When Seth Rich’s Gmail account received an alert this week from Mega.com, attempting to start a new account on a website created by the New Zealand-based Internet businessman and convicted hacker Kim Dotcom, his family knew that something was off.
A conspiracy theory that began on pro-President Trump message boards — a theory that Rich was actually a mole who wanted to expose corruption at the DNC — was fed by Russian news outlets including RT and Sputnik. The Daily Mail, Fox News’s website and several other mainstream outlets with large audiences
Over seven frenzied days, Dotcom had become a leading purveyor of the theory that Rich, a staffer at the Democratic National Committee who was shot dead near his home in Northeast Washington last summer, had supplied DNC documents to WikiLeaks and was killed as a result.
All that began to unravel Tuesday afternoon when Fox News retracted a story that had claimed the same Rich-WikiLeaks connection
Source: The life and death of the Seth Rich conspiracy theory – The Washington Post