Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s sudden interest in the 2016 murder of a Democratic National Committee staffer in Bloomingdale was a sham, according to the report released on Thursday by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Seth Rich was fatally shot in the early morning hours of July 10, 2016. Shortly thereafter, his death was seized upon by online conspiracy theorists who sought to connect his still-unsolved murder to the DNC emails released by Wikileaks. If Rich were to have been the source of the emails, the unfounded claims went, that would exonerate Russia and quash a narrative of the country colluding with the Trump campaign.

Assange himself fanned the flames, implying without evidence on multiple occasions that Rich may have been the source of the emails and even offering a $20,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of Rich’s killer. As the Mueller report states, these public statements were “apparently designed to obscure the source of the materials that WikiLeaks was releasing.” As Assange was attempting to pin the blame on Rich, he was also in communication with his actual source for the purloined emails—Russian intelligence, per the report.

“After the U.S. intelligence community publicly announced its assessment that Russia was behind the hacking operation, Assange continued to deny that the Clinton materials released by WikiLeaks had come from Russian hacking,” the report says. “According to media reports, Assange told a U.S. congressman that the DNC hack was an ‘inside job,’ and purported to have “physical proof that Russians did not give materials to Assange.”

Rich’s grieving family has said time and again that these false theories are deeply hurtful. One family member told DCist that learning about a new conspiracy theory was like “having a semi come up and t-bone you in the intersection when you think you’re doing fine. It catches you so off guard that you don’t just pause, you step backwards.” On the first anniversary of Rich’s death, his family released a statement pleading that people “please cease using Seth as a political football in predetermined partisan narratives. The continual push of false and inaccurate information about Seth’s death, along with the harassment of Seth’s friends, family and co-workers, hurts those who were closest to Seth, and does nothing to bring justice to his killers.”

Aaron Rich, Seth’s brother, reacted to the Mueller report in a statement: “The special counsel has now provided hard facts that demonstrate this conspiracy is false. I hope that the people who pushed, fueled, spread, ran headlines, articles, interviews, talk and opinion shows, or in any way used my family’s tragedy to advance their political agendas—despite our pleas that what they were saying was not based on any facts—will take responsibility for the unimaginable pain they have caused us. We will continue to pursue justice for Seth’s murderers, as well as those who used his murder to advance their personal or political agendas by advancing false conspiracy theories.”

At least one of the prominent conspiracy theorists, Jack Burkman, appears to have moved on from his peddling of Rich conspiracies. Now, he’s teamed up with Jacob Wohl, who Deadspin writer Dave McKenna recently described as “slimy beyond his 21 years,” for a slew of disastrous press conferences trying to falsely smear Mueller.

But stories that tied Rich to Wikileaks continued to appear in media outlets. After a lawsuit, The Washington Times in October retracted an op-ed about Rich filled with statements “that we now believe to be false,” the newspaper said. The suit is ongoing against America First Media Group, its founder, and Ed Butowsky, a cable news contributor who stands accused of concocting and purveying theories about Rich’s death in an attempt to help the president.

While Fox News retracted its version of the story a week after publication in May 2017 (and the source says in a lawsuit that the quotes were made up), local affiliate Fox 5’s story remains online to this day.

This story has been updated with a comment from Aaron Rich.