Marcy Wheeler doesn’t want to hear your complaints about Merrick Garland. She has her own. But she doesn’t want to hear yours. Not yet.
Why? Because it’s time to save democracy.
The publisher of the essential Emptywheel.net and a renowned national security and civil liberties reporter for decades, Marcy Wheeler joined us this week to unspool the “Ball of Thread” that has led us to the point where a party that is embracing fascism has almost even odds of taking over all three branches of our government.
No one follows the legal machinations of Trump’s legal mire more rigorously than Marcy. And she does it without ever losing track of the context that brought us to this point. Most importantly, she makes the case for the rationality that Trump, Putin and all their authoritarian friends are aiming to destroy.
Because this episode is so jammed packed with detail that may have been familiar to you at one point but has been lost in the flood of MAGA shit we’re forced to endure, I’ve littered the transcript with links to her site so you can dig in deeper.
Catch up on all the episodes of “How are you feeling about democracy?” here. Special thanks to members of this Patreon for sponsoring and sharing this podcast. If you want to support what we’re doing, please join the earlyworm society – free or paid, your support matters.
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TRANSCRIPT
Jason Sattler: You wrote this week, "One of the many reasons I'm focused on the Hunter Biden story is that it actually proves the continuity of that story of Russian influence that Democrats have failed to tell."
Can you give us the Wikipedia intro into the story you wish Democrats were telling?
Marcy Wheeler: You have this continuity between 2016, Vladimir Putin helps Trump get elected... 2019, 2018, 2019, Russian-allied entities are pushing dirt on Hunter Biden to get to Joe Biden, including an attempt to frame Joe Biden with bribery. And then 2024, we're still dealing with this. This is what drove impeachment.
About Hunter Biden... The investigation into Hunter Biden, at least substantially, was driven by 1) the laptop. We still don't know the backstory to the laptop, but my suspicion is that the IRS and the FBI sat there and did nothing as Hunter Biden's digital life was absolutely pwned by people who may have ties to Russian networks, and also GOP ratf*ckers. 2) It was driven by Rudy Giuliani's information operation, in which we know he was soliciting help from Russian spies and other people who were doing Russia's bidding. 3) We now know that Alexander Smirnov, who has ties to Russian intelligence going back going back over a decade was pushing that same line, possibly in conjunction with Andrei Derkach, who was the Russian spy that Rudy Giuliani went and met with in December 2019 to get dirt on Hunter Biden.
And at least according to Alexander Smirnov, there were other aspects attacking Hunter Biden that his Russian intelligence sources, who have only gotten more senior, have been pushing directly in connection with Trump's coordination with Russia to basically deliver Ukraine on a silver platter to Putin. So that's the continuity that we're looking at.
Jason Sattler: Your reporting seems to show that the Hunter Biden impeachment is much more of a scandal than anything Hunter Biden did.
Marcy Wheeler: Absolutely. I read the Scott Brady transcript in October, November of last year.
Jason Sattler: That's the US attorney who Bill Barr asked to look at the material Rudy Giuliani had gathered about Hunter Biden?
Marcy Wheeler: Yeah. And I started screaming.
We've known that Bill Barr set up this side channel. Jerry Nadler actually did a really great job of trying to find details of it in advance, so did American Oversight. They did some FOIAs that are what Scott Brady used to prepare himself for this interview.
But as I was reading the interview, I was like, this is far worse than we know. Because Scott Brady called up the FBI guy in Ukraine and said, "Can you talk to the prosecutor general and see if they have dirt on Hunter Biden?"
He appears to have checked all the places where the oligarchs Rudy was sidling up to are also being investigated. So, he appears to have checked in on the Dmytro Firtash investigations. Did that one get shut down because Rudy was asking for help? He appears to have checked in on the Igor Kolomoisky investigation, which shortly thereafter led to criminal charges.
This is the crazy thing: he called up Jeffrey Berman...
Jason Sattler: That's the former US attorney for the Southern District of New York who Barr fired at Trump's request?
Marcy Wheeler: Yeah. And said, Jeffrey Berman, you're wrong about what you think about Rudy and Lev Parnas. Even while, according to his own testimony, he didn't have subpoena power. He was mostly going after what Rudy told him.
So that's one scandal, which is that Bill Barr, while Rudy was being criminally investigated, shut down any investigation into when Rudy flew and met with Andrii Derkach to get dirt on Hunter Biden. He moved that. SDNY (United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ) naturally should have investigated it. He took that out of their hands, moved it someplace else so they could investigate it and then gave him this way to deal dirt on Donald Trump's opponent without Rudy suffering any legal exposure in doing so.
