ANDREA MITCHELL (HOST): And I want to ask both of you -- I want to switch subjects, briefly move to the case of Seth Rich. It's a story that has not reached enough prominence, I think, in the news, and you have an op-ed, a column from his parents saying that their son, who worked for the DNC and was gunned down in Washington on July 10, 2016, was not involved, as some of the fake news, the alt-right people have been suggesting, not at all involved in the hacking of the DNC. Can you address that?
RUTH MARCUS: Well, this family has suffered the ultimate tragedy in losing their very promising young son. And it's been -- that tragedy has been exacerbated and exploited by people without any basis seeking to get some kind of political benefit by suggesting that Seth Rich, who was about to go to work for the Clinton campaign, worked for the DNC, was somehow killed as a result of being involved with WikiLeaks. There's no basis for this. And there's just a very heartbreaking -- we reached out to the Rich family and his parents wrote this -- you cry when you read it -- op-ed talking about how much more difficult this has made their lives, and the nightmare that they are waking up to close to a year after their son's death as people continue to really cynically exploit this death. And so, everybody should read it and judge for themselves whether you want to inflict this kind of pain on people who are already suffering.
MITCHELL: And briefly, Nick, Fox News has now, interestingly, said that they are taking down their story suggesting this conspiracy, and Sean Hannity, who was pushing it, has said he will not be broadcasting about it anymore. Nick?
NICHOLAS CONFESSORE: Well, Sean Hannity still owes an apology to the Rich family. I mean, he's peddled this absurd theory for days, if not longer. It casts my mind back to the Vince Foster conspiracy theories under former president Clinton, where a poor man who suffered badly, was made into the object of a fantasia for political purposes. This is a transparent effort to refocus attention away from President Trump and onto the DNC leaks. It's terrible it's happening.
