Trump is not "Putin's Pet"

 I've got to admit that I'm surprised I would agree with Fiona Hill, but

 Trump wants to be Putin's pet, but he's not.

Revealed: the hacking and disinformation team meddling in elections

OK, maybe you don't give an fcuk about Palestinians, but Israelis live high on the hog with universal health care, nice homes, education, and all sorts of other goodies paid for by the US tax payers.

You don't get the "socialism" and "welfare state", but you pay to support a nation that does not act in the US interest.

Remember the US Liberty.

You know that Russian Interference?

Actually, it's more like they blame Russians for interference even though the 2016 election was thrown by the Electoral College, which comes from the US CONSTITUTION! It's called distraction.

 The Israel lobby actually does what the Russians have been alleged to do. 

And I don't care how pro-Israel you happen to be: that money would be much better spent here.

Joe Biden fracks up his chances to be president

 Joe Biden said I shouldn’t vote for him if I wanted to ban fracking.

The problem with Joe is that he is WORSE than Hillary Clinton for switching positions. Climate Change, Fracking, and the "Green New Deal" are a case in point.

His position switching make him untrustworthy.

Let's add on top of that the allegations of accepting bribes from foreign countries, which he denies. Despite the "laptop from hell" confirming any suspicions about this matter.

Joe's record is out there and it's not good. He's not "progressive" by any standard unless you are Fox News. And the same goes for Harris. They were both candidates whose campaigns tanked.

As Steve Bannon pointed out, Bernie Sanders would have been the nominee if this primary process was on the up and up.

Don't blame the Russians when Biden loses, unless the Russians run the DNC.

Voting Green

Yes, I voted for Jill Stein and the Green Party in the 2016 election.

This is one of the many reasons I am skeptical about "Russian Influence". The other one was that Trump won in the Electoral College, not the popular vote. 

Of course, you won't hear from the likes of me in the Media. And I won't even let off supposedly unbiased sources like the Guardian or the BBC in this rant. Neither of these news sources has paid attention to the US third parties. This is sad since any truly unbiased new source should be interviewing people like me.

Instead, I see bullshit like this trying to point out how Green voters were duped. Toss in the attempt to make third party voters somehow responsible for the Electoral College fiasco.

Anyway, Jill Stein didn't need any social media help for her campaign. Most of the people who voted for her were so disenchanted by the two party system that we were ready to vote for the Greens, Libertarians, or Roque de la Fuentes. I've said it before, the only way I would have considered voting for Hillary Clinton would be if ranked choice voting existed. In that case, I would have cast my vote something like this:

Jill Stein
Gary Johnson or Roque de la Fuentes for Second or Third
A Write in for Bozo the Clown for fourth
And then I would have voted for Hillary Clinton.

So, the "Russian influence" horseshit tends to neglect that Hillary Clinton was one of the most unpopular candidates to ever run. But, never mind that the DNC and establishment democrats chose her over Bernie Sanders. There is another aspect to all of this which I have covered before and won't bother here about my disenchantment with the two party system.

So, any accusation of "Russian Influence" needs to examine how the two party system works since the bottom line of the whole argument seems to be that the Russians used it against itself.

So, any "Russian support" was pretty much negligible. I think Paul Jay of the Real News Network also does a great analysis of the Russian Influence issue.  As a lawyer, the standard for criminal convictions is "beyond a reasonable doubt" and no one has persuaded me beyond that that their assertion of "Russian Influence" outweighs any of the other issues (such as the Electoral College) for Trump being president.

Remember, persuasion require the person to be somewhat inclined to whatever you are trying to persuade them to do. I wouldn't have voted Green if the Dems had addressed: Climate change, election reform, and all the things Bernie was on record as being for. As Stein pointed out, You will love her if you liked Bernie.Toss in I am disgusted with the Democratic Party and its sham primary elections.

As for social media, pretty much everyone who supported the Green Party did so for the same reasons I did: disgust with the two party system (notice how the Media fail to talk about that Green talking point). The Green Party wasn't on the ballot in every state, which meant that a lot of people voting Green were doing so in the hope of gaining ballot access by getting 5% of the vote.

I'll toss in another reason I voted Green was that Hillary was supposed to win in a landslide, which she did if the popular vote actually mattered.

But the popular vote doesn't matter.

US elections are a sham.

And who better to make the baddie if the US wants to pretend it is the "Great Democracy" (or republic for that matter) than an actual "dictatorship".

