lucas died without an apparent struggle in
a situation that resembled the similar demise of Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia, which this writer attributed to a time-release capsule
disguised as medication. Scalia visited his physician before traveling
on holiday to Texas. Whether Lucas was taking prescription medicine needs
to be determined. The possible scenario that he lapsed into a coma before
being inserted into the bath should also be considered.
Whatever the ambiguities due to the news blackout, the salient point is
that the timing of Lucas’s death exactly coincided with hasty legal maneuvers
by the DNC and the Clinton campaign. Until substantial convincing proof
is presented to show otherwise, it would be irresponsible to discount
the possibility of assassination as a possible cause of death.
The Clinton Pet Project
Seth Rich was assaulted and shot dead in the predawn hours of July 10,
three weeks before Shawn Lucas’s death. Julian Assange later stated that
Rich may have been the original source of the DNC emails, a suggestion
that bears some credence, given the circumstances of his killing and his
cyber-strategic position as data director for the all-important DNC Voter
Expansion Project.
The malicious disinformation website Snopes.com gave away its pro-establishment
servitude by stating: “Rich worked in voter expansion, a minor post in
getting people to their right polling places. He was a low-level staffer
who had only been employed since 2014, and thus unlikely to be near sensitive
information.” First off, Rich was the director of data management and
not a “low-level staffer.”
As to its perceived value, the voter information was sensitive enough
to split the Democratic Party and nearly led to violent clashes between
Sanders supporters and Hillary’s handmaidens. Willful ignorance is defined
as the practice of ignoring any sensory input that appears to contradict
one's inner model of reality. The Snopes mindset, as uncovered in my article
on the Glock-armed hitman who infiltrated Trump Tower, is based on tactics
of denial developed by the Israeli Defense Force cyber-warfare command,
whose front companies invested in the user-tracking adware secretly planted
on unsuspecting visitors to that “myth-busting” website, which has always
relied on computer-generated hits for ratings.
The Voter Expansion Project was initiated in person by Bill Clinton in
a video timed for the DNC’s winter conference in February 2014. At that
gathering NPR reported: “Underscoring the Clintons' centrality to the
new effort, the former president appeared in the DNC video announcing
and unveiling the initiative.”
Obama basketball crony Pratt Wiley was named to head the DNC voter project
in the role of a political commissar. For data-mining talent, the DNC
turned to the Democrat-based pollster Greenberg, Quilan, Rosner (GQR).
The research firm conducts surveys for electoral campaigns at home and
aboard, including several Color Revolution parties, Tony Blair and Ehud
Barak’s HaAvoda. GQR also provides tech services to the Democratic National
Institute (a vehicle for the National Endowment for Democracy), USAID,
the World Bank, corporations including Microsoft and Sun Microsystems,
and liberal warhorses Open Society Institute, SEIU and HERE (Hotel Employees
Union). The client list is practically identical to that of CIA-infiltrated
civil-society groups.
GQR transferred to the DNC one of its brightest proteges, Seth Conrad
Rich, to run data research for the Voter Expansion Project. Due to the
sensitive task of handling personal data, for example, from county records,
prisons, hospitals, ICE and Facebook users, Rich was not once mentioned
in the Wikileaks emails and project communications were relegated to Wasserman-Schultz
and Pratt Wiley. Far from holding a minor post, Seth Rich was a protected
asset.
The Voter Expansion Project is funded by three major sources:
- Wyss Foundation: According to a Wikileaks release of Guccifer2.0 hacks,
the nonprofit charity funded by Swiss medical technology tycoon Hansjorg
Wyss (pronounced Weiss) has pledged USD 100 million to the Clinton Foundation
for the DNC voter expansion. This donation stands in clear violation of
IRS regulations against the use of charitable funds for political campaigns.
Wyss made his fortune by developing therapeutic prostheses for trauma
victims and sponsors a research institute at Harvard. His critics claim
that Wyss’s association with the Clinton Foundation is motivated by his
plans to block product-liability and medical malpractice lawsuits.
- George Soros/OSI: A few months after Bill Clinton launched the Voter
Expansion Project, George Soros committed USD 5 million to the proposal,
with the stipulation that non-citizens should be given the right to vote
in U.S. elections. The Open Society Institute has adopted voter recruitment
and lobbying for lax registration standards as one of its priorities,
obviously to organize its next Color Revolution, a full-spectrum subversion
of U.S. democracy in red, white, blue and purple.
- Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft connected with intelligence agencies,
has invested USD 44 million in electronic voting technology tech provider
Scytl (pronounced Sky Tel), a Barcelona-based corporation the purchased
SOE, the largest American voting technology company. Scytl now provides
cyber-registration and online voting equipment to more than 100 electoral
districts in battleground states New York, Texas, Washington, California,
Florida, Alabama, Missouri, Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, New Mexico,
Nebraska, West Virginia and Washington D.C. Other investors in Scytl include
funds linked to the intelligence community, Balderton Capital (which has
interlocking directors with Rothschild Continuation Holdings) and Nauta,
whose U.S. CEO Dominic Endicott is a former executive with Booz Allen.
For further detail on Scytl, see Gerry Bello’s series at
freepress.org.
Setting Up Sanders for Sabotage
Contrary to the Snopes.com attempt to minimize the importance of data,
the Sanders campaign complained bitterly about being locked out the VoteBuilder
data trove. Soon thereafter the DNC voter database was famously compromised
on Saturday, December 12, 2015, when software vendor NGP VAN installed
a patch that temporarily disabled the firewall between the three campaigns.
Sanders data programmer Josh Uretsky took advantage of the lapse to access
the Clinton campaign’s voter information but was quickly caught and forced
to admit culpability. Uretsky was fired from the Sanders team after other
staffers accused him of being a plant in a publicity stunt organized by
the Clinton team to force Sanders to drop his lawsuit against the Hillary
Victory Fund.
In both camps, there was a hunt for moles and agents provocateur. Adding
to the breakdown of trust was the bipolarity of SEIU and HERE unionists
whose bureaucratic loyalties are out of kilter with their populist rhetoric.
SEIU has become increasingly beholden to the intelligence operations run
out of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), while the Hotel and Restaurant
Employees are under the thumb of the remnant Cleveland mob, which run
the union pension and medical plans. Inexperienced activists are easily
swayed by fast-talking “radicals” in the service of the Clintons and the
CIA
A major flaw in the Voter Expansion drive has been the temptation of voter
fraud, for example, registration of dual surnames of divorced women or
recently married brides; use of driver’s license ID without certification
of citizenship allowing temporary residents and illegals to vote; electronic
data-mining of residents who are dead but missing an obituary (as happened
in Ohio), registration of felons and severe psychiatric patients, and
financial incentives for registering friends. With millions of dollars
in slush funds available to field staffers plying low-income neighborhoods
in a dozen battleground states, there is really nothing that can prevent
vote-buying, except rare honesty.
Resisting the Rot
The ever-widening factional distrust, along with pressures to facilitate
voter fraud, must have ethically challenged Seth Rich, who remained in
contact with his former employer GQR through his girlfriend, KM, who was
still working there. Rich was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in the wake of
the notorious Franklin boy’s sex scandal and attended Creighton University,
where the department head of psychology had been a Jesuit priest implicated
in the pimping of boys to U.S. senators and the Bush White House. The
Rich family belongs to a conservative Jewish congregation and he attended
the all-Jewish Ramah summer camp in Wisconsin and in Israel. At heart,
he was a good Jewish lad. The blasphemous brawl over access, money and
power inside the DNC, along with abuse of data, would have seemed to him
flagrant misconduct verging into criminality.Judging from Rich’s emotional
depression on the last night of his life, his high-minded political ideals
had been shattered.
Was Seth Rich involved in taking down the computer system (that then necessitated
the NGP VAN patch) to expose the Clinton campaign’s sustained effort to
destroy the Sanders movement? As Voter Enlargement data director, with
support from GQR, he certainly had the technical ability and only needed
the motivation to expose the corruption at its weakest point.
Aside from the voter data breech, the hacks of the DNC email system began
in late 2015 and continued through the end of January. Was Guccifer2.0
actually an inside job? The one man with the answer is dead.
The DNC hired the Crowdstrike cyber-security firm to investigate the December
voter data breech and later the email hacks. In both cases, Crowdstrike
resorted to its predictable scare tactic of blaming hacker teams in hostile
foreign countries, in this case the Russians. Crowdstrike boss Dmitri
Alperovitch uses the alarmist tactic of blaming security lapses on evil
foreigners, as for example the Shady RAT operation supposedly involving
a mysterious Chinese group housed in what turned out to be a dilapidated
long-vacant building in Shantong Province. Eugene Kaspersky has slammed
Alperovich: "Sophisticated threats, such as TDSS, Zeus, Conficker, Bredolab,
Stuxnet, Sinowal and Rustock, pose a much greater risk to governments,
corporations and nonprofit organizations than Shady RAT." If there really
is a rodent in the shade, it’s name just might be Dmitri.
