Just weeks after urging the American public to cool it with spreading unfounded rumors about the jailhouse death of Jeffrey Epstein, former New York City mayor, MAGA-hatted lunatic, and personal attorney to the president Rudy Giuliani launched himself headfirst into a different—completely debunked—conspiracy theory favored among the worst parts of the right wing fever swamp: that of murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich.
Quoting a bizarre, first-person thought experiment from disgraced conservative conspiracy theorist Matt Couch, in which Couch rattled off a number of seemingly incriminating aspects of Rich’s 2016 murder on Twitter, Giuliani tweeted “I’d like to know,” lending his voice and considerable personal capital to the thoroughly disproven belief that Rich’s death was somehow orchestrated for nefarious purposes.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Rudy then engaged in a series of text messages with The Daily Beast’s Will Sommer, in which he fell back on the laughably pathetic excuse that he was simply asking questions, folks! What’s worse, he seemed to not realize the Rich conspiracy had even been debunked in the first place.
From The Daily Beast (emphasis mine):
In text messages with The Daily Beast, Giuliani insisted his tweet wasn’t meant to promote any conspiracy theories but merely to ask questions about Rich’s murder, which has remained unsolved.
“I didn’t support any conspiracy theory,” Giuliani told The Daily Beast in a text message. “I raised several nagging coincidences.”
“I vaguely remember it and was asking a question about whether it was ever investigated fully,” Giuliani added. “Don’t remember if it was ever solved? Was it.”
After this article was published, Giuliani doubled down on his speculation and accused The Daily Beast of lacking “proper seductive reasoning.”
“Either you haven’t been trained in proper seductive [sic] reasoning or the most truthful explanation is irrelevant,” Giuliani wrote in a text message.
While Giuliani is far from the first person in President Donald Trump’s orbit to push the ghoulish notion that Rich was murdered for political gain by some shadowy cabal of politically-motivated assassins, he’s appears to be the highest profile person to do so after the right-wing Washington Times was forced to retract a conspiracy-mongering op-ed that helped fuel the hysteria in the first place, following a lawsuit by Rich’s understandably enraged and heartbroken family.