Rim Country Gazette: Informant Marcy Wheeler: 'Mueller sitting on a lot'

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Informant Marcy Wheeler: 'Mueller sitting on a lot'

Marcy Wheeler’s story about her agonizing decision to unmask a source and talk to the FBI has been told both here at Daily Kos and at mainstream media outlets such as The Washington Post.

In a nutshell, Wheeler, a journalist and staunch privacy advocate who writes a national security blog called emptywheel, revealed a source to the FBI after her conscience compelled her to do so.

Wheeler says she received a text shortly after Donald Trump was elected that piqued her interest, and then some.

Wrote WaPo:

Her blog post centers on a text message she says she got from the source on Nov. 9, 2016 — about 14 hours after the polls closed — predicting that Michael Flynn, who would be Trump’s appointee for national security adviser, would be meeting with “Team Al-Assad” within 48 hours. Russia has been perhaps the Assad regime’s staunchest ally.

As she noted: “The substance of the text — that the Trump team started focusing on Syria right after the election — has been corroborated and tied to their discussions with Russia at least twice since then.”

Wheeler won’t say when she went to the FBI other than that it was in 2017. In December 2017, Flynn flipped, pleading guilty to one count of lying to the FBI about his contact with the Russian government during the presidential transition; Trump had fired him in February.

In addition to the knowledge of her source’s inside information, Wheeler said, she had reason to believe that the source was involved with efforts to compromise her website and other communications. And perhaps most important, that he was involved in cyberattacks — past and future — that had done and could do real harm to innocent people.

In a new interview with Pod Save America, Wheeler elaborated, claiming that Mueller is “sitting on a lot” and that we’re bound to see some big plot twists before this is all over.

For instance, when asked if most of the information that’s bound to eventually become public is already out there, Wheeler indicated that there’s still plenty to be revealed:

“Well, my part’s going to be a surprise for virtually everyone, but some of what I know was in public. Some of what I went to the FBI with was, ‘Hey, look at this that’s public.’ I just was looking at it from a very different perspective than a lot of people. And that’s part of the core case, I think.

Again, the reason I went to the FBI is because this person played a significant role in the election attack, not because … he sent me a text 15 hours after the polls closed making it very clear he knew exactly what was going on inside the White House. And this is not a Republican and not somebody who has any ties to Trump. ...

“I assume it must be true that there are many witnesses like me who were witnesses to stuff that nobody knows about, who were watching people who no one’s paying attention to who were part of this, and so yeah, I suspect that that kind of case is going to be pretty surprising and pretty strong.

“I mean, I’ve said that I never talked to Peter Strzok, who is the FBI agent that Trump attacked in Helsinki today. He wasn’t anywhere near the testimony I gave to the FBI; I wasn’t actually speaking to the Mueller inquiry when I did, and I can point to things that, between what I told the FBI and what I found, you know, shortly thereafter lying out there in public, I can get right to Trump, and I assume that’s true by a number of means, and therefore … Mueller is sitting on a lot, and he, I think, is going to roll it out. And if today is any indication, I mean, finally we’ve got Republicans saying this is beyond the pale, we cannot have a president subject himself to a hostile foreign power like Trump did today. I think we might see some momentum finally turning against Trump.”

When asked if the revelations in Mueller’s report will ultimately be jaw-dropping, like The Sixth Sense, or a disappointment, like The Village, Wheeler said this:

“I think there are some big plot twists. I did a series some months ago when the questions that Mueller wants Trump to answer came out, and I laid it out. This is clear quid pro quo. They went to Trump and said, ‘We’ll help you. We want sanctions relief, we want Syria, throw in Ukraine, maybe we’ll throw in a Trump Tower.’ And that’s it; that is the basic equation we’re talking about.”