Crowdstrike’s xenophobia perfectly matched Hillary’s denunciation of Donald
Trump as a stooge of the Kremlin. Although unfounded, these sorts of accusations
scare the daylights out of junior staffers and the news media. The Cold
War-style red-baiting is absurd now that Russia has rediscovered its Orthodox
Christian heritage, and when such accusations are coming from a Clinton
clan whose head, then a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, attended youth rallies
in Moscow in the 1960s as a guest of the KGB.
Shark Attack
If slipping an unconscious lawyer into a bathtub is the signature of a
state-run black operation, then the roughing up of Seth Rich before his
shooting is the handiwork of strong arms from the loan shark business.
There are several jarring points about Seth Rich’s last hours. His girlfriend
KM, who was away from the East Coast on an extended Fourth of July visit
to her family home, spoke with him over the cell phone twice that night,
once in the early evening, when she apparently admonished him, and again
at about 4:15 a.m. just before he was shot. She told the Mirror newspaper
that Rich planned to meet for a drink with friends. The two phone calls
would be time before and after the planned meeting with the people that
Miss KM was leery about. Toward midnight, Rich entered Lou’s, a sports
bar, where he was a regular recognized by the service staff. They noticed
that he sat on his usual bar stool at the corner of the bar and drank
alone.
Later, he walked alone to the nearby Wonderland Ballroom, whose previous
incarnation as Nob Hill was “a legendary gay bar”, according to a D.C.
tourism website. Due to the unspoken policy of discretion in gay-oriented
drinking establishments in the capital, his presence went unnoticed. It
was there, after 1:30 a.m. he must have met with his contacts and after
last order the group possibly visited a nearby apartment for after-hours
drinking session until Rich left for his apartment in the gentrified Bloomingdale
district at about 4 p.m.
Who could these late-night acquaintances have been? At that very same
moment, Seth Rich was preparing to leave his post at DNC for a new job
with the Hillary Clinton campaign (which after all could pay higher salaries
with all the money confiscated from Sanders and the state committees).
Was he invited to meet for informal discussion of his new assignment with
Hillary, only to be set up for the kill by her operatives? The culture
of anonymity at a D.C. gay-oriented bar was the ideal rendezvous point
for a planned hit. The D.C. press is trying to blame a three-person gang
of robbers with a silver gun arrested for a robbery in the same vicinity,
but the problem with that claim is that the actual assailants would never
return to the murder scene when the rest of capital is up for grabs.
The physical beating and knockdown of Rich to the pavement, preliminary
to two shots in the back from a low-caliber handgun, reflects the style
of aggressive debt collectors. The usual purpose is to warn other deadbeats
from delaying payment on loans. The Rich killing had a dual intention:
To eliminate a suspected turncoat who might have leaked DNC documents
to Sanders and to Wikileaks; and to sweat other staffers into keeping
their mouths shut.
Now who would order such a down-market atrocity against an idealistic
kid from the Midwest? Look no further than Broward County, Florida, home
district of Wasserman Schultz and her dicey husband who runs an aquarium
for loan sharks.
Paradise for Capone and Lansky
The congresswoman from Florida’s 23rd district, Rep. Deborah Wasserman-Schultz,
is the champion of the PayDay Loan industry, as represented in her state
by the Florida Community Financial Services Association. She’s been leading
an uphill battle to gut congressional legislation imposing anti-usury
rules that protect low-income borrowers.
Her gerrymandered district, which includes northern Miami Beach and Broward-Palm
Beach, is recognized as the national center for innovative fraud, from
credit-card scams by phony retailers to personal identity theft. Ever
since Al Capone built a vacation home in Broward and Meyer Lansky used
it as a base for running his Cuban casinos, the beach property with its
corrupt police force has been a magnet for Italian crime families from
the New York-Jersey region, Jewish financial criminals, Columbian drug
lords, Russian mafiya, and Wall Street banksters.
Legalized usury is aimed at the working poor and welfare recipients in
urgent need of medical treatment and on an underclass hooked on gambling,
drug abuse, alcoholism, used car purchases and subprime mortgages. Fast
Cash windows are by no means mom-and-pop curbside banks but are actually
storefronts for Wall Street hedge funds and investment banks. The New
York financial elite can borrow practically for free from the Federal
Reserve, and then roll over the easy cash through the PayDay Loan shops
at an average annual interest rate of a whopping 300 percent.
