“Seth Rich Confidant” Escaped to Russia
To comment go to Heresy Central.
Edward Snowden and John Mark Dougan are both relatively young American
whistleblowers who have been granted political asylum by the Russian
government. Dougan could be the more important of the two
“fugitives,” but almost no one in the United States has heard of him, while
almost every halfway-informed person has heard of Snowden. This fact
speaks well of Dougan, suggesting that he might well be the more genuine
of the two.
Snowden is a former CIA operative who spilled a lot of beans about
surveillance of the public by the National Security Agency (NSA), perhaps beans
that they really didn’t mind seeing spilled. Dougan is a former
Marine and former
police officer who used his
considerable computer skills to embarrass the leadership of his former
employer, the Palm Beach County (FL) Sheriff’s Department. In June
of 2013, Snowden traveled to Russia where he was eventually granted political
asylum after being charged with violation of the Espionage Act. Dougan has
been living in Russia since April of 2016 after numerous agents of the FBI
raided his home. Discovering that his name had been placed on a
no-fly list, he sneaked across the Canadian border and flew from Toronto to
Moscow, by way of Turkey. He left a wife and two young children
behind in Florida. He had not yet been charged with any crime, but
it appears that he had valid reasons for fearing American law enforcement
authorities, from the sheriff’s office that he tormented for several years, all
the way up to the top.
Dougan certainly has done more than his share of things to
antagonize them. The following passage is from the beginning of
Chapter 37 of his new book, Badvolf, which carries the subtitle, “The true story
of an American cop’s retaliation against a corrupt system of justice and
politics, forcing him to seek political asylum in Russia.” The chapter
sets the stage for his departure for Russia:
The various forms of dissidence I displayed: email
pranks on politicians, sowing fake news, creating a website to show how to
prevent the FBI from accessing a computer; it was only a small portion of the
activities in which I was engaged. My site exposing corruption and
coming forward as a witness about the affair of a Deputy
Sheriff in Seth Adams’ civil murder trial pissed a lot of people off. The
listing of the confidential records for law enforcement officers also didn’t
help. But like I said, if I wasn’t entitled to my privacy, then why
should a law enforcement officer be entitled to theirs? What’s good
for the goose is good for the gander, and law enforcement shouldn’t be allowed
to abuse their power, just because they can.
The following passage is from an article critical of Dougan in
the online establishment-Left Daily Beast:
Dougan mastered the dark art of fake news, crafting
official-looking websites with names like DCWeekly.com and DCPost.org for his
made-up stories. One of his bigger hits quoted [Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric]
Bradshaw encouraging motorists to run over Black Lives Matters protesters. It
was so convincing that Bradshaw’s office had to issue a denial, leading to a
cycle of real
news headlines like “Sheriff
Bradshaw Wrongly Accused of Telling Boynton Residents to Run Over Protesters?”
Dougan can never be accused of lacking a sense of humor,
although one can readily question his judgment and sense of propriety. It
is this latter characteristic that leads him into trouble. He freely
admits to perpetrating hoaxes and writing falsehoods, justifying them because
of the larger, higher purpose that they serve. He must realize,
though, that they tend to undermine his credibility on virtually
everything. Thus he made it easy for the headline writers at the Daily
Beast in that critical article: “Fugitive
Cop Says He’s Behind the DNC Leaks. It’s His Latest Hoax.”
Actually he doesn’t go that far, either in his book or in the various
interviews he has given from Moscow that one can readily find by searching
“John Mark Dougan Seth Rich” on the Internet. He never
paints himself as anything more than peripheral to the leaks of the emails from
the Democratic National Committee. He implies that the critical John Podesta emails
that gave rise to the Pizzagate pedophile
suspicions were actually accessed by someone with
connections to the NSA. Curiously, he doesn’t even mention his
possible connection to Seth Rich until Chapter 36, which bears the title, “The
Man with DNC Docs from D.C.” The chapter begins on page 193 of his
265-page book.
He has clearly strategically placed the story, though, leaving the
reader with the impression that it was his meeting with the guy in
Washington—who had contacted him because of his whistleblower website—that
brought the FBI down on his back. He describes the raid in the very next
chapter. He also never says that the person who gave him the incriminating
documents was Seth Rich. For the sake of confidentiality, he says,
he never asked the man what his name was, only saying that after he saw the
photos of the slain Rich, that the guy looked a lot like him. He
also tells us that the FBI in their raid confiscated what he had gotten from
the Rich lookalike, forcing him to rent a car and make a quick long drive up to
Washington, DC, and back to south Florida to get a thumb drive with the
documents on it.