For example, Rudy Giuliani did an interview with Scott Brady, back in January 2020 in the middle of impeachment. Right? This is while impeachment is going on, Rudy Giuliani is feeding this garbage to Scott Brady. And that 302, the interview with Scott Brady, was never given to SDNY so they could use it in their criminal investigation of Rudy Giuliani.
So basically, Bill Barr shuts down the investigation into Rudy Giuliani, and then uses Rudy Giuliani's dirt from Russian spies as a way to frame Joe Biden. And he does this in the middle of an impeachment, partly because, you Donald Trump said to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, "Can you work with Bill Barr? Can you work with Rudy Giuliani to investigate Joe Biden?"
This was the scandal of impeachment. And there's this moment in Scott Brady's testimony where he's like, "Oh, we had no idea what was going on with impeachment," which just defies belief.
And then there are two things that make this still crazier, which need more investigation and won't be investigated by David Weiss...
Jason Sattler: And David Weiss is the U S attorney who is appointed by Trump and who Joe Biden kept on to investigate his son?
Marcy Wheeler: Yeah. One of those things is that, at least according to Chuck Grassley, in December of 2019, DoJ shut down an investigation into Mykola Zlochevsky, the head of Burisma. That investigation was started in 2016 when Joe Biden was vice president. So it was started when Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma. Barrack Obama's DoJ was investigating Burisma while Hunter Biden was working for them. Like that's the opposite of corruption.
Bill Barr shuts down that investigation in the middle of impeachment. Remember Donald Trump's impeachment defense was, "I think It important to investigate potential corruption at Burisma." He shut down investigation into Burisma while that was happening.
There are all sorts of questions about the Hunter Biden laptop, how it was packaged up. There's good reason to believe that Russian networks had a role in it. How it was shared with the FBI, and then Rudy Giuliani, we all know that that's scandalous. But it was originally obtained on a money laundering subpoena. The investigation wasn't money laundering, it was tax. So, there's another investigation somewhere in the money laundering.
And there's a three day gap, right? So, FBI gets the laptop on December 9th, 2019. They don't get a warrant until December 13th, 2019. But if you ask the blind computer repairman, people at the FBI access laptop on December 9th, 2019. So already you've got a Fourth Amendment violation. They were accessing the laptop before they actually had a warrant. Crazy stuff.
But then they get the warrant on December 13th, 2019. And the next day, Will Levi -- who is Bill Barr's chief of staff, who is the son of the guy who tried to fix DoJ after Nixon, but is kind of Nixonesque... He's perfect for Bill Barr... So Will Levi texts Bill Barr on his personal phone and says, "Laptop on its way to you." I can't prove that that's Hunter Biden's laptop, but it's awfully curious that Bill Barr, who still to this day is like, "Oh, I think we should have looked more at the Hunter Biden laptop," was sent a laptop the day after there was a warrant obtained for the laptop that was shared with the FBI.
And there, there was a lot of discussion about John Durham getting a copy of it. So there's a good reason to suspect at least that Bill Barr shared the laptop with John Durham, so John Durham could conduct an investigation into into Joe Biden. There's good reason to suspect that that Bill Barr himself, him and John Durham, met with people who were later named Russian agents.
This is the story that I hope comes out by the election, because what it shows is that Bill Barr, you know... There's this crazy notion that Donald Trump in a second term would turn DoJ into his personal plaything. And it's like, are you nuts? Did you not see Bill Barr?
Because Bill Barr did all of that. Like he shut down multiple criminal investigations into Trump and his allies, including an ongoing investigation into Roger Stone that disappeared. We still don't know what happened with that, but that one was an investigation into whether into CFA, into whether, into whether Trump's ratfucker conspired with Russian, with the GRU, in a hack-and-leak case. My suspicion is it was Macron, not Trump, but nevertheless...
He did the Durham investigation. There was no crime. He just said, "John Durham, you're going to go look for a crime involving Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Go!" And, you know, five year investigation found nothing, embarrassing, made stuff up, fabricated stuff. And then this other side channel, right, where you're fabricating stuff to feed into the Hunter Biden investigation.
And that's just the start of it.
The other thing that's part of the impeachment is Tony Bobulinski, who we are learning and we may learn next week because he's going to have a hearing which is another emBarrassing James Comer hearing...
Jason Sattler: This is Hunter Biden's old business partner, allegedly.
