Kroll’s Death on W Street shares revelations about Seth Rich and the conspiracy theories surrounding his death.

“Death on W Street,” the new book released this week by ProPublica journalist Andy Kroll, contains revelations about Seth Rich’s murder and the proliferation of right-wing conspiracy theories surrounding it.

Why it matters: The tragic death of the 27-year-old DNC employee in 2016 in Bloomingdale was initially just a local story of a fatal robbery.

• But it turned into baseless conspiracies that Rich was killed for leaking DNC emails to WikiLeaks.

Here are four takeaways from the book:

1. This is the most complete look at Seth Rich’s life, including interviews with his family, friends and colleagues.
2. A D.C. police officer undermines a murder investigation by accessing the case file and leaking details of a potential witness.
3. Deborah Sines, the veteran federal prosecutor who worked on the case, regrets not being able to bring it to a conclusion.
4. There are inside details about Fox News’ misreporting, specifically a May 2017 story that focused more on the conspiracy theories surrounding WikiLeaks than on Rich’s life. The scandal resulted in a seven-figure settlement between the network and Rich’s parents.

Kuneit spoke with Kroll about “Death on W Street.” Here’s what he had to say.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

As you write in the book, you actually knew Seth Rich before the murder. You two were from the Midwest with mutual friends and bumped into each other at parties and events around D.C. Was delving into this story a personal rollercoaster for you?

It was a personal roller coaster. It was unlike any story I had done in almost 15 years of journalism. The first thing I felt wasn’t the classic journalistic impulse of “Oh man, that’s a great story.” The first thing I felt was, “Oh man, this is just a terrible tragedy” that happened to someone I knew and had a lot of mutual friends with.

What was the moment when the Seth Rich story started to spiral out of control?

• I would point this point to August 2016. I would put it very specifically in an interview that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gave to a Dutch radio station. By this point, there was a conspiracy buzz about Seth Rich on the internet. That noise was there. But it was not a phenomenon. It really wasn’t until Julian Assange mentioned Seth’s name and hinted in a really subtle way that Seth was the source of the leaked DNC emails released by WikiLeaks, not Russian-linked hackers as cyber security experts said, and the US intelligence community would he continued to say.

How did you get Seth Rich’s family to open up?

• I told them that Seth and I had these things in common here in DC, that I played on this soccer team on the weekends that Seth also played on. There was a kind of personal connection. I also told them that I was not there for a quick, short account of just one small part of this whole amazing saga. I tried to convey to them that I wanted to do something deeper.

What was one important element you wanted to get across in this book?

• I call this political moment we’re living in right now, the golden age of conspiracy theories. It’s never been easier to broadcast a conspiracy theory to the masses. If you hit the right algorithm on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Tiktok, you can reach millions of people in 15 minutes.

Has there ever been a Washington story like this?

• Yes and no. I am writing for a federal prosecutor named Deborah Sines. Deborah Sines worked for several years on the Seth Rich murder investigation. (I think she came close to finding out who did it, but couldn’t make it to the finish line, something I know haunts her to this day.) But before that case, she was involved in another case that DC- area people will recognize – the case of Chandra Levy, a young woman and political activist in Washington who was killed while jogging through Rock Creek Park. Levy’s case became a spectacle, but I don’t think it ever reached the same viral scale. In the case of Seth Rich, this speculation was much stronger and spread much faster.

Join Kroll for a discussion about “A Death on W Street” on September 13 at 7:00 PM at Politics and Prose on Connecticut Avenue, NW