Marcy Wheeler's Blog

When I told my taxi driver I was in Dublin to go to a No Kings rally at the American Embassy, we had quite the chat. He came from a big Republican family, he explained, before he went on to catalogue how many of his relatives had been shot during the Easter Rising in 1916 and at which of the locations we were driving by.

No Kings rings a bit different here in Dublin.

According to the organizer, we had about 400 people — 100 more than they had in the summer — representing almost every state. Som...

Donald Trump’s weaponization of government against his adversaries is a catastrophic assault on rule of law.

But in those efforts, he continues to do things that may backfire. I’ve noted repeatedly how poorly he chooses the political martyrs he creates. Just the other day, for example, Tish James got rock star treatment when she introduced and endorsed Zohran Mamdani.

In addition, Trump is conducting his vengeance tour in such a ham-handed fashion that that one after another after another after...

On Nicole’s podcast today, I said that many of the criminal issues that will arise from Trump’s politicization of DOJ won’t be all that controversial at SCOTUS (and SCOTUS is least awful on criminal justice issues). But I said one area would likely break new ground: selective and vindictive prosecution.

Jim Comey’s prosecution — and that of everyone else Trump is pursuing — fits poorly in the existing precedents for selective and vindictive prosecution, even while they clearly are vindictive.

Pl...

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Link to Tim Miller interviewing Robby Roadsteamer

Link to ICE officer being an asshole to cops

The post Fridays with Nicole Sandler appeared first on emptywheel.

The John Bolton indictment is a substantive document. If the claims about classification levels stand up, it is as substantive as the indictment against Trump (though with less sensitive documents and none of the obstruction).

For each of 8 charged documents (each was charged twice, once for transmission and once for retention) it describes Bolton sending the information to one of his family members via an AOL account that got hacked by Iran, then keeping it such that it was found when the FBI s...

Sydney Reid, who was arrested in July after a tussle as she was filming an ICE arrest, was just acquitted by a jury.

This was a case that should never have been charged, one of at least dozens just like it. Pirro and her prosecutors have been damaged over and over in trying to bring it to trial.

First, three grand juries no-billed the case. Pirro charged it as a misdemeanor Information anyway.

Then, the government unsuccessfully tried to exclude evidence that damaged their case and the credibil...

The court filings submitted since Jim Comey’s arraignment have set the stage for several possible prosecutorial disasters.

After loaner AUSA Tyler Lemons made a transparent bid at the arraignment to slow Eastern District of Virginia’s rocket docket with both discovery and the invocation of the CIPA (Classified Information Procedurs Act) process, Judge Michael Nachmanoff,

Enforced a discovery deadline of Monday over prosecutors’ attempts to stallAdopted Comey’s preferred protective order, rejec...

No one has confessed they were wrong that JB Pritzker’s late August messaging was enough to stave off an invasion.

Shortly after Pritzker had that press conference on August 27, Trump announced he was going to invade New Orleans instead of Chicago, implying that he wanted to be invited to invade.

President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he may deploy federal troops to New Orleans next, not Chicago, and is waiting for governors to ask for help — a shift in his rhetoric about moving into maj...

Yesterday, French Prime Minister Sebastian Lecornu gave the speech of his life. Tomorrow, he’ll find out if it worked.

Something shifted in French politics, while Macron was off arm wrestling with Trump in Egypt. Lecornu, self-proclaimed Macron’s warrior monk earlier this week, claimed to be independent of Macron. And surprisingly enough, it might be true. Lecornu seemed to just maybe have broken with Macron, perhaps after being thrown to the wolves, then picked up and thrown at them again.

The ...

Congratulations to the memory of Charlie Kirk. Trump has, in his death, affirmed that Kirk is the same kind of person as his idol, inflammatory bigot Rush Limbaugh, whom Trump also awarded the Medal of Freedom.

To pay tribute to the event, the State Department yesterday announced another assault on free speech, identifying six purported visa holders who — it claims, but the underlying logic is worthy of conspiracy theorist Darren Beattie, currently the State Department head of Public Diplomacy —...