The FBI not only has possession of a laptop computer owned by slain Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer Seth Rich, but a report detailing forensic imaging of what’s being described as Rich’s work computer, the bureau revealed in a new filing.
The FBI’s records office located the report while searching for the work computer, Michael Seidel, chief of the office, said in a sworn declaration filed with a federal court in Texas on Dec. 9. He described the document as “a three (3) page forensic report detailing the actions performed by an outside entity to image the work laptop.”
The report was among four documents that had never been disclosed by the FBI in relation to Rich’s case.
Journalist Sy Hersh said in 2017 that he was told by a source about an FBI report on Seth Rich. He said, according to the source, that Seth Rich’s computer showed the DNC staffer had relayed DNC documents to WikiLeaks, a pro-transparency group. Hersh made the disclosure in a phone call with Ed Butowsky, an investor who has later retracted claims about Rich being a WikiLeaks source.
Rich was gunned down in the early morning hours on July 16, 2016, near his home in Washington. The killing of Rich, the DNC’s voter expansion data director, remains unsolved. Authorities have claimed that the killing was a robbery gone wrong. Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, has suggested that Rich passed DNC files to the group, which released the DNC files in 2016. U.S. authorities have alleged that Russians hacked into the DNC systems, but those allegations were made before the FBI received images from the DNC’s server to determine their validity.
The Metropolitan Police Department, the lead investigating agency, has declined to say whether the FBI was helping with the probe into Rich’s death.
New Records
The new records were found after the records office contacted an unnamed FBI special agent during its search for Rich’s work computer, according to FBI Records Chief Seidel.
The other records are a letter from a third-party that accompanied the work computer and two FBI chain of custody forms.
None of the records were indexed to Rich inside of the bureau’s central records system and neither the forensic report nor the custody forms mention Rich’s name, according to the FBI. They were also not included in an electronic file created for Rich’s case.
The agent claimed that disclosure of the records would harm an FBI investigation into the allegations that Russians had hacked into U.S. systems.
Bureau officials had previously claimed in sworn statements that the FBI had searched for records on Rich but did not locate any.
The FBI now wants the court to agree to keep the new records shielded from Brian Huddleston, a Texas resident who filed a lawsuit against the bureau over its ignoring a Freedom of Information request for records on Rich.
In 2020, for the first time, the FBI admitted it had files from a computer belonging to Rich. Some of those files were then released to Huddleston and made public, including documents that appear to suggest that someone could have paid for his death.
The FBI has also already said it has images from a second computer owned by Rich, which the bureau described as Rich’s personal laptop. A federal judge in September ordered the bureau to hand the images over to Huddleston, finding that the bureau improperly withheld them.
FBI Argues Computer ‘Not an Actual Record’
The FBI has repeatedly sought, and obtained, delays to the production order and has still not produced the images.
The bureau had not explained whether it ever took possession of Rich’s personal laptop. A Department of Justice lawyer said at one point that the bureau was “working on getting the files from Seth Rich’s personal laptop into a format to be reviewed.” Seidel said in the new declaration that the FBI “does not have, nor has it ever had, physical possession of the actual personal laptop.”
The work laptop was conveyed to the FBI from a non-governmental third party, the FBI has said. The bureau is fighting against the release of both the images of Rich’s personal laptop and work laptop, which it says is being held in an FBI evidence room. Under the Freedom of Information Act, Seidel asserted that the computer “is not an actual record” but is “physical object/evidence” that is not subject to the law.
The law states that every U.S. agency shall make available “agency records.” But factors used to determine whether a record meets the definition shows that the computer is not, Seidel said. One factor is the extent to which personnel at the agency have read or relied upon the document, and the FBI has “found no indication” that the FBI relied on the content of the work computer, he added.
U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant, the Obama appointee who is overseeing the case, should order the computer and its associated records, including the newly discovered forensic report, shielded from Huddleston, U.S. lawyers said.
