Grand Collusion

Pierre Fresnay and Erich von Stroheim in Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937), via NYTimes.

There's so much going on on all Trump fronts at the moment it's almost unbearable trying to pick a subject, but this thing from Michael Isikoff at Yahoo looks to me like the smokingest gun ever, maybe not that smoking, in the Trump-Russia matter, and I don't think it's been getting enough attention—that the Seth Rich Deep State conspiracy murder theory was originally concocted by Russian intelligence:

Russia’s foreign intelligence service, known as the SVR, first circulated a phony “bulletin” — disguised to read as a real intelligence report —about the alleged murder of the former DNC staffer on July 13, 2016, according to the U.S. federal prosecutor who was in charge of the Rich case. That was just three days after Rich, 27, was killed in what police believed was a botched robbery while walking home to his group house in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Washington, D.C., about 30 blocks north of the Capitol.

and offering a conspiracy theory to account for the crime, claiming

that Rich, a data director in the DNC’s voter protection division, was on his way to alert the FBI to corrupt dealings by Clinton when he was slain in the early hours of a Sunday morning by the former secretary of state’s hit squad.

And this newly discovered document must have been the source of a report by "Sorcha Faal" in the Russia-supported conspiracy blog WhatDoesItMean.com, which elaborated the story the same day on the basis of a purported SVR report:

A somber Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) report circulating in the Kremlin today says that a top American Democratic Party staffer preparing to testify against Hillary Clinton was assassinated this past Sunday during a secret meeting in Washington D.C. he believed he was having with Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents, but who turned out, instead, to be a “hit team”—and who, in turn, were captured yesterday after a running gun battle with US federal police forces just blocks from the White House.... Rich was “lured/enticed” to his murder by this Clinton “hit team” who portrayed themselves as FBI agents wanting to secretly interview him (Via Snopes)

It wasn't the only theory to emerge, or even the first; Heat Street, the blog produced by Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp where Louise Mensch got her start, alluded on the 12th to "all sorts of political conspiracy theories and racially charged remarks" on social media, some suggesting a vague connection to the sniper murder of five police officers in Dallas around a street protest some days earlier, which Rich had tweeted about, and some others, collected by Philip Bump for the Washington Post, referred darkly to "the Clintons", and Rich's supposed knowledge of the rigging of the California Democratic primary (believed by some people convinced that Bernie had really won-) on June 7.

Bump is a skeptic on the importance of this new story, but one of the things he's missing is narratological: the Russian contribution provided the circumstantialized frame of a murder mystery in place of the dark hints of the tweets and senseless objectivity of the properly written newspaper reports. While its details couldn't be true—the 4:00-in-the-morning mousetrap with the fake FBI is hard to imagine, and those "federal police forces" in their gun battle with the Clintonian assassins are even crazier than Louise Mensch's "marshal of the Supreme Court" (since a person with that title does actually exist) —they had the effect of the first telling of a story in a mystery proper, where you know the diegetic narrator character, the cop or witness, is getting it wrong, possibly lying, communicating to the reader the feeling of an open question rather than an answer, the puzzle you're going to want to solve. The WhatDoesItMean story was a kind of vessel ready for another story to be poured into it.

Which came along in a couple of days, as new repercussions arose of the hacking that spring of the Democratic National Committee's email system:

On July 18, 2016, Dmitry Peskov, press secretary for Russian president Vladimir Putin, stated that the Russian government had no involvement in the DNC hacking incident.^[91] Peskov called it "paranoid" and "absurd",^[92] saying: "We are again seeing these maniacal attempts to exploit the Russian theme in the US election campaign."^[93] That position was later reiterated by the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC, which called the allegation "entirely unrealistic".^[94]  (Wikipedia)

and four days after that WikiLeaks began releasing the emails themselves, packaged with an excellent search function that enabled reporters to quickly find what they all seemed primed to look for, evidence that the Committee could be seen as favoring one candidate, Hillary Clinton, over another, Bernard Sanders. Although, as a few journalists noted, including Aaron Blake at WaPo, it was all from a time, in May 2016, when Sanders had already definitively lost:

Many of the most damaging emails suggest the committee was actively trying to undermine Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign. Basically all of these examples came late in the primary -- after Hillary Clinton was clearly headed for victory -- but they belie the national party committee's stated neutrality in the race even at that late stage.... 

