00:02:09.460You've been on this case from day one,
00:02:11.960And I've been bugging you to come on and talk about this, I think, for over a year now, because this is something Lou is fascinated with.
00:02:19.460Sean Hannity over at Fox News, fascinated with.
00:02:21.760They began talking about it and were sued by the rich family.
00:02:26.480Let's start chronologically for the people who are not familiar with this case or the people who want to brush up on the case.
00:02:32.600Everything you could tell us about the inception of the case, and then we'll get into the details about the FBI allegedly not being involved.
00:02:40.380Sure. From the earliest days of the case, there were reports that Seth Rich had been the source of the emails, the Democratic National Committee emails that were published by WikiLeaks.
00:02:55.160Seth, in fact, worked for the Democratic National Committee. Shortly after his death in August, Julian Assange went on to Dutch television and all but said that Seth was the source of the emails.
00:03:08.960And immediately, Julian Assange went from the hero of the left, the guy who exposed the supposed prison abuse in Iraq, to enemy number one.
00:03:22.980But even before that happened, Ellen Ratner had gone to visit Julian Assange.
00:03:29.160He was, I guess, still holed up in the embassy at that time.
00:03:32.580And Assange told her, and Ratner's talked about this, that the Russians were not the source.
00:03:38.640to the emails. It was somebody inside of the DNC. And Ed Butowski has testified that Ratner told him
00:03:47.080that Assange said it came from Seth Rich and actually encouraged Butowski to reach out and
00:03:53.620contact the Rich family. And so that immediately raises questions, you know, is this a botched
00:03:59.140robbery or something worse going on? But as you noted, the D.C. police have always said this is
00:04:06.000a botched robbery. Nothing was taken. A lot of just the immediate circumstances of the case
00:04:12.920look odd. But we learned years later, for example, that the Metropolitan Police allowed Seth Rich's
00:04:20.620brother to come to DC immediately and then abscond with his personal laptop. Now, I've got two
00:04:27.700brothers. If one of those brothers got murdered, I don't think my first instinct would be, well,
00:04:32.020I'm going to go fly to where they are and I'm going to take their laptop.
00:04:35.540But they allowed him to take the laptop for years, though.
00:04:39.580The FBI said, you know, I saw my first FOIA request in 20 FOIA requests.
00:04:45.120Sorry. Twenty seventeen. And the FBI said we got nothing.
00:04:48.760You know, we had nothing to do with the case. Now, as of a couple of years ago,
00:04:53.300we're up to two laptops that they've had possession of that belong to Seth Rich, a computer disk, thousands of pages of documents.
00:05:02.020So we know the FBI has been lying about what it has. Of course, they separately discovered a bunch of burn bags after Christopher Wray resigned. They found a bunch of burn bags. The FBI has agreed to search those burn bags and see if there's anything in there about Seth Rich. But, you know, this has been going on for nine years. And I thought when the Trump administration took over, it would be a whole new day. And they're fighting me as hard as they ever have.
00:05:28.160What I've been told from forensic folks, Ty, is the amount of information that was stolen from the DNC would have been far too big.
00:05:35.740The data file is far too big for someone to have sent it via, we'll just say Dropbox for all intensive purposes or some sort of media file share.
00:05:43.060This was terabytes of data that was actually extracted.
00:05:46.920I think I've spoken to Roger Stone about this, actually physically extracted of a hard drive plugged into something and extracted out.
00:05:54.540Is that something you've ever confirmed?
00:05:56.160Yeah, there are a couple of technical indicators that this was not a hack.
00:06:02.260The Russians would have had to come in remotely to hack this.
00:06:06.840And you're right that the data speeds, the transfer speeds, would not have been fast enough to move this much data.
00:06:16.520And I'm not an expert on this, but I've talked to several IT guys, one including our own IT expert.
00:06:21.640However, the file markings on these particular files from the DNC are consistent with loading to something like a thumb drive.
00:06:31.320So technically, it looks like an inside job.
00:06:34.500But as you know, the FBI supposedly never looked at any of that.
00:06:38.400They farmed it out to CrowdStrike, which also happens to be the in-house IT company serving the Democratic National Committee.
00:06:45.900To my knowledge, and I'm an ex-cop, I have never heard of the FBI or any other agency allowing the supposed victim of a computer crime to go hire its own private company in lieu of a law enforcement investigation.
00:07:02.060And yet that's exactly what happened here.
00:07:04.280What do we know that was confirmed on that hard drive?
00:07:06.740Obviously, we've seen the emails, you know, the stuff that they were rigging the DNC primary against Bernie Sanders in favor of Hillary Clinton.
00:07:16.880What do we know that was on on those thumb drives that were allegedly stolen by Russia?
