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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nLast week, I provided the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn with clear evidence that FBI officials were hiding records<\/a> about Mr. Rich, who was murdered in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 2016. Two days after I filed the motion, Judge Lois Bloom ordered the FBI to respond<\/a>. The FBI filed a response this afternoon<\/a>, and it only makes the government look worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before I get to that, let me provide a little background. In my original motion<\/a> filed on October 8, 2019, I included a transcript from Michael Isikoff’s interview of Deborah Sines, the former federal prosecutor assigned to the Rich case. According to Mr. Isikoff and Ms. Hines, the FBI did<\/span> investigate Mr. Rich’s computer after his death. <\/p>\n\n\n\n That’s huge, because in response to my Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the FBI has maintained all along that it conducted a “reasonable” search for records about Mr. Rich and it found nothing. The FBI has also maintained that it was never involved in the investigation of Mr. Rich’s death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The latter part may be technically true, but I didn’t ask for records about a murder investigation. I asked for all<\/span> records about Seth Rich, which would include all<\/span> FBI investigations pertaining to Mr. Rich, e.g.<\/em>, records indicating whether he was the source of Democratic National Committee emails published by Wikileaks. [continued on p.2]<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n Now, back to today’s events. In the response filed this afternoon<\/a>, the FBI attacked the statements of Mr. Isikoff and Ms. Hines as “unsworn” and “hearsay,” and it insisted that it did not need to conduct any more searches for records about Mr. Rich. Mind you, I’m just asking the FBI to pick up the phone and call its Computer Analysis Response Team (“CART”) and ask whether CART has any records about Seth Rich. The FBI refuses to do that, even though it has twice called the Washington Field Office (“WFO”) to ask whether WFO had any records about Mr. Rich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to the FBI, any CART records would have shown up in the index search of the FBI’s Central Records System (“CRS”). As I explained in a September 17, 2019 motion<\/a>, however, the FBI had already admitted that not everything gets entered in the CRS. And now we’ve got the former prosecutor who was assigned to Seth Rich’s case<\/em> admitting<\/span> that the FBI investigated his electronic devices… yet the FBI refuses to search for records in CART, the place where such records would most likely be found. Suspicious, no?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Judge Bloom scheduled a telephone hearing<\/a> for 11:15 a.m. on Friday, October 15, 2019, to discuss my motion and the FBI’s response. As you can see from that motion<\/a>, I’ve asked for permission to take testimony from Ms. Sines, the chief of CART, and the head of the FBI’s FOIA response unit. Somebody’s got some ‘splaining to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Incidentally, a couple of sources forwarded an October 2, 2019 press release<\/a> about a former D.C. federal prosecutor who was investigated for leaking information from a D.C. Superior Court grand jury. Any grand jury investigation of Mr. Rich’s murder would have occurred before a Superior Court grand jury, and Ms. Sines made some pretty shocking revelations to Mr. Isikoff. Is she the leaker?<\/p>\nShare this:<\/h3>