In other words, distract the people as the world falls apart.

Sorry, I am one of the many people who isn't buying into the "Russian Influence" thing. And you can read all my posts to see why, but the bottom line is that nothing the Russians, or any other foreign power, have done tops the mess that is US politics.

See also:

• No, Jill Stein Did Not Cost Hillary Clinton the White House

Answer me this one question before you go on about Russian Collusion

Carefully study this picture before answering:

Please explain to me the disparity between the popular vote (small print under photos of candidates) and the electoral votes.

How is this a result of "Russian interference in the US election process"?

I will add that the rumours of Catherine the Great and farm animals are not grounded in reality. She didn't die fucking a horse.

And she certainly didn't fuck a donkey 222 years after she died.

Now, fuck off unless you are going to address real problems and stop playing silly buggers.

Why it's Russian Interference instead of Election Reform.

There is a reason people are fixated with having Russian Interference shoved down their throats: Both parties are guilty of "dirty tricks". You point out that the US meddling was much worse than anything the Russians did and people tend to write that off as somehow being OK. In fact all the Russians did was to point out the problems, which means anyone who points out the real issues is somehow a "Russian Bot".

Anyway, the reason that no one is doing anything about the Electoral College is that it is one of the best things for keeping the duopoly going. It's hard for new parties to get into the system. Hint: one of the reasons I voted Green was the hope that the party would somehow get enough of the vote to have ballot access and other perks that being a national party would bring.

Why doesn't US MSM publish things like this.

Al-Jazeera on Trump being Putin's puppet:

Trump does not behave as Putin's puppet. He behaves as a person who sees himself as a great deal-maker, who is able to negotiate with anyone - from Putin to Kim Jong-un - to get a good deal.

The US president is a businessman who started his career in the real estate sector. In this type of business, one does not care who buys the penthouse as long as it is swiftly paid for. A number of apartments in the Trump Tower, for example, were bought by people of questionable or criminal background (including Russian citizens).

In this sense, it is not a surprise that Trump is dealing with anyone and everyone in the pursuit of the most lucrative deal.

Of course, whether this strategy is indeed effective or not can be debated. Many experts think it isn't, but this does not mean that Trump's policies are dictated by Putin; they are dictated by his own views, however wrong they may be.

This is not necessarily good for Putin. Despite all the niceties exchanged and footballs passed at the summit, there is still no development on the major issues of concern for the Kremlin: sanctions and Ukraine. If this is how Trump will do business for the next two years and if reelected, the another four afterwards, the Russian president might start thinking that the hacking of the Democratic National Committee emails might not have been such a good idea after all.

One of the major issues during the campaign was that Trump was a rogue actor. Some people were hoping he would bring down the Republican Party. The Al-Jazeera article makes a really good case that the US MSM spin on Trump and Putin's meeting may not be correct.

Maybe I shouldn't write off Fox News...

I have to agree that I don't think these indictments will go anywhere since there is way too much refutation to this case to provide reasonable doubt. Toss in that there are no specific instances of "Russian meddling" that couldn't be shown to possibly be domestically produced. This segment from Fox news sounds plausible to me as a former lawyer who practised criminal law.And the hack is open to debate.

Not sure where this will go if the Republicans win the "mid-term" elections. Also not sure why the powers that be would have let Trump run, unless it is true about the DNC wanting a pied piper candidate, which is why I think the meddling is domestic and not Russian. And it came from the DNC.

As I said, no one is denying that the leaked e-mails are genuine, which is dangerous since any defence attorney worth their pay has their defence mapped out for them in the e-mails. After all what's the point of having strict rules over elections and referendums if there are no consequences for them being broken? And how is "Russian interference" germane if the DNC can break its own rules and run a rigged primary. As I said before, nothing in the Wikileaks leaked documents came as a revelation to people in the Sanders campaign.

I think this shit is a distraction to keep people from demanding campaign reform.

Internal Misconduct is far more of a concern than "foreign interference".

As I said before, if the goal of  the alleged "Russian interference" in US elections is to destroy confidence in the process, then they don't have too much work to do other than rub the US public's nose in the shit that the electoral process happens to be. Whatever "Russian interference" that may have existed pales in comparison to all the shenanigans that are considered SOP in US elections. The level of damage caused by "Russians" is unquantifiable.