He said that he concealed the thumb drive by sewing it into his
backpack, and, presumably he still has it with him now
in Moscow. If he was ever going to make the drive’s precious
contents public, his book, it seems, would have been the place to do it, but he
never even talks about what’s in those precious DNC documents that seem to have
gotten him into so much trouble. RT has also produced a polished
51-minute documentary
film about Dougan that
is well worth watching, but there’s not a peep in it about any connection
between Dougan and Rich. It’s as though the folks at RT
were saying, “Let Dougan pull his irresponsible and juvenile tricks
to get attention for his case, but we have a journalistic reputation to
uphold.”
The Daily
Beast might have done a reasonably good job of taking
advantage of the openings that Dougan has given them, but the
following two paragraphs of their article demonstrate why they are among the
last people who should be trusted when it comes to the question of the Seth
Rich murder and a possible connection to the DNC documents:
Seth Rich conspiracy stories are most virulent of the narratives
purporting to exonerate Russia of interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential
race, and by extension clear the Trump campaign of collusion. Rich was 27 years
old when he was shot and killed on July 10, 2016 on a
Washington, D.C., sidewalk. The police believe it was a botched robbery, but
the unsolved murder has fuelled waves of speculation
that it was Rich who leaked the 44,000 DNC emails ultimately published by Wikileaks,
and that he was murdered as a consequence.
To be clear, there
exists no evidence that Rich was secretly a Donald Trump supporter, a leaker of
any kind, or a hacker with the skill to steal the private emails of seven
senior DNC staffers. The only reason conspiracy mongers fixed on Rich, rather
than any of hundreds of his fellow DNC workers, is because he was killed. To a
sizable number of fringe conservatives, it goes without saying that the
Clintons order hits on the people who get in their way. It’s been part of the
far-right canon since Vince Foster’s suicide in 1993.
I claim no expertise whatsoever when it comes to computer hacks,
but I know journalistic hacks when I see them, and with this passage, the Daily
Beast’s Kevin Poulsen has shown that he fits the description to
perfection. Absolutely no one is claiming that Seth Rich was a
secret Trump supporter. That he might have been sickened by the
Clinton thicket of corruption that he found himself in, and that, like so many
other young Democrats, he was a likely Bernie Sanders supporter, would
have been sufficient motivation for him to want to rat out the rats, so to
speak. One hardly has to be a “conspiracy
monger” (note the loaded language) to see a possible connection between Rich’s
murder and the DNC leaks. It’s the logical conclusion for any
objective person to reach, particularly when the “botched robbery” explanation
looks so ridiculous on its face. Just because the DC police are
saying that that is what they believe doesn’t mean that they really do…or that Poulsen really
does, for that matter. After the victim has been immobilized from
having been shot, finishing the job by taking his valuables like his wallet,
his watch, and his cell phone is the easy part, but none were taken. That
the DC police should be corrupt enablers for higher-level corruption is a
lesson we should have learned from several suspicious cases, like those of Chandra Levy, Mary Caitrin Mahoney, and Gus Weiss, for starters.
And if one ever needed a reason to be suspicious of the Rich
murder, and of the Daily Beast, Poulsen’s comparison of
it to the Vince Foster death is all one should need. It was The
Washington Post’s comparison of the two cases, after all, that prompted me
to write “Seth
Rich Equals Vince Foster?”
A Leak, Not a Hack
The fact of the matter is that the best evidence to date indicates
that the DNC emails came out as the result of a leak rather than from a
hack. The best source for that conclusion is a group that calls
itself the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Patrick
Lawrence wrote the latest word on their work for Consortium
News online on August
13, 2018. This passage still represents the core of their findings,
as reported by Lawrence:
At the time I reported on the findings of VIPS and associated forensic scientists,
that the most fundamental evidence that the events of summer 2016 constituted a
leak, not a hack, was the transfer rate—the speed at which data was copied. The
speed proven then was an average of 22.7 megabytes per second. That speed
matches what is standard when someone with physical access uses an external
storage device to copy data from a computer or server and is much faster than a
remote hack, reliant on communications topology available at the time, could achieve.
Lawrence had a good summing up of the situation in an August 9,
2017, article
in The Nation, hardly a “fringe conservative” publication, to say the least:
By any balanced reckoning, the official case purporting to assign
a systematic hacking effort to Russia, the events of mid-June and July 5 last
year being the foundation of this case, is shabby to the point taxpayers should
ask for their money back. The Intelligence Community Assessment, the supposedly
definitive report featuring the “high confidence” dodge, was greeted as
farcically flimsy when issued January 6. Ray McGovern calls it a disgrace to
the intelligence profession. It is spotlessly free of evidence, front to back,
pertaining to any events in which Russia is implicated. James Clapper, the
former director of national intelligence, admitted in May that “hand-picked”
analysts from three agencies (not the 17 previously reported) drafted the ICA.