Ty Clevenger, the lawyer representing Huddleston, told The Epoch Times that he didn’t see a distinction between the physical work computer and the images from both computers. He said he would urge the judge to order the release of information from both computers.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
The FBI is such an unbelievably corrupt institution, full of lying and arrogant officials. It needs to be disbanded and replaced with an honest, transparent, and non-partisan law enforcement agency. Today’s FBI is like the KGB. Get rid of it!
The FBI is part of DOJ which is in turn part of the executive branch. It is difficult for me to believe that there will be any change under the present circumstances.
I suppose that it is possible for some change due to pressure exerted as result of the recent twitter activity…
Yes, the bottom line is that the FBI and CIA both need to be disbanded. I don’t think we need a federal police agency as we see what that’s led to, and when you go back in time & review the FBI, they seem to be corrupt for generations. Even including their actions during the JFK case. As for the CIA, their function should be performed within the Pentagon under direct civilian control. Intel Ops need to be far more transparent as they are being used against US now. Many Fed Govt agencies should be eliminated entirely like the Dept of Education, CDC, etc.
Right on the money!!! Go get ’em!!!
The FBI can be eliminated, and not be replaced at all… It hasn’t been here that long, and local and state officials handled all law enforcement, including any federal crimes… There is also a Federal Marshalls Service…
There was no FBI or equivalent, for the overwhelming majority of the history of the USA…
I read that the FBI just went to court to keep records on Seth Rich sealed from the public for 66 years. Don’t know what the outcome of that was. Here’s a link to the story: https://nationalfile.com/fbi-asks-judge-to-delay-seth-rich-laptop-release-for-66-years/
It seems pretty obvious to me that the FBI does know info about Seth Rich’s death or why he would be killed and they are trying to cover that up obviously for some powerful person(s).
Gee, now that the FBI has been exposed (AGAIN) will they be telling us why the DNC had him whacked? NOT holding my breath.
All the Trump worshipers need to remember that Trump did nothing about this. He was too incompetent to even fire Comey because he stupidly thought of himself as so great, that even democrats would love him. Worship is ALL Trump was after. If he had been a true man and smart, he would’ve gutted the FBI and had someone trustworthy investigate this. He could’ve done to the FBI, what Musk has done to Twitter. But he was just an old fool who had no clue how to play the game.
He had a lot on his plate. He chose his battles well, considering.
He expended his energies so as to benefit Americans, not himself.
There’s only so much time and political capital.
The proof is in the pudding. He did more to elevate America during his six-plus years of antagonistic onslaught than any modern President, including Reagan.
Silly people. Nothing will ever bring us the truth. The power is on their side. We ask nicely. We play by the rules. They don’t. The purpose of the law is Justice. Without Justice, the law is a failure, a joke. When the law becomes a tool for the corrupt government, it commands no respect, nor obedience.
That is why they are called a court of “law”, and not a court of “justice”.
SO, much treason to punish.
Never understood that at the Clinton inauguration FBI files were transferred to the WH!!!? Beginning of the end.
Time to End the FBI and make the entire contents of Seth’s laptop AND Hunter bidens, public.
If Trump was smart and had good advisors he would have pardoned Assange who would have ended the argument as to who gave Wikileaks the info from the DNC server.
The Russian collusion hoax would have ended right then and there.
…’if Trump was smart’… say no more.
Never forget
We have a hostile Media
I wouldn’t trust ANYTHING on Seth’s computer after the FBI has had it. They or the CIA could have planted anything at all on it. Hunter’s laptop is believable because an objective, third-party computer tech cloned the drive BEFORE giving it to the FBI, so they can’t doctor the data to falsify anything on it. They can (and probably have) on Seth’s computer. Why would anybody trust data the FBI claims had been on it?
I’m still scratchin my head why the FBI is involved in a robbery gone wrong that turned into murder ?
If the Seth Rich computer hard drive doesn’t meet the definition of a record, the FBI better start apologizing to all the pedophiles that have been prosecuted (successfully) where no records of their crime exists!
I’ve come to realize every enemy to my way of life and America are college graduates and wear ‘slinky’ clothes and can’t seem to comprehend cause and effect.
That’s sobering. They used to be the leaders, now they’re just nuts!