So that they could just as easily be seen as defense of the party, which had to all purposes made its decision and really didn't need to have Sanders or his surrogates making dark accusations against it, or spinning out his refusal to endorse Clinton to a ridiculous length of time, working as if to persuade his fans not to vote for her.

And on August 12 Julian Assange made his famous appearance on Dutch TV simultaneously suggesting and saying he wasn't suggesting that Seth Rich might have been a WikiLeaks source:

In an interview with Dutch television program Nieuwsuur Assange said: "Whistleblowers often take very significant efforts to bring us material and often at very significant risks.

"There’s a 27-year-old who works for the DNC and who was shot in the back, murdered, just a few weeks ago, for unknown reasons as he was walking down the streets in Washington."

When asked if Rich was a WikiLeaks source, Assange refused to comment, saying the organisation does not reveal sources. Assange was then asked why he was commenting on Rich’s murder.

He said: "We have to understand how high the stakes are in the US, and that our sources face serious risks. That’s why they come to us, so we can protect their anonymity." (via Belfast Telegraph)

And offered, via Twitter, a reward:

And on the same day Roger Stone

tweeted a picture of Rich, calling the late DNC staffer in a tweet “another dead body in the Clinton’s wake.” He then added: “Coincidence? I think not.”

This is how the project began to fill up the murder mystery setup WhatDoesItMean had provided with a solution in which "the Clintons" had murdered Seth Rich because he was the thief of the DNC emails, and the Russians weren't, with two figures who knew it wasn't true (WikiLeaks didn't receive any of the material until Rich was already dead), vaguely connected to Russia and vaguely connected to each other, and the story had a function (which it wouldn't have during the campaign) of sowing doubt over the connections between the Russians and the hacking as the FBI investigation moved forward.

We've met WhatDoesItMean before on this page, by the way, in regard to a crazy story they were pushing in early May 2016 about how the SVR had possession of all the emails from Hillary Clinton's private server, which was passed by Andrew Napoletano to Megyn Kelly and Joe Hoft, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Zerohedge, leading (as we now realize) to the weird quest of Mike Flynn and Peter Smith to obtain the imaginary treasure and Trump's famous "Russia if you're listening" invitation.

That's something else Philip Bump is missing, when he minimizes the Russian contribution to the development of the story:

it’s in fact much more accurate to pin the broad embrace of Seth Rich conspiracies on WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange — and on U.S. actors like Infowars’ Alex Jones and Fox News’s Sean Hannity.

Though it's also overdoing it when Isikoff tries to make the SRV the sole fons et origo of the Seth Rich story.

These people are constantly working together, or in parallel, ideas take their time to ripen, and a venue like WhatDoesItMean achieves its effects not like the Internet Research Agency directly to the masses, but by feeding those like Jones and Hannity with the reach. Sometimes it firms up into a real conspiracy, as when the Rich story finally began swelling (in advance of the Guccifer 2.0 indictment of Russians) in April 2018:

These conspiracy theories were promoted by Mike Cernovich, Sean Hannity, Geraldo Rivera, Kim Dotcom, Paul Joseph Watson, Newt Gingrich, Jack Posobiec, and others.^[81][82][83]

The same venues that fomented the false Pizzagate conspiracy theory helped to promulgate the Seth Rich murder conspiracy theories,^[11][84][85] and each shared similar features.^[86][87][88] Both were promoted by individuals subscribing to far-right politics,^[89] and by campaign officials and individuals appointed to senior-level national security roles by Donald Trump.^[90][91][92] After prior coordination on Facebook, each theory was spread on Twitter by automated bots using a branded hashtag, with the goal of becoming a trending topic.^[84] Both the Pizzagate conspiracy theory and the Seth Rich murder conspiracy theory were spread in the subreddit forum /r/The Donald.^[93] In both conspiracy theories, the promoters attempted to shift the burden of proof — asking others to attempt to disprove their claims, without citing substantiated evidence.^[94]  (Wikipedia)

But for the most part the activity's not adding up to much, and "collusion" is a more appropriate word.