On the other hand, the institutions and institutional practises that led to Clinton "losing" the election tend to be mostly home grown, which is what the "hacked e-mails" demonstrated. Although, it is questionable as to whether the e-mails were really hacked, or leaked by someone disgusted with DNC violations of its own rules. Additionally, Clinton only "lost" in the electoral college, an institution which is intended on thwarting democracy and democratic process. That is the obvious cause for her "defeat" while having one of the largest margins of the popular vote.

In fact, that is the main problem with the "Russian Interference" allegations: Clinton didn't lose by the standards of most democratic systems. Instead, Clinton lost because of an anachronistic, anti-democratic institution created by the US Constitution. It is an institution that most people don't understand.

The letter that former FBI Director James Comey sent to Congress on Oct. 28, 2016, and the subsequent media firestorm over it was an event that could also have contributed to Clinton's "loss". The impact is relatively easy to measure because it was the biggest news event in the final two weeks of the campaign, and we can compare polls conducted just before the Comey letter to the ones conducted just after it.

Is James Comey under indictment?

As I understand it, Russian attempts at influencing the US election consist of the hacking incident, which the Democrats assured us was not an issue: until they lost the election. They also consist of trying to show Clinton as being dishonest and otherwise discredit her. That's another one of those things which is amazingly easy to defend against! Just play one of the many tapes of Clinton contradicting herself.

Anyway, there are a lot of other explanations for why Trump is president which are far more credible and substantial than Russian interference. Any defence attorney worth their pay can blow this one out the stadium with little effort.

You also have to remember that the standard for burden of proof in a criminal conviction is "beyond a reasonable doubt", or "that no other logical explanation can be derived from the facts except that the defendant committed the crime, thereby overcoming the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty."

I have yet to see that non-US actions caused Clinton's loss or that any "foreign interference" went beyond that standard.

I think US resources would be far better spent on addressing the internal problems than trying to place fault on things which probably didn't effect the outcome at all.

Wanna see a Liberal's head explode.

I could see this one coming. I mean it had to come didn't it.

Now, watch the pundits try to dodge accusations of anti-semitism if they decide to go down this path.

Russian influence or was Hillary just a bad candidate?

Nate Silver points out that:

How did Trump win? Or more to the point, how did Trump win given that he only had a 38 percent favorability rating among people who voted on Election Day? The answer is partly the Electoral College, of course. But it’s also that Clinton was really, really unpopular herself — almost as unpopular as Trump — with a favorability rating of just 43 percent among Election Day voters. Also, the substantial number of voters who disliked both Clinton and Trump went to Trump by a 17-point margin. Voters really weren’t willing to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt.
That’s largely because Clinton was viewed as dishonest and untrustworthy, exactly the sort of message that the Russian campaign (which used hashtags such as #Hillary4Prison) was trying to cultivate. Trump, of course, was trying to cultivate this message too. Media coverage often struck the same themes. And voters sometimes heard variations on this theme from Sanders and his supporters in the more contentious moments of the Democratic primaries. Was some of this Clinton’s fault? Yep, of course. Would Clinton still have been “Crooked Hillary” even without the Russians? Almost certainly. But the Russians were at least adding fuel to the right fire — the one that wound up consuming Clinton’s campaign.

It's hard to tell what was "Russian influence" or Hillary's own faults the way I read that since a lot of people were talking about "Hillary for Prison" without having the Russians involved. Toss in her reputation for not being trustworthy was due to her own actions and position flipping. There was a 2008 Obama ad that "She'll Say Anything And Change Nothing".

Toss in the bottom line that you were taken by Russian influence if you voted for Trump, Sanders, or Jill Stein. I can honestly say that the DNC is rife with Russian Operatives if that is the basis for saying Russian operatives fixed the election. The DNC's actions pretty much were why I left the Democratic Party.

We can also get into Media complicity in giving Trump free air time which increased his profile.

You also have to remember that the standard for burden of proof in a criminal conviction is "beyond a reasonable doubt", or "that no other logical explanation can be derived from the facts except that the defendant committed the crime, thereby overcoming the presumption that a person is innocent until proven guilty."

Anyway, I am 100% certain any "Russian influence" was insignificant compared to internal US actions. Any investigation worth the money needs to look into the US institutional problems which led to the 2016 election disaster.

The People who persuaded me it would be OK to vote Green.

Hey, Mueller, you gonna indict these people too???

Because they were so sure she was going to win, Hillary Clinton couldn’t have really lost.

