DALLAS _ A federal lawsuit accuses a Dallas-area financial adviser of orchestrating a "fake news" story with Fox News and the Trump White House to distract the public from the Russia investigation.
The suit filed Tuesday targets Ed Butowsky, a managing partner at Chapwood Investments LLC in Addison and an outspoken supporter of President Donald Trump. A private investigator alleges that Butowsky pressed him to buttress a false story by Fox News that blamed the 2016 leak of Democratic National Committee emails on a former campaign operative, even though the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russians were responsible.
According to the suit, Butowsky told the investigator that Trump had seen a draft of the Fox News story and wanted it to run "immediately."
"It's now all up to you," Butowsky allegedly texted the investigator. "But don't feel the pressure."
Earlier this year, Butowsky hired Rod Wheeler, a private investigator in Washington, D.C., to look into the June 2016 slaying of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee employee who was gunned down near his Washington home.
Butowsky has told The Dallas Morning News and other outlets that his intention was to help Rich's parents find closure. But Wheeler told a court that Butowsky had an agenda from the start _ to help Trump by distracting the public from an investigation into his campaign's possible collusion with Russia.
Wheeler argues in the suit that Butowsky was working with Fox News investigative reporter Malia Zimmerman to prove that Rich had released a trove of internal DNC emails to anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks before he died. The leak embarrassed the Hillary Clinton camp at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign.
"Butowsky and Zimmerman hoped that, if they could confirm that Seth Rich leaked the DNC emails to WikiLeaks, that would debunk reports the Russians were responsible for the DNC hacks," according to the suit. "In turn, Butowsky and Zimmerman hoped that, if they could shift the blame for the DNC hacks from the Russians to Seth Rich, this would undermine reports of collusion between Russia and the Trump Administration."
Butowsky wasn't immediately available for comment Tuesday, but he denied many of Wheeler's allegations to NPR, which first reported on the suit.
For one, Butowsky told NPR that he was kidding about Trump's involvement.
Wheeler's complaint focuses on a May 16 story by Zimmerman that Fox News retracted a few days later. The story quoted an unnamed source with the FBI who said Rich had sent more than 44,000 internal DNC emails to WikiLeaks.
But Zimmerman's story also relied on Wheeler, the only person quoted in the story by name. It attributed this quote to Wheeler: "My investigation up to this point shows there was some degree of email exchange between Seth Rich and WikiLeaks."
Wheeler claims in his suit that Fox News made up the quote and that he reached out to Butowsky to demand an explanation.
"Butowsky stated that the quotes were included because that is the way the President wanted the article," the lawsuit reads.
Wheeler described a meeting with Butowsky and Sean Spicer on April 20 _ a month before the Fox News story ran _ to inform the White House about the Seth Rich investigation.
Spicer, the former White House spokesman, confirmed to NPR that he had met with the men but denied that the president had been involved with the Fox News story.
"Ed's been a longtime supporter of the president and asked to meet to catch up," Spicer told NPR.
Meanwhile, Fox News is fighting Wheeler's claim that its reporter made up quotes, but the network did not address allegations that the White House had played a role in pushing the story.
"The accusation that FoxNews.com published Malia Zimmerman's story to help detract from coverage of the Russia collusion issue is completely erroneous," Fox News president Jay Wallace said in a prepared statement. "The retraction of this story is still being investigated internally and we have no evidence that Rod Wheeler was misquoted by Zimmerman."
