In May 2017, the Russian government and state-sponsored media began pushing a now-debunked conspiracy theory claiming that DNC employee Seth Rich was murdered for leaking internal documents to WikiLeaks. On May 16, RT (Russia Today) published a story repeating the discredited claims; on May 19, the Russian Embassy in Britain tweeted that Rich, not Russian hackers, had provided the material to WikiLeaks. On June 2, Sputnik published another “conspiratorial” piece featuring fringe allegations that “Rich’s death could have been part of a massive conspiracy” to elect Hillary Clinton in 2016. Later reporting revealed that Russian military intelligence (GRU) officers manipulated metadata in stolen DNC files before releasing them, in order to corroborate the conspiracy theory.