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.
Former FBI Supervisory Special Agent and current January 6 defendant Jared Wise believed that a CHP officer was out to get him on April 2, 2023. And actions he took as a result — getting out of his car to film the cop — ended up in a suppression motion.
The list of people against whom Trump has elicited threats is perhaps the best indication of what a second Trump term would look like.
JD Vance, by claiming that the decision by Twitter and Facebook to censor Hunter Biden’s dick pics in 2020 would justify the Vice President not certifying Joe Biden’s win, asserts that according to his own standarda, he and Trump cannot legitimately win this election, because they in fact asked tech companies to “censor” the stolen JD dossier.
Back in June, Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon argued that Trump had to be permitted to make false claims that stoke political violence as part of his campaign. That strategy has become painfully clear in recent days.
Nicole and I talked about Trump’s Chinese Bible.
The latest installment of Ball of Thread focuses on Bill Barr’s hatchet job on the Mueller investigation.
In a piece purporting to explain Elon Musk’s role in helping Trump get elected, NYT leaves out Musk’s jokes about assassination attempts against Kamala Harris and Trump’s hypocritical involvement in getting the JD Vance dossier suppressed.
Trump’s latest efforts to keep details of how he almost got his Vice President assassinated under wraps may well draw more attention to them.
My discussion with Harry Litman about Jack Smith’s immunity filing.
Russia’s 2016 intelligence operation and its aftermath may be the most successful intelligence operation in recent history, because Vladimir Putin has gotten Trump to believe that his KGB handler is hiding the proof he’s got of how weak Trump is.