“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
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