Ball of Thread

Donald Trump will never accept losing anything – whether an election or a bet. But that wouldn’t matter if he didn’t convince millions of Americans to make his grievances their own.  This Ball of Thread unwinds what made the pincer attack that overran the Capitol on January 6th possible. Donald Trump’s grievance narratives gave disaffected Americans meaning, and in that meaning, he convinced thousands of people to throw their lives away in his name.  The thing is, it’s all the same con. That con defeated the Russia investigation and weaponized the Department of Justice against his opponent. And when he lost in 2020, he unleashed it to unite fringe right-wing groups and mainstream Republicans in a shared revenge fantasy. Thus, he was able to raise a ragtag army to sack the nation’s Capitol briefly, and in the process, savagely battered hundreds of police officers and ended America’s tradition of a peaceful transfer of power. Though the attack ultimately failed by only delaying the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, the bets Trump and many of his biggest fans made on January 6, 2021 are now paying off in ways that were inconceivable on January 6, 2025.

In this bonus episode, Marcy saves reporters a lot of work by explaining more than a half dozen direct political interventions into Hunter’s prosecutions. The reporting on Hunter Biden’s pardon shows just how badly Ball of Thread is needed—especially the last two episodes on the blackmailing of Joe Biden and the packaging of Hunter. While the pardon story has died down and the former FBI informant who tried to frame the Bidens has now pled guilty, the Republicans in the House who kept this targeted abuse of power alive for the last two years have vowed to continue hounding the soon-to-be-former president’s family. One thing Ball of Thread has made clear is that whatever the right-wing media fixates on will be what Republicans in power fixate on. And House Republicans will need a perceived enemy to distract from the actual oversight they won’t be doing.

After Bill Barr buried the Mueller Report and went to work suffocating the remaining prosecutions in the Russia investigation, Donald Trump and his “lawyer,“ Rudy Giuliani, shifted their main narrative focus from Hillary Clinton to Hunter Biden—also with the help of Bill Barr. The first flailing attempts to smear Joe Biden with his son’s connections to a corrupt Ukrainian business resulted in Donald Trump’s impeachment and the arrests of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. But MAGA hit paydirt with the “discovery” of Hunter Biden’s “laptop,” which first appeared mysteriously right around the time of Trump’s first trial in the US Senate and then reappeared the following year, just in time to be the election year October Surprise. At first, the laptop, with its endless supply of digital proof of the depravity to which Hunter Biden had descended before he got sober the year before, didn’t work out the way John Podesta’s emails had. At first, journalists actually demanded proof the files were authentic and also tested whether they proved what Rudy Giuliani or NY Post claimed they did. But over the years, egged on by Fox News and enticed by the promise of easy sensation, they came to chase the dick pics because they were there, just as Murdoch’s propagandists had done.  And the process by which icky dick pics came to stand in for unsubstantiated claims that Joe Biden was corrupt sucked all the air out of DC reporting for years … and laid the groundwork for Trump’s reelection.  For the first time, Marcy Wheeler ties together the story of what is actually known about Hunter’s laptop(s) and hard drives and the baffling characters who got their hands on them. She explains how the shameless leaking of the private data of the son of a former vice president and future president to his father’s political opponents was never really treated as a crime. She also exposes how Trump’s plot succeeded in sucking all the air out of Joe Biden’s presidency and fueled problematic political prosecutions that haunt America and still twist our discourse today. This Ball of Thread also attempts to do what almost no one has. It shows how the press joined in an effort to dehumanize Joe Biden’s kid and, in the process, abdicated their primary job.  

What if the President of the United States was framed with the help of the Attorney General of the president he defeated, and nobody cared? In this Ball of Thread, Marcy Wheeler reveals how Donald Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Guiliani, spent more than a year trying to trade access to or leniency from the Department of Justice for dirt on Hunter Biden. And while that disgraceful abuse of power eventually erupted into Trump’s first impeachment, it essentially continued for another four years, only fading away after a key player in the conspiracy was indicted for feeding the FBI lies from Russian spies. It’s a story that only Marcy has told and will now likely fade into history. But the abuse of the Department of Justice as a plaything for Donald Trump to deploy against his perceived enemies will continue for at least the next four years.  