There is a way to understand “hand-picked” that is less obvious than meets the
eye: The report was sequestered from rigorous agency-wide reviews. This is the
way these people have spoken to us for the past year.
Behind the ICA lie other indefensible realities. The FBI has never
examined the DNC’s computer servers—an omission that is beyond preposterous. It
has instead relied on the reports produced by Crowdstrike,
a firm that drips with conflicting interests well beyond the fact that it is in
the DNC’s employ. Dmitri Alperovitch, its co-founder and chief technology officer, is on the record as
vigorously anti-Russian. He is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, which
suffers the same prejudice. Problems such as this are many.
So, as much as the folks at the Daily Beast would
want to use their undercutting of Dougan to undercut the case against
Russian hacking, they are really as much beside the
point as Dougan appears to be, himself. If it is a virtual
certainty that the DNC emails became public as the result of a leak instead of
a hack, Rich certainly looks to be the most likely one to have done the leaking
on account of his very suspicious murder.
Only Tip of Corruption Iceberg
If, as it now appears to me, Dougan’s purpose in
dragging Seth Rich into his story was to garner attention, one must concede
that he has been successful. That’s certainly how he got me
interested. From the few comments one sees so far on the Amazon site
for his book, it looks like he is reaching his main target audience, those
concerned about the corruption of our political institutions, particularly the
criminal justice system and our police forces.
It is easy to see why this writer would be a readily receptive
audience for his police-corruption message. We have already alluded
to instances of corruption in the DC police, but it is a national problem, and
it is heavily abetted by the corruption of the news media. It’s
probably worse than even Dougan realizes. I received my
baptism in that reality by looking into the Vince Foster case. The
corrupt Fairfax County medical examiner, the late Dr. James Beyer, who
performed the fraudulent autopsy on Foster also did a demonstrably fraudulent
autopsy on Tommy Burkett, the son of a couple of English teachers who lived
only a couple of miles from me in western Fairfax County. I got to
know them very well over the years, having first visited their house in the
company of reporter (now Newsmax CEO and Donald Trump
confidant) Christopher Ruddy. One can read a good summary of their
son’s case at the Unsolved
Mysteries site. The
breadth and depth of the corruption revealed by the Burkett case is hinted at
in my article, “News
Suppression in Action.”
The Burketts had founded a
national organization called Parents Against Corruption and Cover-up. Among
the family members belonging to that organization were those of Kenneth Trentadue, whose obvious beating death—ridiculously ruled a suicide by
hanging—is apparently connected to the cover-up of the Oklahoma City
bombing. The Burketts staged an
annual event on the National Mall in which they displayed a giant “cover-up
quilt,” with individual squares provided by family members of the various
victims. The Trentadues were
regular attendees. The national news media, as heavily concentrated
as it is in Washington, paid virtually no attention to the annual event. Even
the local news media tended to ignore it.
The Burketts also had a
powerful web site, here recovered from the Internet
archive. It came
down shortly after the mother, Beth George, died of rather fast-acting ovarian
cancer. I have often wondered if it might have been somehow induced,
similar to the suspicions that people have had about
Lee Harvey Oswald-slayer Jack Ruby’s cancer. Tommy’s father, Thomas
Burkett, Sr., died three years later, also of cancer. Both parents
were only in their mid-50s. John Mark Dougan might, indeed, be
safer if he remains in Russia.
Although police corruption might be bad in the Washington, DC,
area, it could be even worse in Dougan’s South Florida stomping
grounds. One may get some idea of how bad it is there by reading my
two articles, “Burdick,
Mitchell on Hart, Rice” and “Edna
Buchanan’s Embarrassment.” They are built around the book, Blue
Thunder: How the Mafia Owned and Finally Murdered Cigarette Boat King Donald Aronow by Thomas Burdick and
Charlene Mitchell. The book is extraordinarily revealing,
particularly coming from mainstream journalists. Perhaps as ominous
as the premature deaths of the Burkett parents is that the journalistic
footprint of Burdick and Mitchell seems to have disappeared after their book
was published. They were young when they wrote the book, published
in 1990, but I have been unable to find a trace of either of them on the
Internet.
David Martin
August 15, 2018
Home Page Column Column 5
Archive Contact