When Politics Gets Rough

We all know that politics is rough game.  Julian Assange has indicated that Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee (DNC) staff member was an informant (he uses the word "source") who may have supplied information to Wikileaks.  Seth Rich was murdered last week in what was described as a "failed robbery" by the D.C. Police.  Considering the number of shootings in D.C every night, that is a plausible story, but nothing was taken from him that would indicate he was actually robbed.  This leaves more questions than we really want to answer.  The alternative explanations for what happened are going to be interesting.

The conspiracy theory runs that he was shot to stop the damage from the leaked e-mails, and making sure there were no more.  That comes from believing that he was the source of those DNC e-mails, as he may well have been;  someone knew he was the source, and used that reason to justify killing him.  Law enforcement should at least look at that possibility, and after yesterday, they probably will.  For the political process, which is layered with information war, this is something different.  

Assange certainly would not love Hillary Clinton, since the Obama Administration has kept him in exile, yet he has been publishing e-mails from the DNC that are not going to help her campaign very much.  In some places in the world, that would be enough to get you killed, but we would like to believe that the US isn't one of them.  There is a lot of pressure on the system to favor debunking the conspiracy theory, just to just to make sure we don't have another Watergate, where President Nixon was complicit in ordering a break-in of the Democratic National Committee.  Facing impeachment, he resigned.

What bothers me about this is the alternative stories to be explored:  [1] Assange could be using Wikileaks for revenge against the Clintons who are not his favorite people in the world.  That wouldn't be very nice, but it would be interesting for us spectators.  Or....  [2] Assange is right and Rich was a source of the DNC internal e-mails.  The latter does not necessarily lead to murder, but it could.  As we found out in Watergate, police are not best investigators when it comes to political motivations.  It was a burglary and lots of those happen every day in that part of the city.  Had a reporter not recognized one of the burglars at his lockup, the story would have died quickly.