D.C. lobbyist Jack Burkman, who claims Seth Rich was murdered by the DNC, has been hospitalized after being shot several times and run over by an SUV on Tuesday.
Kevin Doherty, a special agent with the Department of Energy, has been charged by police for the attempted murder of Burkman – who had been busy investigating Seth Rich case.
Doherty, 46, was charged Monday with Use of a Firearm in the Commission of a Felony and two counts of Malicious Wounding, according to the Arlington, Va, Co. police department.
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Washingtonpost.com reports: “It’s a horror story,” Burkman, of Arlington, said in an interview Monday afternoon. He is still recovering after being shot several times and run over by an SUV last Tuesday.
Doherty briefly worked for Burkman’s Profiling Project, which was formed to build a psychological portrait of Rich’s likely killer. Burkman was offering a six-figure reward for information on the slaying of Rich, which police have determined was most likely a random robbery but many conservatives have claimed was part of a political conspiracy.
Burkman said Doherty presented an impressive resume — ex-Marine, ex-special agent — and did good work. But tension quickly developed. In Burkman’s view, Doherty began speaking to reporters out of turn and tried to take over the investigation.
Doherty’s military background could not immediately be confirmed.
“He became somewhat angry because he thought the Profiling Project belonged to him,” Burkman said. In July, he cut Doherty loose and sent him a cease and desist letter.
“I just figured the matter was closed,” Burkman said. “But what happened is, I guess, he was simmering and simmering and simmering.”
In February, Burkman had moved on to a new investigation. He had put out a call for whistleblowers in the FBI, offering $25,000 for any information exposing wrongdoing in the presidential election.
Soon, he thought he had hit the jackpot. A man reached out, describing himself as a senior FBI official with information about then-agency deputy director Andrew McCabe, who at the time was under an internal investigation for his handling of probes into Hillary Clinton. (On Friday, McCabe was fired, after an internal investigation found he had dealt improperly with the media and then lied about it. He has denied wrongdoing.)
His source dropped off two packets of emails under a cone in a garage at the Marriott in Rosslyn, Burkman said.
“I thought I had the story of the decade,” Burkman recalled. His wife, Susan, was more skeptical. She warned him that she didn’t think he was dealing with the FBI. But, he said, the emails “looked super real,” containing details about the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The last drop was supposed to be “the big one” — the full inspector general report on McCabe, which still has not been released.
Instead, when Burkman bent over to pull the papers out from under the cone, he was shot in the buttocks and thigh. As he ran out of the garage with his dachshund in his arms, he was hit by an SUV.
He said the car backed up to hit him again.
“It looked like he was coming to kill me,” Burkman said. But he said a woman watching from a window of the hotel screamed. A guard came running and the SUV sped off, Burkman said.
Police would not comment on Burkman’s account of the incident.
But Burkman said it was by authorities that Doherty was tracked down through the SUV. Burkman said police came to him in the hospital with a photo of his former employee. He didn’t even recognize Doherty at first. When he heard his name, he was shocked.
Burkman had already met with police in January, when a masked man approached his house in an SUV and hit him in the face with pepper spray. No charges have been filed in that incident.
“We went through a thousand possibilities,” Burkman said. “Kevin was not on the list.”
Doherty does not yet have a lawyer in the assault case and is being held without bond, prosecutors said.
Girum Tesfaye, who represented Doherty on a drunken driving charge last year, also expressed surprise.
“From what I know of him it would definitely be out of character,” Tesfaye said.
Burkman said he is now traveling with security. But the experience has not soured him on conspiracy theories. His profiling project concluded that Rich was shot by a hired killer, and he wonders if Doherty was working for someone else.
He has not given up on investigating Rich’s death, whose family just sued Fox News for publishing a false story linking their son to WikiLeaks.
“This in my mind makes the whole Seth story stranger and stranger,” Burkman said.
