No one has mentioned the name Seth Rich on Fox News for several years, and for good reason. The tragically deceased Democratic National Committee staffer, whose unsolved murder fueled a vicious conspiracy theory linking him to the DNC hack during the 2016 election, was a fixation of Fox News coverage in 2017. That fixation endured until the network was forced to retract its reporting and sued by his surviving family.

According to the conspiracy theory, incubated by supporters of Donald Trump and covered relentlessly in right-wing media, Russia did not hack the DNC and send Hillary Clinton’s emails to Wikileaks, which then published a trove of those communications shortly before the 2016 election; Rich was the source of the leak, the baseless theory holds, and he was murdered as a result.

The 27-year-old was shot and killed in Washington D.C. in July 2016. The murder remains unsolved, but police have been clear: there is no evidence Rich was killed because he sent the hacked DNC emails to Wikileaks. His family, meanwhile, has pleaded that right-wing media stop pushing the alternate theory of his killing.

Fox News pushed the theory both in a report online and on the air, courtesy of hosts like Sean Hannity. The network ended up retracting that report, and was sued by the family of Seth Rich, which stated in a lawsuit that the reporting intentionally caused emotional distress.

The network reached a private settlement with Rich’s parents in 2020, reportedly to the tune of millions of dollars.

“We are pleased with the resolution of the claims and hope this enables Mr. and Mrs. Rich to find a small degree of peace and solace moving forward,” a Fox News spokesperson said at the time.

But then, on Monday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson revived that very same conspiracy theory.

During a segment that examined Hillary Clinton’s claims Russia hacked the DNC, Carlson said:

[Clinton] said Russia has engaged in cyberattacks on the United States, and that’s probably true in point of fact. But she was speaking about a specific ‘cyberattack’. She was talking about the Russians hacking the servers at the DNC. Democrats wasted three years of our lives telling us that, at ever-increasing volume. Here’s the interesting thing. It was not true. It has never been true. Vladimir Putin did not hack the DNC. There was never any evidence that the Russians hacked the DNC. Instead, the DNC emails were very clearly stolen from within the building, most likely by a Bernie Sanders supporter who wanted to show the world how Bernie Sanders was being shafted by the very same corrupt forces in Washington that later shafted Donald Trump. That was very obvious to anyone who was paying attention at the time. What’s interesting is that no one’s been punished for it.

What we do know is that Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation did indeed find Russia was behind the DNC hack. U.S. intelligence agencies concurred with that assessment.

Mueller indicted 12 Russian military officials in 2018 over the hack. When announcing the indictment, Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general under then-President Donald Trump, said the Russian officials hacked the DNC, another congressional campaign committee, and accessed the email accounts of Clinton campaign staffers:

The defendants accessed the email accounts of volunteers and employees of a U.S. presidential campaign, including the campaign chairman, starting in March 2016. They also hacked into the computer networks of a congressional campaign committee and a national political committee. The defendants covertly monitored the computers, implanted hundreds of files containing malicious computer code, and stole emails and other documents.

The theory that Rich was behind the DNC leak, and not Russia, has long been used as a way to absolve Russia of 2016 election meddling, which would, in turn, absolve Trump as the preferred presidential candidate of Vladimir Putin.

But the theory was always based on nothing. The consequences for promoting it were that of tormenting a grieving family. Fox News did the bare minimum by retracting its original Seth Rich reporting, ceasing to cover the story on air, and paying a settlement to Rich’s family.

When the network reached its settlement with the Rich family in 2020, the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple wrote that “Fox News had a gigantic moral obligation to the Riches in this case. Hannity’s actions alone would have led to his immediate dismissal from any ethical news outlet. Instead, he remains in his perch every night on Fox News.”

Two years later, and that moral obligation is out the window, as the Seth Rich conspiracy theory has been revived by another prime time Fox News host.