Marcy Wheeler: Not even partner. They signed a deal and Hunter Biden, partly because Bobulinski wanted to take over... It was Bobulinski selling the Biden name, not Hunter Biden. That was the entire point.
Hunter Biden and his actual partner, his long term partner, had concerns about Bobulinski's Russian ties. Bobulinski has ties to Viktor Vekselberg, which we Barrely scratched the surf of a surface of in his deposition. But next week, maybe we'll learn more about that. And this dude, Tony Bobulinski, who's like the Fox News hero, goes from being Trump's personal guest at the debate in October 2020... The next day he waltzes into the FBI and says, "I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you about Joe Biden being bribed by the Chinese."
He says things that Bobulinski now claims he didn't say, such as that he personally witnessed the Chinese businessmen giving Hunter Biden these enormous diamonds. Diamonds turned out to be worthless, by the way. And then, according to Cassidy Hutchinson there's this hush-hush meeting at a Georgia rally where Bobulinski meets with Mark Meadows and Mark Meadows hands Bobulinski something. So that looks like suborning perjury from somebody.
This is the irony that under Bill Barr, David Weiss was sort of like, "This is all garbage, I'm just not going to deal with it." Literally now, by all appearances, David Weiss said, "Make me special counsel so I can go investigate this bribery allegation against Joe Biden." And that's what extended the investigation into Hunter Biden. That's what led to all the felony counts. That's what led to this extension of the investigation into Hunter Biden, so that you're going to have two trials in June, maybe. And then he discovers that it was all a frame job. Then he discovers it's yet more Russian disinformation.
Hunter Biden's attorneys submitted a filing the other day that they were like, "You're doing the bidding of Russian intelligence. If this was Russian disinformation, by extending this investigation, you're doing exactly what Russian spooks wanted."
Jason Sattler: The question I wanted to ask you is Rudy Giuliani really this good at getting away with crimes? Is Donald Trump this good at getting away from crimes?
It seems like the answer here is that Bill Barr is the one who's really good at getting away with with crimes. Basically his biggest accomplishment in life is helping Republicans get away with crimes.
Am I right? Is Bill Barr the through-line that makes this all work?
Marcy Wheeler: Bill Barr is definitely a big part of the through-line.
The reason, by the way, or one big reason why Rudy Giuliani wasn't prosecuted for getting Marie Yovanovitch fired, right?
That's the part that Bill Barr didn't shut down. That's the part that Geoffrey Berman made sure wasn't shut down when he was fired back in June 2020. When they seized Rudy Giuliani's phones -- the phones going back to 2018, 2019, the phones that would have shown that he was basically in the employ of Ukrainians who were trying to get Marie Yovanovitch fired, who did get Marie Yovanovitch fired -- those phones were corrupted.
So, that's independent of Bill Barr. But that is something that is not very well known. And it's something that Robert Costello, his ex-attorney, revealed in the, in the Ruby Freeman case that. So we don't know how they became corrupted. Costello blames the FBI. You can't even rule that out, right? This is the New York field office, Rudy Giuliani, can't rule that out.
Jason Sattler: Which connects back to 2016, how all of a sudden Jim Comey feels the pressure to come out and do the, the memo about the Wiener laptop right before the election. The through-lines... You can only really describe it, as you have, as the "Ball of Thread."
Marcy Wheeler: Yeah. It is all one continuity. Honestly, not only is Bill Barr an important, he's not the only thing... But he is an important part of the through-line. Rob Rosenstein, too, right? I was writing a piece on on the delay of turning over the records in the Michael Cohen case to Alvin Bragg for the trial that was supposed to start in a week. But some of that's Rod Rosenstein. This was started before Bill Barr got there. And Bill Barr's PR is absolutely spectacular, and Rod Rosenstein's is even better.
Jason Sattler: Because he kind of presents himself as someone who checked Donald Trump . Whereas Barr didn't even take that path until after January Sixth. Am I right about that?
Marcy Wheeler: Barr claims to have taken that path in late November, 2020, right? Right after, by the way, right after the Mike Flynn pardon.
My suspicion is there were legal problems with the Mike Flynn pardon, irrespective of the fact that Sidney Powell was already doing work for Donald Trump. So you've got a conflict there. Sidney Powell, with Bill Barr, set up a debate attack on Joe Biden in the first debate using documents that got altered in Bill Barr's, this is another Bill Barr intervention, Jeffrey Jensen investigation, which remember was his excuse to back out of the Mike Flynn case. There were documents that had dates added to them that were wrong. DoJ says they were just Post-it notes. Whatever. I don't, in one case, believe that. But the dates were wrong, and Sidney Powell used it to say Joe Biden started the investigation into Mike Flynn, rather than somebody at ODNI. So, you know, incredible stuff.
