Emptywheel

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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 Motherboard, the New Republic, and 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 serves on the Advisory Committee for the House Fourth Amendment Caucus, is a senior fellow at GWU’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, and was declared an Internet Human Rights hero by AccessNow. Marcy has been blogging full time since 2007. She’s known for her live-blogging of the Scooter Libby trial, her discovery of the number of times Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded, and for reverse-engineering government surveillance years before it otherwise gets disclosed. 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. Marcy, her spouse, and June Bug the Terrorist FosterEx Dog recently moved to Ireland. Source

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Language English
Country United States of America
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Elon Musk Is the Election Cheat Harmeet Dhillon and Bill Essayli Claim to Be Hunting

| Emptywheel
by | Jun 15, 2026 | 2020 Presidential Election, 2024 Presidential Election, January 6 Insurrection | There was a weird phenomenon in several of the stories last week covering the FBI raid of a voting rights group in Ohio, first broken by MS-NOW. In a laudable effort to point out how the Trump administration’s hunt for election crimes is based on flimsy claims, they dutifully aired Democrats’ warnings that such fraud mostly doesn’t exist.
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Flailing: Two Lines of Testimony about Georgia Fort

| Emptywheel
by | Jun 13, 2026 | Don Lemon prosecution, Weaponized DOJ | Don Lemon and Georgia Fort have been fighting to get grand jury transcripts for four months, since February 13. They asked to accelerate briefing on the topic more than three months ago, on March 3. Starting more than two months ago, on April 10, their co-defendants commenced their own effort to get grand jury transcripts.
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Andrew Boutros’ Fraud Fraud Emergency

| Emptywheel
by | Jun 12, 2026 | Financial Fraud, Weaponized DOJ | When Andrew Boutros has dismissed the shoddy prosecutions of most Chicago defendants — such as Marimar Martinez or Paul Ivery or two of the Broadview 6 defendants — he has shown little urgency for the task. He has done so via filings submitted to the docket. Even in those cases, they have gotten dismissed within days.
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NYT's Titty Distraction - emptywheel

| Emptywheel
by | Jun 11, 2026 | Epstein | The name “Melania” does not show up in NYT’s 8,000-word piece claiming to explain the “White House freakout over the Epstein files.” Instead, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan give us tits, a bullshit claim that the White House was panicked about the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files primarily because a woman had claimed Trump abused a girl’s nipples until they hurt. There are other enormous gaps in this story.
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How DOJ Threw a Crock of Shit because Kat Abughazaleh Complained about Being Run Over

| Emptywheel
by | Jun 10, 2026 | Immigration, Weaponized DOJ | The headline issues disclosed in the Broadview 6 grand jury transcripts released yesterday show the abuse in the case was far more spectacular than made out in the hearing on the issue.
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The World Knows Trump’s Team is Not Qualified to Use FISA, Too

| Emptywheel
by | Jun 10, 2026 | FISA, Foreign Policy, Intelligence, State Department, Trump 2.0, Weaponized DOJ | I want to build on Marcy’s earlier post, to add another level of concern to everything she raised. Specifically, this: every single major ally with whom we have intelligence sharing agreements and every significant enemy who wants to thwart our intelligence efforts is paying attention, too. The latter group is licking their chops, and the former group is getting nervous.
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Trump’s Team Is Not Qualified to Use FISA

| Emptywheel
by | Jun 9, 2026 | FISA, Jim Comey prosecution, Letitia James Investigation, Weaponized DOJ | Back when Trump proposed Bill Pulte to serve as interim Director of National Intelligence, I argued that Democrats should draw a line in the sand. They were poised to provide just enough votes to authorize FISA 702, which expires on Friday. But the prospect that Pulte would preside over the program should be cause for Democrats to refuse to reauthorize FISA.
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NYT Details Todd Blanche’s Personal Involvement in 8647ing Jim Comey

| Emptywheel
by | Jun 8, 2026 | Weaponized DOJ | Devlin Barrett has a long story on the effort to prosecute Trump’s enemies (primarily the efforts in VA).
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DOJ Remains Panicked about So-Called “Duplicative” Jeffrey Epstein Files

| Emptywheel
by | Jun 7, 2026 | Epstein, Weaponized DOJ | To the extent anyone covered the Oversight Committee’s interview of Pam Bondi — the transcript of which was released on Thursday (see my Bluesky thread on it) — they focused on the extent to which Bondi said Todd Blanche was in charge. It’s true Blanche came up almost a hundred times. It’s true that Bondi’s invocation of Blanche (and Stan Woodward) gives Democrats reason to demand they sit for interviews.
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In Superseding SPLC Indictment, DOJ Confesses They Made a Big Mistake

| Emptywheel
Days after DOJ first indicted SPLC in April, I laid out how the indictment worked. I showed several problems with the indictment’s theory of deception and argued that DOJ might be trying to criminalize SPLC’s efforts to protect their informants from the far right extremist organizations they were targeting. After I posted it, several revelations made it clear the US Attorney involved, Kevin Davidson, had rushed his work, and in the process fucked up the indictment in several ways.
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Wheeler, Marcy

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