All too ironically, they turned for solace to the line Donald Trump was feeding to his followers to embrace in anticipation of defeat ahead of the November election: The election must have been rigged! So on and on the Democratic Party and its supporters in the media have gone about Russian interference in the 2016 election, an interpretation that it now appears will never abate for the fiercest of Democratic partisans (And, suprisingly, even some Republicans).

Admitting the DNC rigged the election against itself by ignoring independent voters and aggressively quelling the nearly successful primary challenge by an independent candidate, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, is out of the question.

Let's toss in that Clinton DID WIN by the standard used by most democracies: the  popular vote. She only "lost" in the electoral college, yet that is another thing which people can't get their heads around because few people understand what the fuck the electoral college actually does.

See also:

• Why Can’t The Media See Independent Voters?
• Check this out for more arrogance that Trump wouldn't win.

You don't need Russians to interfere or meddle or whatever.

The threat is real. There is unanimity of opinion in the intelligence community that hackers working on behalf of the Russian government undertook a coordinated effort to destabilize our election system. As the witnesses from the intelligence and law enforcement community testified, one of their primary objectives was to undermine Americans confidence and trust in their election system. We now live in a world where foreign governments wage war on our country not with guns and bombs, but by attempting to diminish Americans’ faith in our democratic institutions.

Source: The Hill: The truth about Russia, 'hacking' and the 2016 election

As I have been saying any serious investigation requires scrutinising US institutions. You have the Electoral College which is designed to be anti-democratic and the 2016 demonstrated how much it can deviate from the popular vote. But don't think I am being a "snowflake" since FairVote decided to look at the 2008 election for a “worst case scenario” of just how few popular votes Barack Obama really needed to earn a majority of the vote in the Electoral College.  They didn’t change John McCain’s votes, but eliminated all the “unnecessary” votes earned by Obama – meaning all of his votes in states he didn’t’ need to win and any “surplus” votes earned in states he wins (meaning any votes beyond one more than McCain).

 President Obama could have defeated Sen. John McCain in the Electoral College with as few as 24,781,169 popular votes despite McCain earning 59,479,469 votes. In other words, he could have won even while losing the popular vote by 69% to 29% (with 2% for other).

Looking only at states that he actually won, Obama could have carried enough states to earn 270 electoral votes with just 26,721,494 votes – meaning with a popular vote defeat by 68% to 30%.

 Source: http://www.fairvote.org/electoral-college-distortions-winner-could-lose-popular-vote-by-a-landslide

The leaked DNC emails were no real revelation to be quite honest since most people suspected what was in them. They were a confirmation of people's distrust. It was the icing on the DNC's pushing of Hillary Clinton and disdain for people who weren't "true democrats".  As I said, it was shit like that that made me leave the democratic party.

Even more important is the money in US politics. The primary system is long and drawn out to keep people who don't have big bucks backing them. On the other hand, someone like Donald Trump was able to game the system to get anywhere from $2 to $5 Billion in free, "earned" media attention. Which was also given to him by anyone who showed outrage at Trump's antics (figure includes social media). I remember in 1980 when US Stations couldn't show "Bedtime for Bonzo" because it would have given Reagan free coverage.

No Russian help needed to get people disgusted with US politics: the duopoly does a wonderful job on its own.


Ultimately, it is the electoral college, closed primaries, gerrymandering, uncontested elections, big money, and pretty much the whole election circus that causes the results that people want to attribute to the Russians.

So I find that the real culprits are home grown. And that is where all the energy should be directed, not de minimis "foreign meddling".  Simply stated, if the "Russian Objective" is to destroy confidence in "US democratic institutions", then I see any "Russian activities" as being de minimis compared to those of the DNC, Cambridge Analytica/Robert Mercer, and US media, who spent far more money than the Russians are alleged to have spent for destroying confidence in US Democracy.
 

An open letter to Robert Mueller regarding the 2016 Presidential Election Investigation

OK, let's begin this with the stipulation that the DNC e-mails in question are authentic. It was revealed by WikiLeaks emails from the DNC hack that under the guidance of the now scandal-ridden former chairperson of the DNC, Deborah Wasserman Schultz, the party leadership had shown high levels of favourability towards Hillary Clinton and that they quashed the campaign of Bernie Sanders to make sure she won the nomination.

