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.
While we’re all awaiting the next mugshot of a high profile charged co-conspirator, the key to understanding how all the strands of Trump’s attempt to steal the election fit together may lie with lower profile Georgia bail bondsman, Scott Hall, who was released yesterday on bail himself. The David Bossie brother-in-law had ties not just to Jeffrey Clark and the Coffee County caper, but also apparently to the effort to pressure Ruby Freeman.
Thus far, Mark Meadows seems to have negotiated the various legal risks by only having to give as much testimony as required, delaying the time a grand jury locked him into a particular story. But unless he succeeds in getting the Georgia charges removed to federal court and dismissed, that approach may get far harder soon.
The two indictments implicating Kenneth Chesebro have brought new visibility to him, and his actions. The discovery of Chesebro monitoring Jones’ activities during the attack have made aspects of the coordination behind this attack visible to TV lawyers for the first time. But amid all that newfound visibility, it’s worth remembering that some people who carried out the attack knew to — and did — monitor all this in real time.
Back in February, Beryl Howell scoffed that the public could really understand what was going on in the investigation from reporting on which witnesses appeared before the grand jury. And until we learn what the 39 unidentified warrants provided to Trump in discovery are — in addition to the Xitter warrant about which there was a big fight — she’s right. We don’t know.