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.
Here’s a prediction of where the new Burris controversy is going: I suspect we’ll find out, in coming days, that while Burris did not donate directly to Blago, he never refused to bundle donations for Blago. I don’t know whether Burris actually did bundle donations, but I suspect we’ll learn that Burris has never refused to bundle donations.
You have probably heard of the shamelessly self professed “Toughest Sheriff in America”, Maricopa County Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. For years he has been making a PR spectacle of himself all the while running an unconstitutionally deplorable jail system, letting inmates die under tortuous conditions, and violating the civil rights and liberties of everybody in sight, especially minorities. The House Judiciary Committee has just issued a letter calling on Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to investigate allegations of misconduct by Arpaio. There are a lot of grounds for the action sought by HJC, lets look at them.
Remember that Office of Public Responsibility investigation that Congress requested, Bush squelched (by refusing the investigators clearance to do the investigation), but that, under Mukasey got reinstated? Apparently it came to the same conclusion everyone else already had–that the lawyering that went into Bush and Cheney’s justification of torture and warrantless wiretap was crap. The question is, did Michael Mukasey and Mark Filip succeed in their efforts to squelch the report?