Conspiracist Says He Was Attacked By Man He Hired To Analyze Seth Rich’s Death
Seth Rich Image by Linkedin
By Aiden Pink March 20, 2018
A conservative activist in suburban Washington, D.C. is recovering from being shot and hit by a car, allegedly by a former Marine he hired to investigate the death of former Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich.
Jack Burkman told The Washington Post that he had hired Kevin Doherty to help him build a psychological profile of Rich’s killer. Local police believe that Rich’s death in 2016 was the result of a botched robbery, but conspiracy theorists believe that Rich was murdered for political purposes. The culprit has not been caught.
Burkman fired Doherty in July 2017 and moved on to investigating the FBI. In February, Burkman was contacted by a man who claimed to have information on then-deputy director Andrew McCabe. Burkman said his source promised to drop off a full report under a cone in the parking garage of a local hotel.
But, Burkman said, when he bent over to pick them up, he was shot in the buttocks and thigh, and then hit by an SUV.
“It looked like he was coming to kill me,” Burkman said. He was hospitalized for three days. Police tracked Doherty down via the SUV and charged him on Saturday with malicious wounding and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.
Burkman was also sprayed with pepper spray by a masked man in January, an incident that Burkman didn’t connect to Doherty at the time. No charges have been filed in that incident.
Coincidentally, the alleged attack took place soon after Rich’s parents sued Fox News for having “intentionally exploited” falsehoods and conspiracy theories about his death. The network had claimed to have information that Rich leaked information to Wikileaks, before retracting its report.
“This in my mind makes the whole Seth story stranger and stranger,” Burkman said.
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