New York Times, not the people who are currently reporting, but New York Times did a really good piece in real time in 2020 on the Scott Brady side channel. Only one or two other people wrote about the altered documents, even though DoJ admitted it. The Tony Bobulinski thing got some press when Cassidy Hutchinson wrote her book, but it's not being, you know, it should be the focus if you're going to call Tony Bobulinski to be your witness... Granted, Tony Bobulinski is now the most credible of all of the impeachment witnesses because everyone else is already in jail. But you should be talking about the fact that one reason Hunter Biden got rid of Tony Bobulinski is because he worried about Tony Bobulinski's ties to Russian dodgy money.
Jason Sattler: The Ball of Thread here is that the Republicans and the Russians are working together to undermine rule of law. And Donald Trump has completely sold the Republican Party on this process. There's no immune system left that's stopping them from just abandoning democracy and going straight forward into authoritarianism. Am I getting that?
Marcy Wheeler: Yeah. The Ukraine vote will be quite interesting in the House because for a lot of Republicans, they really do get it. Like the argument that delivering Ukraine to Putin is itself a problem, but it's also a problem because it'll make, you know, make China more ambitious with Taiwan. That's, I think, true. If you sign up to Trump's decision of delivering Ukraine to Putin, you are basically signing the death knell on what's left of American hegemony in the world. And Republicans like to think of themselves as powerful. They just can't separate themselves from Donald Trump.
It's a variety of things. I've talked about the different motives.
For some, it's like individual ambition. For some, like I think Scott Perry has become a true believer. For some, it's fear. It's terror, right? They're afraid that their wife is going to be the one who has to sleep with a gun because their wife is going to be the one getting death threats next.
So it's a spectrum.
And then you continue to see people like Ken Buck, who's incredibly conservative. Ken Buck can't stand it anymore, and he's gonna leave with a week's notice. So the people who would stand up to it in the past, are checking out, the Liz Cheneys of the world, and so it's unclear yet how that's going to affect the election. I think, you know, the polling we're seeing on the election right now, I think assumes that the GOP is going to be the size of the GOP in 2020.
I think the Georgia results, especially the primary results in Georgia, where you don't have crossover voting and where Nikki Haley continued to get people to come out and vote for her even after she stepped down... I think the Georgia results show that there really is a 15 percent of the Republican Party that has very serious qualms about voting for Donald Trump.
Those people, the Ken Bucks of the world, may actually make the difference in November. We don't know. But where that line is for Republicans, whether they want to join donald trump in authoritarianism most are okay with that. I think where they might not be okay is In the process ceding the US role in the world.
Jason Sattler: Mitch McConnell made the best argument for funding Ukraine.
(Mitch McConnell speech "Russian Defeat In Ukraine In Direct U.S. Interest" from February 2024 )
Jason Sattler: Were you surprised at all by Mitch McConnell, endorsing Trump? I know we're not supposed to be surprised by people anymore. But Trump had attacked his wife more than a dozen times using racist terms. What do you think Mitch McConnell's ambition is here?
Marcy Wheeler: Well, I think he wants to get to the end of his term. I think he wants to get to November while retaining power. And the way to do that was to endorse Trump.
I think that the most interesting people in the Senate to me are Collins and Murkowski who both endorsed Nikki Haley at the last minute when there was no upside for them.
I don't know what's going to happen. I am cautiously optimistic. Right. But.
But there's a lot of things... Like Bibi Netanyahu, right? Bibi Netanyahu has teamed with Republicans repeatedly to undermine usually it was Barrack Obama, including, and I, you know, talk about this through-line, the first time that Trump colluded with Russia... We know about when Mike Flynn got on the phone and said, hold off on responding to sanctions, but the first time he did was when Mike Flynn got on the phone at Jared Kushner's behest and said, "Hey, Russia, can you help us undermine Obama's position, which would allow a vote on sanctions against Israel for illegal settlements in the West Bank." That's the first time.
Jason Sattler: That was December of 2016?
Marcy Wheeler: Yeah. And once that happened, then the Russians had something over Trump and always have. And it's tied to Israel.
The other day Chuck Schumer is like, well, you know, Bibi's in the way, which is true, of course. And Mitch McConnell and everyone else said, "Oh, my gosh, Chuck Schumer is interfering in the other elections of other people."
