GOP lawmakers continue to promote fake news conspiracies claiming Hillary Clinton is a murderer
Right-wing conspiracy buffs reading between the lines of Julian Assange’s interview with Sean Hannity see evidence confirming one of the presidential campaign’s uglier fake news stories, that Hillary Clinton murdered a Democratic National Committee staffer who leaked the group’s email.
Seth Rich, a 27-year-old DNC employee working on a project to help voters locate their polling places, was shot and killed near his D.C. apartment early one morning in July, 2016. His death, in a neighborhood plagued by a string of armed robberies, remains unsolved.
Before his body was cold, however, a conspiracy theory involving Rich, his employer’s leaked emails and Hillary Clinton had become an alt-right meme. In their eyes, Rich was a “campaign fraud whistleblower” who was planning to meet with the FBI and/or who leaked the emails to WikiLeaks before Hillary Clinton had him killed.
State Rep. JR Hoell (R-Dunbarton) promoted the tale this week when he retweeted an image of Rich that included a conspiratorial caption: “This was who leaked the DNC emails, not the Russians. It could be proven if Hillary hadn’t had him murdered.”
“If true, this man is a hero,” Hoell declared.
Hoell is the latest New Hampshire lawmaker to promote conspiracy theories involving Clinton murders but he is certainly not the first.
In August, state Sen. Kevin Avard (R-Nashua) addressed the Rich murder by sharing a post on his Facebook page with a One News Network video that described “unanswered questions” surrounding the young staffer’s death. “Whoa, Whoa, Whoa!!” the accompanying message read. “This is kind of crazy: A DNC voter database employee was set to testify against Hillary Clinton over voter fraud but then was murdered.”
Avard added his own concerns about the “Clinton cartel.” The two-term senator asked, “[W]hat is the Corporate Media saying about this? Nothing to see move on?” Avard added, “Jesus did say ‘Men love darkness more than the light neither will come to the light lest their deeds be reproved. This may explain the condition of our nation’s willingness to fall in line with Clinton’s cartel.”
Right-wing conspiracists, of course, have been accusing the Clintons of murdering their opponents for over two decades, but the scope of the allegations grew exponentially during Hillary Clinton’s last campaign – aided and abetted by Granite State lawmakers and officials who promoted the fake news conspiracies on social media.
State Rep. Fred Doucette (R-Salem), Donald Trump’s New Hampshire co-chair, shared a conspiracy story about the death of Shawn Lucas, the man who served papers to the DNC in a fraud class action suit on behalf of Bernie Sanders supporters. “And the ‘hits’ keep on coming…” Doucette wrote. “When will the Left see through all of this…” (The D.C Chief Medical Examiner subsequently ruled Lucas died of an accidental drug overdose.)
Trump veterans adviser Rep. Al Baldasaro posted a dark video titled, “A Look At The Recent Clinton Bodycount.” As ominous music sounds, the video details the deaths of seven individuals linked to the Clintons over the years. “Why won’t the media talk about the #ClintonBodycount?” the video asks.
And then there’s former GOP state party chair Jack Kimball. Included among the scores of conspiracy videos posted on his Facebook page is one that asks, Are “Mysterious Deaths Connected to the Clintons?” Another answers, “Three with Ties to DNC Mysteriously Die, It’s NOT A COINCIDENCE!”