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.
Since I seem to be the only one interested in Lurita Doan now that Bush has apparently refused to fire her for clear Hatch Act violations, I thought I’d point out the interesting tidbit that shows up in a profile of Scott Bloch, the guy in charge of Office of Special Counsel, the office that carries out Hatch Act violations that Bush studiously ignores.
Meanwhile, the Doan matter is breeding some ironies.
DOJ dumped another stash of emails while I was at YKos. Unlike the other late-in-the-scandal email dumps, this one doesn’t consist primarily of emails listed on Kyle Sampson’s list of withheld emails. These are new, previously unidentified emails. That’s not surprising, necessarily, since this dump comes from the Deputy Attorney General’s office, not the Attorney General’s office (where Sampson worked).
TPMM reports that there is a non-public hearing on whether the plea bargain hearings for Tommy Kontiagiannis will be unsealed.
Tomorrow morning, three judges of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appealswill gather in a courtroom inside an elegant 104-year-old building inPasadena for an extraordinary hearing involving one of theco-conspirators in the Randy “Duke†Cunningham bribery scandal.
The court hearing will be closed to everyone – the public, the newsmedia, the defense attorneys
The smart lawyers who (I think) didn’t attend YKos have already posted some really important things on the FISA debacle this weekend. Go here, here, here, and here. Oh, and here’s one from a smart lawyer who was at YKos. But the short version is that Bush now has even more rights to wiretap than what he was known to have had under the secret programs that he instituted after 9/11,
I’m sitting here with Kagro X, wating for Glenn Greenwald to interview Anthony Romero. I suspect the FISA bill will be a topic of hot conversation.
Meanwhile, I wanted to point to the “clarification” given by the guy whom Congress wants to give complete power to decide whom to wiretap and whether those wiretap targets are in the US or not.
As I understand it, we’re still waiting for “the letter” from DOJ that will tell us what we already know–these people are a bunch of sophists.
While we’re waiting, though, this is the most detailed account of the letter from DNI Mike McConnell (as I understand it, Specter said on Wolf Blitzer that he still expects a letter from DOJ):
I’m madly cleaning the house (trust me, a very rare event chez emptywheel) in some kind of mad guilt for leaving mr. e-dub and McC alone again while I’m in Chicago at YKos. So I thought it a good time for a last post until I get to Chicago tomorrow mid-day (well, you know how promises like that go).
I’m hoping I’ll get to put more faces to names among our readers
Hey, Scottish Haggis!?!?!? What happened to that letter from the White House you promised us?
According to RawStory, it’s still in the mail. Or maybe it’s not coming after all.
The White House has refused to comply with a Republican senator’srequest for information about Alberto Gonzales’s conflicting testimonyon a secret surveillance program by a 12 p.m.
It has been over 50 days since Scott Bloch, the head of the Office of Special Counsel, sent Bush a letter advising that Lurita Doan be disciplined severely for her violations of the Hatch Act. Yet there she is, still in charge of the government’s credit cards as the Administrator of the GSA.
If Doan weren’t a Bush appointee, her fate would be clear–she would have been fired fifty days ago.
What is it with news outlets and the who, what, why, when, where of briefings? The Hill, in its description of Specter’s 18 hour deadline for the Administration, names neither all the people who briefed Specter (it reveals Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell was one of the briefers) nor all the people who got briefed (“other Senators,” Specter says).