Author Archive for: emptywheel
About emptywheel
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.
Entries by emptywheel
Dick Cheney’s Lawyer Spikes the Phone-Jamming Case
/55 Comments/in Law/by emptywheelMcClatchy has a long story out detailing how indictments for the New Hampshire phone-jamming case got stalled. The whole thing is worth reading. But I’m particularly intrigued by the role of Terry O’Donnell, who was apparently responsible for getting Tobin’s indictment stalled until after the 2004 election. That’s rather curious, since O’Donnell is actually Dick Cheney’s personal lawyer.
Why Is Dana So Touchy?
/27 Comments/in Press and Media, Unitary Executive/by emptywheelIn all fairness to Dana “Pig Missile” Perino, she probably doesn’t want to become the next Scottie McClellan, forced to say things from the podium while Dick Cheney is hiding his criminal ways behind those public statements. Still, Dana comes off very badly in yesterday’s attempt to explain why anonymous sources at the White House are saying one thing and she’s saying another.
Sub-Heading: White House Panics
/74 Comments/in Intelligence, Press and Media, Unitary Executive/by emptywheelThe White House has gone to the trouble of making the NYT correct their headline indicating that news of the involvement of Addington and Gonzales in discussions of the terror tapes differs from the story the White House was pitching–that Harriet Miers was the only one involved.
While the White House is correct that they never officially claimed that Harriet was the only one involved, someone has certainly been shopping that story for over a week. Which is why it behooves those who received that story to out their source, particularly if that person is in the White House.
Lawyering the Torture Tapes
/78 Comments/in Intelligence, Unitary Executive/by emptywheelYes, the NYT story tells us something we were safe to assume: that David Addington and Alberto Gonzales were involved in the torture tape destruction conversations. But I’m more interested in that news in light of the mounting evidence that Jose Rodriguez got legal advice that he could destroy the tapes in seeming isolation from all the discussions about the wisdom of destroying the tapes or even the explicit court orders regarding the torture tapes.
DiFi’s Amendment
/55 Comments/in Bingo, Unitary Executive/by emptywheelDiFi’s discussion of her amendment on immunity raises all sorts of interesting questions. Did the telecoms get oral authorizations to wiretap Americans, or were they all written? Did those authorizations specifically vest their authority in the President’s Article II power, rather than in the statutes governing wiretapping?
From what I can see in her discussion, though, her amendment offers one great advantage: it asks the FISA Court to review the program and rule on the limits of the President’s Article II power to wiretap. Oh–and of course she requires the one court against which Bush can’t invoke State Secrets to conduct this review.
Henry Gets Impatient
/33 Comments/in CIA Leak Case, Law/by emptywheelApparently, I’m not the only one who noticed that, since the time when Henry Waxman first asked Michael Mukasey to hand over the White House-related materials from the CIA Leak Case investigation, he has proven to be mighty responsive to requests from Congress when it involves covering up for the White House.