And I'm like, guys, let's go back and talk about the first time that Trump colluded with Russia. Or let's talk about the time in 2015 where you guys brought in Bibi to undermine the Iran deal, which Trump's reversal on it has made the world less safe. There's a long-standing practice in which Bibi and the Republicans undermine Democrats. That's another crazy thing that's going on.
But honestly, that may give Joe Biden a way to finally fix his Gaza policy at the same time. Because Israel wants to get rid of Bibi too.
Jason Sattler: The far right is the theme there. The far right of Israel that is who Bibi has clung to for his last barnacling of power. The worst of the worst, people who have been rejected in mainstream American politics for decades, are in Bibi's Cabinet. And it's the far right, obviously in the form of Putin. Is there an Alliance going on here of the worst leaders in the world, or is it just a convenient aligning against Joe Biden, who actually believes in democracy?
Marcy Wheeler: There are two things.
One is -- and this is a post that I haven't written in my Ball of Thread yet -- the way in which corruption is a, is a process, is a tool.
The reason Bibi is horrible is because he has allied himself with the far right. The reason he's had to ally himself with the far right is because he's corrupt, and he's doing anything to cling to power because he knows the day that he leaves power, he's going to jail. Same thing as Trump. Victor Orban is the same. You acquire power through corruption and you are desperate to retain it because without that you're going to be in a lot of trouble. And Orban in particular and, and the U. S. started beating up on Orban yesterday, which is, I think it's the 25th anniversary of, of Hungary joining NATO. They're like, "Look, you can't bad mouth the United States or democracy if you want to be part of NATO anymore." Which was really as interesting as what's going on with Bibi.
Is there an alliance, you know, we haven't talked about the Saudis. Speaking of corruption, speaking of the 2 billion that they invested with Jared Kushner.
Jason Sattler: Plus golf.
Marcy Wheeler: Yeah, plus the golf tournaments, which is laundering money to Donald... We do not know -- this is insane -- but it is literally true that we do not know if Donald Trump is an agent of the Saudis, is basically an employee of the Saudi government. We don't know that. No one is asking that question, and it's a very basic question, and no one is asking it.
So, yes, there is an alliance.
Bibi, the Saudis, the Emiratis, Russia, Hungary, and definitely joined by the Chinese. They are all better off with Donald Trump in power, and the reason even China would vote for that is because they are better off with Donald Trump in power. And the reason even China would vote for that is because as soon as Donald Trump gets into power, he's going to dismantle NATO. And the reason that China and Russia have been allies for a while or have been growing close is because they just don't want rule of law. They don't want a Western order. They want to be able to do whatever they do in their country and not have anyone frowning at them. That is one of the many reasons why Donald Trump is better for them.
The United States has been polarized for a long time. Where I'm going with the Ball of Thread is Donald Trump over time -- it was like a boiling frog thing -- he took Republican partisanship and turned it into polarization. Now there are two truths in America. There's the MAGA truth and there's reality.
And frankly, I think that even the left has gotten impatient with democracy. One of the reasons I get so impatient with people who make claims about what Merrick Garland did in the January 6th investigation, without any basis in fact is just what separates you from QAnon if you just make stuff up about the January 6th investigation without, without bothering to check? Much less adhering to those beliefs, even after I can point to here's what happened to Rudy Giuliani's phones in 2021... You have to deal with the fact that Rudy Giuliani's phones were seized and searched in a way such that as soon as they were done, anybody else who had a warrant got them. So it took nine months off the investigation. No one besides me talks about it.
Jason Sattler: And I think that's really the choice. If you believe in democracy, you have two choices right now. Either you're really mad at Merrick Garland or you follow Marcy Wheeler, because you are really -- there are exceptions and you see reports coming out once in a while -- but you're the only one who follows this closely. You're the only one who actually knows what happened in early 2021. And many times you seem like the only one who remembers the COVID actually made things quite difficult to prosecute and hold hearings in for a big bulk of that beginning period of time.
Also, just the amount of brainpower it takes to keep track of the Russian names that you've just listed off here. I feel like I have been reading Brothers Karamazov, that I have to kind of like even keeping track of that. It's very very challenging to kind of keep this all in your head.
So is your frustration with the people who fixate on criticizing Merrick Garland that they're being lazy. Or do you think that we're all drowning in the zone of shit? That kind of thing that Steve Bannon talks about where they overwhelm us with disinformation so there's no way we can possibly keep track of what's going on.
