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.
In the Sussmann case, Judge Christopher Cooper has, overly optimistically, I think, set up a framework (primarily by excluding discussion about the accuracy of the information) that he thinks will guide all these decisions. But even within that framework, the rules of evidence will still apply.
And that will leave significant parts of Durham’s conspiracy theory out of the trial.
During the six weeks that Judge Analisa Torres has been considering Project Veritas’ demand to claw back materials obtained in SDNY’s investigation of Ashley Biden’s allegedly stolen diary, Special Master Barbara Jones has gotten almost through the process of handing those materials over to SDNY.
Yesterday, Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that he will review 38 Fusion emails to test the claims of privilege the Democrats and Rodney Joffe made over them. But because of procedural issues, it’s possible Durham will win his privilege battle but lose his ability to use those emails at the Michael Sussmann trial.
Oath Keeper Todd Wilson’s guilty plea brings us very close to a point where the networked conspiracy behind January 6 is going to coalesce such that it’s no longer about discrete militia groups, but it’s about people sitting in hotel rooms blocks away from the direct assault on the Capitol.
The United States learned, at great cost, about how intently Russia was attempting to sow divisions in the United States by pushing certain campaign attacks. Even under Trump’s control, the government put in place efforts to prevent that from happening again.
And then Chad Wolf ensured those efforts would fail to identify Russia’s repeat performance of its 2016 attacks.