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.
I know, I know. The indictment against Dickie Scruggs looks bad for Dickie (though not, I keep emphasizing, Zach Scruggs, whose indictment given the evidence mystifies me). But I can’t help but notice a few details from the short form of Judge Lackey’s tell all (I’ll look up the long form after I meet my damn deadline today).
How nice of Andy Card to call Karl Rove on his bullshit claim that the Democrats pushed the Iraq war before the 2002 elections.
Karl Rove asserted on the Charlie Rose show recently that it wasCongress that pushed the Bush administration into war with Iraq. “The administration was opposed†to voting for a war resolution in the fall of 2002, Rove claimed.
Whooboy. It must be Dukestir day. Seth Hettena reports that Judge Burns just signed off on Wilkes’ subpoenas.
No wonder Judge Burns is pissed. Carolyn Delaney, the federalprosecutor in Sacramento who was given the task of investigating thepre-trial leak in the Brent Wilkes case, has filed a declarationindicating what steps she failed to take to find out the nothing shedidn’t bother to learn.
Here’s what Delaney says:
After reviewing the foregoing materials, I concludedthat
I’m still trying to sort through what it might mean that, after signing an unlikely plea agreement with the government, Duke Cunningham briber Tommy K has continued to engage in mortgage fraud, at the expense of the company most deeply buried in the shitpile, Washington Mutual (WaMu).
But let’s start with the description John Michael’s lawyers gave of Tommy K’s method.
Kontogiannis would have a loan application prepared in the name of a
Mr. emptywheel and I have a running joke about “English Day”–where your dog, for one day only out of his entire life, can speak and understand English. What would we learn in that one day, we speculate, when McCaffrey the MilleniaLab could tell us precisely what he was thinking?
Which gives me another cool idea–“Source Day”–where for one day, we can see all of the sources that journalists use and consider credible.
Tommy K says he shouldn’t go to jail because he has a bad ticker (h/t chrisc). But it sounds like going to jail in the first place may be the least of his worries. According to a filing submitted yesterday, it appears that John Michael’s earlier allegations were correct, and that Tommy K violated his plea agreement by continuing his bank fraud after the plea deal.
(4) During the pre-trial proceedings of
Lotus is right–the indictment against Dickie Scruggs is pretty damning. Here’s the bit everyone is keying on, from a conversation between Timothy Balducci and Judge Lackey:
“my relationship with Dick [Scruggs] is such that he and I can talk very private [sic] about these kinds of matters and I have the fullest confidence that if the court, you know, is inclined to rule …
Perhaps it was just a confluence of events that convinced Trent now was the time to quit.
After Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott (R-MS) announced his resignation this week, it was widely speculatedthat Lott was quitting in order to dodge Senate ethics standards thattake effect next year. The new rules require senators to wait two yearsbefore entering “the lucrative world†of lobbying Congress.
Any speculation on whether Trent knew this was coming down when he resigned the other day?
ProminentMississippi trial attorney Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, the brother-in-lawof outgoing GOP Sen. Trent Lott, was indicted by a federal grand juryWednesday on charges that he and four other men tried to bribe aMississippi state court judge.
According to the 13-page indictment, Scruggs and three otherattorneys — including Lott’s nephew Zach — attempted to bribeMississippi Third Circuit Court Judge
McConnell doesn’t want you to know, no doubt fearing there will be the same kind of firestorm when we learn who has been schmoozing him as there was when we learned who was schmoozing Jello Jay Rockefeller. Thankfully, a Federal Judge thinks we ought to know this information before Congress passes its amendment to FISA (h/t Mad Dog for the heads up).
The Director of National Intelligence must quickly release documentsrelating to