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.
The answer to the most pressing Trump document theft story from yesterday — why did a former White House aide now working for Trump’s PAC have classified materials on her laptop — may answer the most pressing outstanding question from the Special Master review — who compiled a document with messages from a book author, a religious leader, and a pollster with classified documents?
Jeff Gerth spends 23,000 words lecturing other journalists they need to be more transparent. But he doesn’t reveal that one of the key pieces of evidence in his narrative that Hillary pushed a “conspiracy theory” that “there was a secret alliance” between Trump and Russia was a Russian intelligence product, a product the reliability of which not even spooks managed by John Ratcliffe would authenticate.