Flynn judge signed Seth Rich gag order

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan was back in the news this week. Sullivan forcefully rejected the court filings of attorney Sidney Powell in her attempt to have the guilty plea of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn thrown out.

In so doing, Sullivan made sure that the FBI notes and the communications between intelligence officials and journalists would not see the light of day.

Sullivan's involvement in the Flynn case is well enough known, as is the Flynn case itself. What deserves attention is Sullivan's largely unknown role in the Seth Rich affair.

If the information from independent journalist Matt Couch is correct, Sullivan has a history of suppressing unwanted information.

Couch and his team at America First Investigations were sued, as Couch writes, "for seeking the truth in the unsolved murder of Seth Conrad Rich."

According to Couch, it was Sullivan who signed the sealed order preventing him and his team from discussing the fruits of their investigation.

The superficial facts of the case were largely established within hours by the local media. "A 27-year-old man who worked for the Democratic National Committee was shot and killed as he walked home early Sunday in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of Northwest Washington, D.C.," NBC Washington reported.

In fact, Rich was the DNC's data director for new voter registration. The shooting occurred at 4:19 a.m. on Sunday, July 10, 2016. Rich was talking to his ex-girlfriend on the phone when shot.

"There had been a struggle," said Seth's mother, Mary Rich. "His hands were bruised, his knees are bruised, his face is bruised, and yet he had two shots to his back, and yet they never took anything." She added, "They took his life for literally no reason."

In the real world, most killers have a reason. Those who fire two shots always do. In the major newsrooms journalists were perversely keen on not knowing what this reason was.

In the years since the shooting, those journalists have offered little useful information beyond the account above. What Rich was doing walking the streets of Washington after 4 a.m. remains as much a mystery to them as it did on July 10, 2016.

Worse, they and their deep state allies have done all within their power to prevent independent journalists like Crouch from solving what was indisputably a murder.

Wikileaks maestro Julian Assange made the media's task much more difficult. Twelve days after Rich's death, Wikleaks began releasing emails pilfered from the DNC. Although the media did their brutal best to kill the speculation Rich had something to do with those emails, Assange would not let them.

Interviewed on Dutch TV four weeks after the shooting, Assange said unprompted, "Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. There's a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington."

Among the few in Washington willing to talk about Assange's comments and Rich's death was Donna Brazile. Rich's murder obsessed her. "All I could think about was Seth Rich," she wrote in her book, "Hacks."

According to Couch, Brazile was called to the hospital where Rich underwent emergency surgery to save his life. In her book, she speculated on whether the Russians had "played some part in his unsolved murder."

If the Russians did play a part – highly unlikely – the media did not want to know and neither apparently did Judge Sullivan. He put information found in the discovery phase of the lawsuit under a sealed order.

"That means that whatever we find in our discovery as a defense (bank records, emails, eBay records, PayPal records, phone records, autopsy) and things we are seeking in our investigations can never be talked about publicly," writes Couch.

"Isn't that interesting, America?" Couch asks. I suspect Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell would agree that it certainly is.