July 4, 2018

It’s a Tough July 4th for Patriots This Year

Mother Jones; J. Scott Applewhite/AP

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Last night I wrote about Imran Awan, a Capitol Hill IT specialist who got caught up in a senseless “lock him up!” Twitter jihad from Donald Trump. Did this put Awan in personal danger? There’s no way to know, but it certainly might have.

Now here’s Marcy Wheeler, who has been reporting on mass surveillance and civil liberties since the Bush administration. To her own shock, last year she came across some information about Russian meddling in the 2016 election that she felt she had to pass along to the FBI:

[One] reason I’m disclosing this now is to put a human face to the danger in which the House Republicans are putting other people who, like me, provided information about the Russian attack on the US to the government.

….My risk isn’t going to go away — indeed, going public like this will surely exacerbate it. That’s to be expected, given the players involved. But I’m a public figure. If something happens to me — if someone releases stolen information about me or knocks me off tomorrow — everyone will now know why and who likely did it. That affords me a small bit of protection. There are undoubtedly numerous other witnesses who have taken similar risks to share information with the government who aren’t public figures. The Republicans’ ceaseless effort to find out more details about people who’ve shared information with the government puts those people in serious jeopardy.

….This investigation is not, primarily, an investigation into Donald Trump. It’s an investigation into people who attacked the United States. It’s time Republicans started acting like that matters.

Here’s a bit of Twitter commentary:

This is what Devin Nunes and his merry band of Trump fanatics are doing. It’s both repugnant and insanely reckless.

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

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