00:07:21.780Well, we don't. They won't really other than what was published by WikiLeaks, other than what got out through WikiLeaks.
00:07:26.860We don't know anything. The judge ordered the ordered the FBI to produce the contents of the laptops,
00:07:35.040including the metadata, over a year and a half ago.
00:08:17.920Police reports showed some very odd things that you wouldn't see in a classic robbery case.
00:08:26.320Nobody saw any of the victims shot in the back, which is, as a cop, not consistent with someone who's being robbed.
00:08:34.120So many inconsistencies about that, Ty.
00:08:37.460Yeah, you know, and there are there are a lot of inconsistencies.
00:08:42.060I mean, if it were it were just the murder by itself, then you can say, OK, maybe he turned to run away.
00:08:48.520That's why they shot him in the back, for example.
00:08:50.860But then when you combine that with all this evidence that he was the source of the leaks and you have both the MPD and now the FBI just saying reflexively, no botched, just was a botched robbery.
00:09:03.060And they don't want to look any further than that.
00:09:30.720One of the prosecutors. So D.C. is unique. It's the really the only place I can think of in the country where local or what would otherwise be state crimes are also prosecuted by federal prosecutors. Right.
00:09:43.980And so it was a federal prosecutor assigned to the murder case. She's a partisan Democrat. And she went out, ran her mouth some and admitted on air that the FBI had involved, been involved. So that's when I had first had evidence, clear evidence. Yeah, FBI was involved. Took that to the court in Texas. I think that helped persuade the court in Texas to order the FBI to look further.
00:10:07.220but we know that early on the fbi was involved that they were out interviewing people around
00:10:14.520the country that they were taking laptops even as they were simultaneously saying nope we're not
00:10:19.500involved it's so troubling to me to think that uh even now with a new fbi with the new fbi director
00:10:31.860that they're still continuing to hide this and not want to get the word out.
00:10:36.340What do you think that is in this hard drive or in these documents that the FBI is concealing that it's so bad?
00:10:45.480I mean, we've seen, Ty, over the last 10 years, we've seen some of the worst things happen in this country,
00:10:49.920including trying to overthrow a duly elected president, indict him 700 years in jail.
00:10:55.840I mean, you know what's gone on with democracy in this country.
00:10:59.940What can be in those documents that's so damning to this country that the FBI just can't come forward, even under Kash Patel?
00:11:09.020Yeah, great question. And I wondered a lot about that.
00:11:11.480One thought that that I that I have said for most of the last year is that in the Southern District of Florida, of course,
00:11:20.280they're building what they call the grand conspiracy case related to Arctic Frost and all these other conspiracies to overthrow Trump.
00:11:26.860So painting it as charitably as possible to Bondi, to Pam Bondi, DOJ, Cash Patel, FBI, they're wanting to keep some of this under wraps until the grand jury in South Florida can decide who to indict and when.
00:11:44.020That's the most charitable explanation.
00:11:54.920And what concerns me, one thing that concerns me about Patel is, you know, he goes out on TV and he doesn't do it as much right now.
00:12:01.680He talks about the brave men and women of the FBI did XYZ.
00:12:05.380I think he's still trying to protect the image of that agency to an extent.
00:12:10.880And what I analogize it to is if you've got stage four cancer and you go in to see your doctor, you don't want to tell you how good your skin looks and your blood pressure and how great your hair is.
00:12:22.320And I think most of this country is fed up with the corruption in the FBI.
00:12:27.680And I think Kash Patel is still trying to protect the image of the agency.
00:12:32.200And I think that's just a terrible mistake.
00:12:35.240Let's go with the one in a trillion possibility of what you just said was true at the top that Pam Bondi has this.
00:12:41.600Wouldn't it be as simple as to say, because the FBI does this all the time to try to deflect and deny, come back to you and say, well, listen, Mr. Clevenger.
00:12:50.800This is the subject. This material is a subject of an ongoing investigation.
00:12:57.280They've kind of done that. But what what they did, I'm glad you asked that question, is they've they've they've said it's related to an ongoing investigation.
00:13:05.220But they've referenced the Natic show. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.
00:13:09.580The Russian agent indictments. So Natic show and all these other Russians were indicted by a D.C. grand jury years ago for allegedly hacking the DNC.
00:13:20.360And they're claiming that case is the basis for withholding because it's related to that supposed criminal investigation.
00:13:28.820But that begs the question, you know, if the Russians were the source or the thieves that stole this data, then why do you care about Seth Rich?
00:13:39.480So that doesn't make much sense either.
00:13:41.860No, none. I mean, none of the thing makes sense.