Is it even possible to tell this whole complex Ball of Thread story about Trump and Russia influence without, say, Barack Obama buying a half an hour on network television and explaining it in the simplest possible terms?
Marcy Wheeler: I have my criticisms of Merrick Garland. I really do. Like I have written more about the special counsel investigations than anybody. And I'm critical of the way he has managed special counsel investigations. We may learn that he screwed up the Jack Smith investigation too. The same people who are like, "Oh, Robert Hur was a big mistake" -- he was -- are just working on blind faith that Jack Smith is God, right? That doesn't make any sense. But, you know, just stop complaining about Merrick Garland, even if you're right, which you're not. But even if you're right every moment that you are complaining about Merrick Garland, because he's not going to be replaced before November, is time you would be better spending talking about Bill Barr, talking about the successful attempt to frame Joe Biden, talking about Rudy Giuliani, talking about Trump's continued requests of Russia for help to win the election.
You have a choice.
Jason Sattler: You know, sacrifice of Ukraine. That's what I feel like everybody should be talking about all the time.
Marcy Wheeler: What are you going to talk about?
You can talk about Merrick Garland, which is going to only serve fascism.
I wish the people, the TV lawyers in 2021 and 2022 would have at least set the expectation, which is investigations take a long time. Reviews of lawyers phones take a long time. Breaking phones that are encrypted takes a long time. All these things take a long time.
There's so many people whose expectation is that you can jail somebody tomorrow. Not in the United States, you can't. Sorry, you know, that, that's, that's the reality. It is the fact that everyone else charged with obstruction just as Trump is on January 6th... With three exceptions, everyone else charged only with obstruction without a tie to the militias also got pre-trial release.
So, you know, these people are like, "Oh, Donald, you know, Donald Trump only got pre trial release because blah, blah, blah."
I'm like, "No, there are 300 other people just like him."
Donald Trump is being treated like 300 other people in the same kind of investigation. Anyway, I wish they had done expectation settings.
But here we are in 2024. And in 2024, you have a choice. You talk about Merrick Garland, serve fascism. You talk about Donald Trump's corruption. Get Joe Biden reelected. And then we can talk about replacing Merrick Garland.
To my mind, it's a stark choice at this point. You talk about Donald Trump's corruption. You don't talk about Merrick Garland because there's no point at this point. Like, you know, you're just whining and oftentimes you're wrong.
Marcy Wheeler: And so how much is it throwing shit at the wall? One of the things that Donald Trump is very good at doing is destroying rationality. And that's the point. If you talk about what's in it for Russia, that's a big part of the point is destroying truth. Right? So he's going to continue telling lies about whether or not he won the election.
He's leading in the polls yet with the RNC, he's setting up to tell lies again. That should really raise a lot of hackles for people that he's setting up to lie rather than to win the election.
Jason Sattler: And canceling the mail-in voting program.
Marcy Wheeler: And canceling the mail-in voting program. And hiring Christina Bobb. Literally, the first thing he did with the RNC, besides turning into his piggy bank, was ensure that his election is gonna be about lying rather than winning the election.
And so, one is that degrades truth, the notion that there can be truth, and social media has done that as well. But the other is just like the, the, and this is something that I think most journalists don't understand. His job is not to make truth claims. His job is to throw a bunch of shit out there. Get you to repeat it. In the spectacular form that he releases it and that sucks all the air out of discussion. It gets all the attention that he wants. You distract attention away from his corruption.
So can you tell the story about Donald Trump? You can repeat it over and over again. It' s about discipline. You need to have your 3 stories and you need to keep telling those 3 stories between now and the election. I think that that can be successful.
I think right now it's more important to try and understand how "The Bubble" -- the Fox News Bubble, the Newsmax Bubble -- how that is going to affect the election than polling. Because one of the reasons why Joe Biden's approval ratings aren't higher is because the 35 percent of the country that ingests Fox News believes that Joe Biden is as corrupt as Donald Trump. And you can't blame them because Fox News is a propaganda channel.
The reason Ron DeSantis never got any traction in the primary is because Fox News spent all their time talking about Hunter Biden's dick pics and not Ron DeSantis. Even though the Murdochs would have happily replaced Donald Trump, they weren't talking about the primary. They were talking about Hunter Biden's dick pics. Like exclusively. For days on end. That's all they would talk about. And so that has led people to believe that Joe Biden is corrupt, which is ridiculous. But nevertheless, you have to deal with the fact that that 35 percent of the country has literally been brainwashed. But every time Republicans try and step out of that Bubble, most recently with Katie Britt, right? And James Comer does it all the time, and it's hilarious. Like, every time they try and step out of the Bubble, they get smashed because they think that they can tell lies and get away with it. Like, Katie Britt had been telling the same lies about that sex trafficking victim for months, and hadn't been called on it. And then she did the State of the Union response, told a lie, and all of a sudden, boom, she gets busted for it. Henceforward, she's always going to be tainted with this horrible lie about her sex trafficking victim.