Sometimes a criminal investigation finds more criminal activity than what was originally alleged. In this case, the e-mails show democratic party collusion to promote Hillary Clinton as well as sabotage Bernie Sanders' campaign. There was a class action suit about this which went nowhere, despite all the misconduct of the DNC being a given.

I believe there have been allegations of vote suppression, which I believe is an offence. Some of the e-mails in question show the DNC staff in damage control over allegations from the Sanders campaign, when a report—corroborated by a Politico—revealed the DNC’s joint fundraising committee with the Clinton campaign was laundering money to the Clinton campaign instead of fundraising for down-ticket Democrats. Regardless of the fundraising tactics, because both major campaigns didn’t agree to use the joint fundraising committee super-PAC with the DNC, the DNC should have recused itself from participating with just the Clinton campaign.

The Associated Press called the Democratic primary races in six states for Hillary Clinton on Monday night, based on its survey of superdelegates. CNN confirmed the count a few hours after that, based on the network's criteria, then declared that it had broken the story. This is one of the things that threw the election.

Even more concerning is that an email released by WikiLeaks shows how the Clinton campaign and Democratic Party bear direct responsibility for making Trump the Republican candidate. The email describes using a "pied piper" strategy, the Clinton campaign proposed intentionally cultivating extreme right-wing presidential candidates, hoping to turn them into the new "mainstream of the Republican Party" in order to try to increase Clinton's chances of winning.The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee called for using far-right candidates "as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right." Clinton's camp insisted that Trump and other extremists should be "elevated" to "leaders of the pack" and media outlets should be told to "take them seriousl

You need to broaden the scope of your investigation to include the DNC misconduct shown in these e-mails if you want to avoid any allegations that your investigation is a political witch hunt. Failure to do so leaves this investigation wide open to those charges.

As someone who voted for Bernie Sanders and then abandoned the Democratic Party to go back to being independent, I can say that the actions of the Democratic Party were far more damaging to it than any purported "Russian Influence".

I know there are a lot of people who buy into the "Russians did it", probably the way they swallowed that the Iraqis had WMD. I didn't . Likewise I do not believe for one second that any Russian activity would rise to the level of misconduct demonstrated by the DNC. And it was the DNC misconduct which cost the election.

And it was Clinton's piss poor campaign and the Electoral College that cost her the election, not the Russians. Address that or your investigation is crap.

See also:

• How the Hillary Clinton campaign deliberately “elevated” Donald Trump with its “pied piper” strategy
• How Much Did Russian Interference Affect The 2016 Election?
• Was the Democratic Primary Just Manipulated, or Was It Stolen?
• The Comey Letter Probably Cost Clinton The Election
• Search the DNC email database
• Five Things That Would Make The CIA/CNN Russia Narrative More Believable
• Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret Takeover of the DNC
• Wikileaks Proves Primary Was Rigged: DNC Undermined Democracy
• 18 revelations from Wikileaks' hacked Clinton emails
• Here are the latest, most damaging things in the DNC’s leaked emails
• Democratic National Committee Fraud Lawsuit Is the Biggest Story in Politics That No One Is Talking About
• The Dismissed DNC Fraud Lawsuit Explained
• The AP's call for Hillary Clinton ruined California's election party--and here’s why that matters

Oh, no, not more Russians and E-mails

OK, the first question everybody should be asking is "are these authentic, DNC internal messages?" I think it's pretty much taken as given that these are. That means Russian interference is pretty meaningless. That's because these e-mails kill the democratic party by showing that it was biased against Sanders which went against party bylaws.

On the other hand, nothing in these e-mails comes as a revelation if you happened to be a Sanders supporter. Glenn Greenwald pretty much sums up the situation:

“When Trump becomes the starting point and ending point for how we talk about American politics, [we] don’t end up talking about the fundamental ways the American political and economic and cultural system are completely fucked for huge numbers of Americans who voted for Trump for that reason,” he says. “We don’t talk about all the ways the Democratic Party is a complete fucking disaster and a corrupt, sleazy sewer, and not an adequate alternative to this far-right movement that’s taking over American politics.”

The issue is that both parties stink and that Hillary basically was her own worst enemy. That was pretty much what the leaked e-mails confirmed. It wasn't anything that most people didn't already know.

And I am going with it was an internal DNC leak since it seems the evidence pointing to it being a Russian is that there is evidence a Russian VPN was used.

