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.
Democrats are trying to figure out what Kash Patel believed, in October 2022, that he had criminal exposure in an Espionage Act investigation. And Chuck Grassley wants to use the fact that the FBI stalled the investigation into Donald Trump for two months as an excuse to refuse that.
One of two lawsuits to prevent the FBI from retaliating against Agents who conducted the January 6 investigation asserts, as part of an aggressive mandamus request, that a DOJ led by Trump’s defense attorneys, “do[es] not have discretion to redefine the truth of January 6, 2021” in order to claim the work of FBI agents authorized by judges is illegal.
Trump’s DOJ is involved in a cover-up as we speak, a cover-up designed to hide how the aspiring FBI Director was complicit in Trump’s efforts to retain classified documents in his insecure basement. But Democrats have not done what they need to do to impose a cost for that cover-up.