00:13:43.880The thing that makes the least amount of sense to me is is the family and God rest this poor man's soul who's now, I mean, a victim of many crimes here.
00:13:54.680The people came out. They tried to figure out what's going on.
00:13:58.200Listen, if my parents or my family didn't try to get to the bottom of whoever murdered me, I'd be up in heaven and I'd be spitting fire down on them to not get to the bottom of it.
00:14:09.800rather go litigious and sue anyone for trying to figure out to me. It doesn't make sense to me.
00:14:17.920Yeah, that is another very strange situation. I think what we witnessed after Seth's murder
00:14:24.540was one of the first opening salvos of lawfare from the left. I suspected this at the time,
00:14:31.600and now I think there's a lot more evidence for it. They were represented by firms,
00:14:38.100big, giant, multinational law firms, overwhelmingly Democrat firms.
00:18:12.540Sure, they were sued in hostile venues. You have to go in front of liberal judges, liberal juries. But I was representing Ed Butowski at the time, and I was begging Fox, hold off, don't settle. And I was asking them to pursue certain avenues of investigation. They had no interest. They weren't trying to get to the bottom of this. They just wanted to roll over and make it go away. And that's what they did.
00:18:37.880Yeah, when you cut the check, Ty, a lot of things disappear, like depositions, discovery, any sort of chances of going to trial where people are put under oath.
00:18:48.660And from all accounts on the election side of things, what I was told from people was the reason Fox settled is because they didn't want to get Rupert on the stand.
00:18:56.580They were terrified because of how much influence he had behind the decision making at Fox.
00:19:02.420And he wasn't the chairman of the board. So you have shareholder responsibility there.
00:19:06.180So I think they figured, let's just settle because the lawsuits we're going to get from our shareholders are going to exceed this small lump sum payment that we pay.
00:19:15.020I was on their star witness list to testify at that trial in Delaware.
00:19:21.080Lou was on it. I was on the witness list actually for Fox and for, I guess, Smartmatic was the first one that they settled on.
00:19:27.280And I was looking forward to it, Ty. They got me in there.
00:19:29.420They said, do you want to sit down with your lawyer and do you want to prepare?
00:19:33.180We're going to need about five or six hours to prepare you.
00:19:35.440I said, there's nothing to prepare about.
00:19:36.860I'm going to go in there and I'm just going to tell the truth.
00:19:39.300There's no reason for me to sit there and prepare how to answer a question.
00:19:43.020You asked me a question and I answer truthfully.
00:19:47.880I hope the videos come out one day of what I did to those lawyers because it was embarrassing as a man who's never stepped foot in a courtroom before.
00:19:59.140Let's go back to Pam Bondi and to Cash Patel.
00:20:02.140Have you ever had an avenue to either of them to just ask the simple question, why, why, why?
00:20:11.140I so I wrote a letter to Patel and Bondi on April 18th of last year, and I raised the fact that the FBI then and now was was violating a court order to turn over this evidence and was potentially subject to being held in contempt.
00:20:28.920But I also laid out the whole history of this case, explained this goes to the heart of the whole Russia collusion scandal, hoax, fiasco, and sent it to them, copied it to multiple people in the White House, to Tulsi Gabbard, John Radcliffe at CIA, sent this stuff certified to make sure they got it.
00:20:52.040But I also had someone who knew Patel personally make sure he got a copy of it.
00:21:00.220And I'm told that what Patel said was he couldn't get involved, which, OK, that blows my mind.
00:21:07.000You're the director of the FBI and we're pointing out clear evidence that your agency is violating a court order and covering up evidence and he can't get involved.
00:21:41.500do you think this runs deeper than the fbi do you think this runs down to the cia to the dni
00:21:51.980to any really yeah yeah we also filed some foyer requests on the cia because uh my my main
00:22:00.500investigator previously worked in intel and told me that he thought the cia had inserted some of
00:22:08.580what I'll call fingerprints into the emails that were published by WikiLeaks,
00:22:14.260little Russian words here and there to try to make it look like Russians were involved in the
00:22:20.240hacking. So I filed a FOIA to the CIA to ask whether they had inserted any fingerprints or
00:22:28.660done anything like that, manipulated it to try to attribute it to the Russians. If they had done
00:22:33.180that, that would be illegal, which is important for two reasons. One, because it's illegal,
00:22:38.000But also, you cannot use the FOIA national security exemptions. You can't classify something to conceal illegal activity. So that was important. And we filed the FOIA to the CIA. And after we sued them, they finally came back and said, we can neither confirm nor deny that we did that.
00:22:57.660Well, you know, if you're normally if you're accused of breaking the law, the first thing you want to say is, well, of course, we never would have done that.
