Authored by José Niño via Headline USA,
Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn, has thrown a fresh spotlight on one of Washington’s most stubborn cold cases.
On July 7, 2026, the Tennessee Republican posted on X that he had formally pressed FBI Director Kash Patel to surrender every document the bureau holds on the 2016 killing of DNC staffer Seth Rich.
“I have called for @FBIDirectorKash to release all records related to the death of Seth Rich,” Burchett wrote.
His press office added, “Today, I sent a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel asking for the release of all records related to the death of Seth Rich. The American people deserve answers.”
The letter itself, dated on Tuesday, opens plainly.
“I write to request the release of all Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) records related to the death of Seth Rich,” Burchett states.
He then leans on the White House, urging, “Given the Administration’s commitment to transparency, I strongly urge the full release of these records, as permitted by law.”
Rich, 27, was shot and killed while walking home in Washington during the early morning hours of July 10, 2016.
Police treated the case as a botched robbery, and it stays unsolved.
Rich’s death later fueled a viral theory that he leaked DNC emails to WikiLeaks and was silenced for it.
Burchett’s demand follows years of FOIA warfare waged by attorney Ty Clevenger on behalf of plaintiff Brian Huddleston. The FBI first claimed it held no relevant files, then conceded it possessed more than 20,000 pages of potentially relevant material, Rich’s work laptop, and an image of his personal one.
According to Radar, this week Clevenger said a government lawyer told him he would soon receive confirmation that several hundred more Rich pages had surfaced inside a previously concealed room at FBI headquarters—the same unmapped SCIF where “burn bags” of Russia-probe files marked for destruction were reportedly found.
That connection remains Clevenger’s account. The FBI has not confirmed it, and the separate burn-bags report never established that Rich records were among those files.