Marcy Wheeler is an independent journalist writing about national security and civil liberties. She writes as emptywheel at her eponymous blog, publishes at outlets including Vice, Motherboard, the Nation, the Atlantic, Al Jazeera, and appears frequently on television and radio. She is the author of Anatomy of Deceit, a primer on the CIA leak investigation, and liveblogged the Scooter Libby trial.
Marcy has a PhD from the University of Michigan, where she researched the “feuilleton,” a short conversational newspaper form that has proven important in times of heightened censorship. Before and after her time in academics, Marcy provided documentation consulting for corporations in the auto, tech, and energy industries. She lives with her spouse in Grand Rapids, MI.
Barely one month after firing two of the men responsible for overseeing the money the United States has provided Ukraine to stave off Russia, Trump is launched false claims about that spending.
Until someone confesses differently, we need to treat Elon Musk’s role in DOGE as exclusively one of propaganda, spinning false tales of corruption from decontextualized files Musk doesn’t understand.
After eight years of Republican insistence that one should never predicate an investigation solely on oppo research, and less than two weeks after SDNY closed a criminal investigation into Project Veritas based on suspicion they committed crimes in pursuit of political hit jobs, DOJ was pressuring prosecutors to open an investigation relying primarily on a Project Veritas video.
Kash Patel serves as the alpha and omega of the grievance narrative Trump used to train Republicans to hate rule of law.
Like me, Judge Dale Ho is really curious why Emil Bove claimed to have written consent to dismiss Eric Adams’ prosecution without prejudice, but did not submit it to the docket.
When a bunch of Democratic Attorneys General latched onto a legal theory to hold Elon Musk accountable for dismantling the Federal government, the White House decided that Musk doesn’t actually run DOGE.
Because John Barrasso has unquestionably parrotted already discredited propaganda, he unwittingly went on Fox News and cheered the shutdown of programs protecting Christian minorities around the world and combatting migration to the US at its source.
Elon Musk’s DOGE boys and Project 2025 bureaucrats are discovering precisely what Paul Bremer learned two decades ago: When you deliberately destroy bureaucracy, you also destroy the ability to rebuild bureaucracy.
There are a number of documents Judge Dale Ho might demand that Emil Bove submit to the docket before dismissing the case against Eric Adams, including the notes from a January 31 meeting that Bove confiscated. Remarkably, though, Bove didn’t even submit the most obvious: Adams’ consent to dismissal without prejudice, which Bove negotiated without the involvement of SDNY.
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