Due to the chronic plight of the poor, aggressive debt collection is the
only guarantee of sure profitability, since mothers fail to understand
at first that repayment comes before milk for their babies. The bloodsuckers
get their fill from helpless debtors surrendering a pound of flesh.
Debbie Wasserman’s husband Steve Schultz is a real estate lender and vice
president of the Community Bank of Broward. His resume includes stints
with Skybridge Capital, Oppenheimer and Company, and the secretive Security
Financial Services Corporation. Schultz is a former U.S. Air Force intelligence
officer, which put him and his wife in good stead with the likes of Gen.
Michael Hayden, former head of the NSA and CIA. Unbeknownst to Debbie’s
constituents, the Schultzes keep a second home in the posh New Hampshire
town of Newbury and a collection of expensive cars.
Deborah Wasserman Schultz was appointed to replace Sen. Tim Kaine (Virginia)
as DNC chair because she is the third highest grossing Democrat of annual
donations. Second on that illustrious list is Rahm Emanuel, whose lucre
ultimately derives from connections with the Israeli mob and the Henry
Crown organization, crooked defense contractors who are the traditional
benefactor of the Rodham family. At the top of the donation heap is Rep.
Nancy Pelosi, daughter and sister of two mayors surnamed d’Alessandro
who ruled Baltimore at the behest of “Lord” Julius Salisbury, boss of
the underworld. Under federal indictment, the Jewish arch-criminal eventually
“disappeared”, apparently to Israel.
Truth in Policy
Progressive reformers should not succumb to an unprincipled compromise
that allows Clinton’s gangster associates and their money-laundering molls
to control Congress and the White House for another eight years. Instead
bottom-up reform of the Democratic Party must remain the determining priority
since these few years offer a rare chance to evict the Wall Street plutocrats
and their criminal allies from the Democratic Party. The key is to elect
reform candidates to Congress while withholding support for Hillary’s
presidential bid and boycotting on Election Day.
High praise is therefore due to the reformers and grassroots activists
in South Florida, including courageous candidate Tim Canova, the gang-busting
law professor challenging the Wasserman Schultz machine in this week’s
Florida primary, and to the legal eagles at Beck & Lee Law.
The alliance of organized crime and Wall Street’s hedge funds is a tough
nut to crack, and it will take a bipartisan sustained populist insurgency
by Sanders supporters and Donald Trump’s grassroots base to topple the
arrogant insiders who use and abuse the American electorate. This election
season has launched the long-overdue task of political realignment in
both major parties along with the flourishing of minor parties. The outcome
should not limited to a radical reordering of each party’s principles
and platforms but also must be aimed at a fundamental restructuring of
the electoral college from its two-party bias toward a more representative
coalition-based formulation for governance.
For progressives to demonize Donald Trump is shortsighted and irresponsible
when self-critical analysis and debate are the priorities for both parties.
It’s not Trump who is killing and terrorizing young progressive activists.
Conflict between left and right is certain suicide when the common enemy
is so close at hand. Under Obama, Wall Street was too big to fail. Under
the next president, the moneyed interests could prove too big to fall,
unless the banksters are gang-tackled by parallel populist movements,
left, right and center. A combined assault on criminal power can happen
only if all sides refuse to fall prey to the elite strategy of divide-and-rule.
After Wall Street is soundly trashed and the economy returns to real-world
production rather than investment scams in intangibles like tech shares,
everyone can go whichever way they want and do as they wish, but until
then unity is essential for the revival of genuine democracy.
If there is one valid warning from the deaths of Seth Rich and Shawn Lucas,
it is the need to be distrustful of the data-obsessed mindset, which prevails
over the intelligence agencies and their array of research institutes,
pollsters and academics that have come to dominate policy and governance.
In stark contrast, democracy operates on the basis of real-world experience,
individual opinion, shared culture and reasoned discussion condensed in
political debate. Computer modeling is not and will never be an authentic
reflection of society much less an accurate prediction of the future.
There is no substitute for the time-honored role of philosophical rigor
as the ultimate guide in honest rhetoric as opposed to slick sophistry.
Every democracy since the Greek city-states had understood this principle,
and the contemporary world must now return to those basics.
Yoichi Shimatsu, a science journalist, is an occasional political
commentator. |