That happens over and over again. Outside that Bubble, Republicans look like cranks.
Donald Trump, as soon as he wasn't on a friendly network, he started saying he was going to cut Social Security, you know, and then Jason Miller ,ran him back to Breitbart and had Breitbart tell another lie for him. And that's the point. Donald Trump is one of the best showmen of all time, right? But even Donald Trump can't handle anything that's even remotely adversarial anymore because the Bubble is so comfortable.
Jason Sattler: And I think it even benefits him not being on Twitter. No one sees the stuff that he's posting all the time. It used to be breaking news whenever he tweeted. Now these 10 paragraph tweets only make sense if you follow him every day. They just kind of land in this puddle of the Bubble that you describe.
I also think that there may be something going on where the only people who respond to polls are these absolute freaks, who are either in the Bubble or people who are just so anti-society they want to troll the pollsters...
Marcy Wheeler: Yeah, I'm in favor of people taking the poll seriously, not because I think they're entirely accurate. As I said, I think they're over measuring... They are they are assuming the Republican Party is bigger than it is. But take them seriously, act as if Joe Biden is three points down, because if you do, you're going to stop talking about what a terrible person Merrick Garland is.
Jason Sattler: We know in Michigan, as a former Michigander now and Irelander, the polls...
Marcy Wheeler: I'm still a Michigan voter. So I'm still, yeah, I'll be a Michigan voter until I move back.
Jason Sattler: The polls underestimated him both in 2016 and 2020. In Michigan. He ended up barely winning in 2016, barely losing in 2020, North Carolina was closer .
So you got to take the poll seriously because they, they, they probably are better for him, at least in Michigan and Pennsylvania than they, they seem to be.
Marcy Wheeler: Yep. Not only am I a Michigan voter, I'm a Kent County voter. Did you see Nikki Haley had her best County in Kent County?
You and I know this because we're Michiganders. But Trump lost the election, not in Detroit, which is where he told the lies, but in Kent County, which is Grand Rapids, which is the DeVos territory which is a young city. Like Chicago East, sort of. It's a growing city. It's very young. It used to be quite conservative and the city itself has become very Democratic. But Trump lost the election in Kent County and he's still not getting voters out in Kent.
Jason Sattler: One last point... I think we've drilled into almost everything I wanted to cover. You anticipated most of my questions. But pardons...
I keep making my joke about how watching Trump do a rally after January 6th is like watching bin Laden teach a flight school. But there's something even more offensive about the way he's abused pardons almost with no coverage. And you're one of the very few people talking about this.
He's now vowed to pardon everyone involved in the insurrection, presumably as a way to solicit more potential violence from his followers.
What do you think have been Trump's worst pardon abuses and, and why do they matter so much?
Marcy Wheeler: Roger Stone. Easily Roger Stone and pardoning war criminals is also an abuse.
But let me take a step back. There was some kind of clemency found in Donald Trump's desk drawer that allegedly has a tie to a French president believed to be Macron. And that's why I think that the ongoing part of the Mueller investigation was actually about Macron and not about the 2016 hack-and-leak. Because we know that Roger, we know that Jack Posobiec was involved in that. We know that people in Roger Stone's immediate vicinity were the ones who leaked the files that the GRU stole from Macron. They were trying to create enough noise such that Le Pen would do better than Macron.
But point is that Roger Stone... People don't know this. His trial was one step in an ongoing investigation. They used the trial to get certain things on the record. They appear to have used the trial to get follow on testimony from Andrew Miller, who knew who Roger Stone met with at the RNC in July 2016, who gave Stone advance notice that the the hack-and-leak was going to be the DNC emails. So it was an investigative step.
And it used the WikiLeaks stuff as a way to collect all that. One of the things they did, for example, was get Randy Credico on the record about Roger Stone no later than nine days after the election in 2016, and I believe back in October 2016, working with WikiLeaks to arrange a pardon for Julian Assange. It was supposed to be an ongoing investigation. And then in February and April, when it moves to the next steps, to the sentencing, that's when Bill Barr comes in. And Bill Barr just did outrageous things. Bill Barr said, we don't have to do a sentencing enhanced enhancement for Roger Stone along with Enrique Tarrio putting together an Instagram post of the judge, Amy Berman Jackson, with crosshairs on it. We don't have to do a sentencing enhancement for Roger Stone engaging in political violence with the Proud Boys, right? This is in 2020.
