Fox News settles with Seth Rich family for undisclosed sum over DNC hacking claims

Fox News has settled a lawsuit filed by the parents of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffer whose unsolved murder in July 2016 became the basis of right-wing conspiracy theories floated by the network.

Joel Rich and his wife Mary Rich had filed the suit over a May 2017 story that claimed their 27-year-old son may have been murdered in retribution for sharing internal DNC documents with Wikileaks in the heat of the 2016 presidential election campaign, even as police said his murder was believed to be the result of a botched robbery.

Fox News eventually retracted the story, which had connected Rich to the DNC leaks without evidence.

The theory allowed President Donald Trump's allies to divert attention from the fact that Russia was responsible for the DNC hacking and handed the emails to Wikileaks, as the Senate Intelligence Committee later concluded.