00:23:06.040But instead, they're asserting a national security exemption.
00:23:09.700So we're litigating that right now because there is an executive order that says you cannot use that that neither confirm nor deny to conceal illegal activity.
00:23:19.660So hopefully we'll get a court decision soon.
00:23:21.460But the whole thing – and we're, of course, we're getting more information about the involvement of Obama, Susan Rice, and all the other bad actors.
00:23:30.200So I think this will show that they have known from day one that the Russians had nothing to do with this, that this was contrived from the outset, that the whole thing truly was a hoax.
00:23:45.100About a year ago – I guess it's almost a year to the date – where the judge ordered the FBI to turn over the hard drives to you or the computer.
00:25:10.860And then they have they initially said as many as 20,000 responsive pages.
00:25:16.800Then they narrowed it down to 3000. I think there's probably more. I did recently. Actually, I served discovery on the FBI, which is unusual in a FOIA case.
00:25:29.400Typically, you don't get to serve interrogatories or have depositions or any anything like that.
00:25:35.220And I won't go into the particulars of why we can do that in this case. I expect the I expect the FBI is going to fight me tooth and nail.
00:25:41.460But I've asked them specifically about these, you know, recently Patel revealed that there have been these prohibited access files.
00:25:51.860So the information system within the FBI, they call Sentinel.
00:25:57.980And within Sentinel, they would designate things prohibited access, which means anybody else inside the FBI except the very top level, people could not see the files.
00:26:06.160So effectively, any FOIA requester was never even going to know those files were there because they'd been designated prohibited access.
00:26:13.300So I've asked the FBI to to search the prohibited access files.
00:26:18.120Supposed to hear from them this week, hopefully next, about whether they're willing to do that.
00:27:04.140yeah so um and and i i can't divulge all the evidence that i'm relying on for this
00:27:12.140but i absolutely believe that seth rich was the source of the leaks to julian assange
00:27:19.340i think the dnc found out about it um and i think seth had some help i can't say who for
00:27:29.100a variety of reasons right now who that who i think that help was but i think he had help
00:27:34.500um i think everybody else has been sued into silence he i he leaked the emails to wikileaks
00:27:40.260and then he shows up dead you know so you tell me whether or not that's suspicious
00:27:45.360i think it stinks to high heavens uh referring to help someone inside of the dnc someone inside
00:27:52.080the federal government i think it was i think it was a u.s source but i think they were on the
00:27:57.160outside of the dnc i don't think it was i don't think the government helped do this uh i don't
00:28:03.560think that i don't think the government helped with the initial transfer to wikileaks but i do
00:28:07.960think he had help do you think julian assange knows what happened i think he knows exactly what
00:28:12.360happened um anything well i he my understanding is he got a lot of because well wikileaks offered
00:28:21.160a twenty thousand dollar reward yeah for information leading to finding out who killed
00:28:25.720Seth, which was the first time and the last time that they've ever done that. I think he got some
00:28:31.240internal pushback from WikiLeaks because they typically don't name sources. And he all but
00:28:36.440named Seth as a source, even though Seth was deceased at that point. I think Julian Assange,
00:28:45.640and I say this out of respect to him, I think he's protecting the person who assisted Seth Rich.
00:28:51.080Wow. Yeah, I think I think he feels a moral duty to that other person to stay quiet.
00:29:00.260And I respect that. Do you think the FBI knows who this person is? Absolutely. Sick.
00:29:05.220Totally, totally sick. Have you and you don't have to answer this question if you don't want to.
00:29:08.920Have you ever spoken to Julian Assange? No, not directly.
00:29:12.520I mean, I've communicated with online with Kim Dotcom and with Assange's wife.
00:29:18.160I've not spoken directly with Julian Assange.
00:29:21.080And I hope Donald Trump pardons him and Edward Snowden.
00:29:25.440You know, if you would have said that 10 years ago, I would have said you're crazy just based on everything.
00:29:31.460But now that we're in this this situation we're in today and just yesterday, I spoke to a former senior NSA.
00:29:36.980He's on the show all the time. Whistleblower. He blew the whistle on the Patriot Act.
00:29:39.840His name is Russ Tice and he's a patriot. And I was explaining to him, Ty.
00:29:44.700It was like, you know, 10, 15 years ago, you know, if you would have told me 9-11 had to make consistencies to it, I'd say you're crazy.
00:29:51.080If you told me we never put a man on the moon, I'd say you're crazy.
00:29:54.520If you told me that JFK wasn't killed the way that they told us he was killed, I'd tell you you're crazy.
00:29:59.440I said, but ever since 2016, we saw what they tried to do to the leading contender, presidential candidate and then future presidential elect.