I think Bill Barr was like, “I'm going to minimize the punishment on all these guys so you don't have to pardon them. I'm going to try and find some way to overturn the Mike Flynn. I'm going to minimize the Roger Stone. I'm going to take Paul Manafort out of jail and let him sit at home.”
And Trump, nevertheless pardoned all these people.
And the Roger Stone one is important partly because they know that Roger Stone kept Trump in the loop of what he was doing with Russia. Roger Stone, the FBI believed and found a lot of evidence had advanced notice of the Guccifer 2. 0 persona, they believe. They believe that he had advanced notice of some of the other personas that were releasing the files. They also had a lot of evidence that Roger Stone got on the phone over and over 26 times and talked to Trump about it and got Trump's buy in for all of this, buy in for the pardon for Julian Assange, buy in for doing these things to get the advance notice of the files. And had Roger Stone gone to prison he might have told those stories. Instead, he didn't go to prison. He was given a pardon.
He went to Mar-a-Lago to thank Trump for the pardon. That same day, he and Trump talked about January 6th at that thank you meeting at Mar a Lago. That is the day when Trump started planning to march on the Capitol on January 6th.
Roger Stone was used to prove the obstruction case against some Proud Boys. He was definitely involved in all these Proud Boys things. Jack Smith appears likely to name the Proud Boys as, quasi co-conspirators of Donald Trump if we ever get a trial. And Roger Stone was the linchpin of all of that. At the same time, of course, Roger Stone was talking about assassinating either Jerry Nadler or Eric Swalwell and also Aaron Zielinski, who had prosecuted him.
So you see this throughput where, first of all, Donald Trump gets away with actually having a role in the 2016 stuff, possibly amounting to conspiracy. He gets away with it by pardoning Stone, Manafort, and Flynn, gets away with that. But then those people, Flynn and, and Stone, most especially, lead right into the political violence of January 6th.
Donald Trump is offering these pardons. I suspect there are actual individuals, including Tarrio, that he is trying to buy the silence of. Just like he did with with Roger Stone and Paul Manafort.
These offers of pardons are outrageous, not just because he's saying they're "hostages." These offers of pardons are how he buys silence. And my suspicion , honestly, is that if the Supreme Court says that official acts can be crimes, including pardons exchanged as part of a bribe, then I wouldn't be surprised if Jack Smith came back with some charges or things that would otherwise be official acts. But now we have to wait until June to see that.
But Trump is alive today politically by trading pardons for silence. And it was for him the neatest thing ever, because he's always been able to threaten people and avoid legal consequences. If people haven't seen the Brian Butler interview that Caitlin Collins did on CNN, because it got buried and it's really good.
(Clip from the Brian Butler interview)
Marcy Wheeler: And he's describing how being a lifelong Trump employee how people tried to silence him, how people tried to say, "Trump is still thinking of you," the same way they did with Cassidy Hutchinson.
Pardons are just the extra sauce that make him able to pull that off, that make people lie their way through criminal trials when in any normal situation you would see people flipping left and right. And that's why they didn't flip in the Russia investigation and that's why fewer people haven't flipped in the January 6th investigation. And it probably you know 20 years from now if we still exist, we're going to look back and learn how much Jack Smith was hampered being unable to get real cooperation…
Jason Sattler: And Robert Mueller as well.
Marcy Wheeler: Yeah, I mean we know that to be a fact with Robert Mueller. People say Robert Mueller didn't find a conspiracy. Of course, he didn't find a conspiracy, but that's not because a conspiracy didn't happen. It's because Paul Manafort and Roger Stone both refused to cooperate.
Jason Sattler: Marcy, because of you, I know not to waste my time being mad at Merrick Garland. I know to be mad at the people who are very, very, very, very good at getting away with crimes. That would be Donald Trump, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, the whole gang and their pal Vladimir Putin. And then you know, the interesting thing about Roger Stone is he stretches back in history to Nixon, the Brooks Brothers riot. It's hard to, it's hard to kind of contain this Ball of Thread that you're unwinding, but thank you so much for doing it.
Marcy Wheeler: Thanks for having me on. It was great to talk to you.
"Destroying Rationality" with Marcy Wheeler