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.
It has now taken longer to hold Trump accountable than it took to get Richard Nixon to resign after the Watergate break-in. Even assuming those were comparable timelines, a number of things distinguish the January 6 investigation from the far less complex Watergate one, starting with the fact that, unlike Nixon, Trump is not known to have wiretapped himself.
The biggest secret that Beryl Howell brings with her, as she ends her tenure as Chief Judge of DC, is whether the closure of the investigation into a suspected $10 million donation from Egypt to Trump in September 2016 was political interference from Bill Barr or a legitimate investigative dead end.
What we’ve learned from Tucker Carlson’s effort to lie about January 6 is that Tucker is the one lying about what happened. Before Tucker’s propaganda gave reason to respond, DOJ, had actually been withholding some of the most damning video from journalists. Tucker’s propaganda effort has provided yet another glimpse of how many close calls the police managed to avert on January 6.