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.
Over and over, Trump 2.0 has taken aggressive steps based off bullshit, much of it coming from Elon or other far right propagandists. And over and over, Trump’s top people keep creating problems for themselves as they try to adjust the (legal) narrative to match their evolving understanding of the facts.
In his response to Judge Dale Ho’s questions about the scope of a judge’s authority on a Rule 48(a) dismissal, Emil Bove engages in his own little Twitter Files game, presenting quotes from Danielle Sassoon and Hagan Scotten and making transparently false claims about what those quotes mean. And he does so while claiming their ethical decision to resign rather than do something unethical amounted to misconduct.
A memo written by an Acting Assistant Administrator of Global Health at USAID puts Senators who were placated by Rubio’s past public reassurances about life-saving aide on notice: They were lying to you. And while they were lying to you, food and medicine was spoiling and people were dying.