Seriously? People use VPNs to HIDE their location, not broadcast it. Toss in any legit VPN host will give the actual location if there is criminal investigation. Give me the actual location, not a VPN IP address.

But let's get into who the messenger is: Robert Mueller. A dude to claimed that Iraq had WMD!

Gimme a break. I call BS then and I'm calling BS now.

Unless Mueller is also investigating the DNC and what the leaked e-mails revealed, then this investigation is partisan bullshit.

After all, no one is denying the e-mails were actual DNC internal communications.

And it was DNC misconduct that made me realise that I was wasting my vote by supporting a duopoly candidate.

Unless this investigation starts looking at the internal US causes of why Trump became president, this is a waste of time. The obvious cause was the electoral college, yet I am hearing squat about addressing that issue.


See also:

• Why Clinton Lost The Election
• Democrats beware: the Trump-Russia inquiry isn't the path to power 
• How a year of Mueller's Trump-Russia investigation drowned out the news 
• House ends Russia probe, says no Trump-Kremlin collusion
• Confessions of a Russiagate Skeptic 
• 'Russian election hack impossible': NSA veteran & whistleblower

I don't get the Russian Interference accusation.

OK, didn't Clinton supporters tell us that there was no issue in regard to her e-mails? Yet it seems that any Russian interference relates to her and others around her e-mails being made public.

I think anyone who said that Hillary's (and other Democratic Committee members) e-mails weren't an issue should be precluded from saying there was Russian Interference.

We don't even need to get into the likelihood that the e-mails weren't hacked, but were leaked by a DNC insider.

The next question would be how did Russians rig the election if it wasn't the e-mail thing?  Were they responsible for Bernie Sanders treatment?

And if I remember correctly, most of the leaked e-mails showed how the DNC screwed Bernie and wanted Trump as an opponent because he would be easy to beat (which he was in terms of the popular vote).

The other possibility is they somehow rigged the voting, yet HILLARY WON THE POPULAR VOTE! I'm going to keep hammering on how the Electoral College distorts the vote and is supposed to thwart the popular vote.

For there to have been local interference, the Russians would have had to had their hand in the choice of voting machines that were not auditable among other things.  But the US is neither an Republic nor a Democracy in that it does not really have free and fair elections.

You can't blame the Russians for that.

It would make far more sense to assess the US process of elections than to blame the Russians.

See also:

• Julian Assange says the FBI and CIA are wrong about Russians hacking the DNC – VICE News
• A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack | The Nation
• American elections ranked worst among older democracies. Here’s why. - FairVote

Once again Penigma scoops the Mass Media on who "hacked" the DNC,

The Shingouz:

It sort of makes sense since nobody is taking credit for a leak.  It would have to be these crafty little critters from Mézières' and Christin's (and now Luc Besson) Valérian et Laureline. What else could so easily get away with stealing documents and then leaking them.

See:
Why Some U.S. Ex-Spies Don't Buy the Russia Story

More Seth Rich

I mentioned the unsolved murder case of Seth Rich in the Heeeyyyy, MITCH! post and this is a follow up.

Seth Rich is the DNC staffer who is alleged to have leaked the Hillary emails to Wikileaks.

It seems that Fox News and Sean Hannity in particular have dropped this as news:

Both Fox and Hannity invited a torrent of criticism for a report on 16 May that Rich, a 27-year-old staffer at the DNC, had been in contact with the website WikiLeaks prior to his fatal shooting in Washington in July of 2016. The unsubstantiated report was published and promoted on both Fox News, most heavily on Hannity’s primetime show, and the network’s local Washington affiliate, WTTG-TV.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, Fox News said the article in question “was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting”.
“Upon appropriate review, the article was found not to meet those standards and has since been removed,” the statement read. “We will continue to investigate this story and will provide updates as warranted.”

Sean Hannity wasn't totally giving up, but said this about his dropping the story:

“Out of respect for the [Rich] family’s wishes, for now, I am not discussing this matter at this time,” Hannity said.
Even so, the characteristically bombastic anchor blamed what he dubbed as “liberal fascism” amid a campaign targeting Hannity’s advertisers in the wake of his promotion of the false report.
“I promise you I am not going to stop doing my job,” Hannity said. “I am not going to stop trying to find the truth.”

I've got to admit this sounds a bit fishy to me, but maybe Fox is going to change with the passing of Roger Ailes.

Quotes here come from Fox drops Seth Rich murder story as Sean Hannity attacks 'liberal fascism'