John Durham was given an impossible job.  Even before the Mueller Report was ready, Bill Barr hired the once-respected US Attorney to investigate how the investigation into the Trump Campaign’s ties to Russia started. After the Inspector General failed to find a conspiracy against Trump inside the FBI against Trump, Barr and Durham tried their best to invent one. They followed every available George Papadaopulus conspiracy, hoping to turn Hillary Clinton, a victim of the Russian attack on the 2016 elections, into the villain.  And that fumbling effort continued long after Trump was evicted from the White House.  This episode provides the first attempt to construct the history of a ridiculous investigation that had no crime, no predicate, and no point–except feeding the fantasies of Bill Barr and Donald Trump. It also explores how Trump uses conspiracy theories to turn elections into battles between good and evil.  Finally, this episode reminds us of how Donald Trump has already weaponized the Department of Justice. He did it once in a way that led Republicans to believe the exact inverse of the truth. And he is undoubtedly ready to do so again but with no guardrails this time. Want to know more? Go to Patreon dot com BallofThread for bonus episodes on breaking news and to ask your questions, which could be answered in a bonus episode. For as little as $1 a month, you can support us and help spread the word.

  Bill Barr killed the Mueller Report. He made sure Congress would not take it as an impeachment referral, which is what appears to have been. But he wasn’t done.  That’s because the suspected crimes the Mueller team found wouldn’t stay dead. Join us as we dig deeper into Bill Barr’s malfeasance as Attorney General. Whether it was Roger Stone or Mike Flynn, Barr’s effort to kill Zombie Mueller paved the way for January 6. Want to know more? Join https://www.patreon.com/BallofThread for bonus episodes on breaking news and to ask your questions, which could be answered in a bonus episode. For as little as $1 a month, you can support us and help spread the word.

Want to know more? Join https://www.patreon.com/BallofThread for bonus episodes on breaking news and to ask your questions, which could be answered in a bonus episode. For as little as $1 a month, you can support us and help spread the word. Most people think of Bill Barr’s interference in the Mueller Report in a very limited sense – a letter to Congress and a press conference.  But it was far deeper and more deliberate than that. Bill Barr turned out to be the ideal consumer for the spin Paul Manafort, Devin Nunes, and Fox News spewed to cloak Donald Trump’s vast connections to Russia.  Armed with a passion for covering up Republican high crimes, an authoritarian worldview, and a view of executive power that resembles monarchy, Barr “reluctantly” returned to government with two goals. He wanted to kill the Mueller investigation. He then launched a counter-investigation that he hoped would reverse the special counsel’s extensive record of convictions.  Those plans, which he withheld from Congress during his confirmation hearings, were exacerbated by Rudy Guliani. The president’s lawyer led the effort to transform the backlash to the Russia investigation into a “harebrained” counter-scandal of his own, based on Russian disinformation and Donald Trump’s opportunistic persecution fantasies.  In this Ball of Thread, Marcy Wheeler untangles the lies Bill Barr used to preempt a Congressional decision about the Trump conduct laid out in the Mueller Report, lies that freed Donald Trump up to continue his relationship with Vladimir Putin to this day.  

Robert Mueller had just 22 months to persuade Trump’s aides to cooperate against him. Just 22 months to learn whether Russia had asked for sanctions relief and to carve up Ukraine in exchange for help getting Trump elected.  Had the House used Volume II of the Mueller Report as an impeachment referral, the investigation might have proceeded further into the truth of what Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Trump’s closest allies had done in 2016 and beyond. Instead, Trump outlasted Jeff Sessions’ tenure and installed an Attorney General – Bill Barr – who would shut everything down. Episode 6 of Ball of Threads explains how all that happened. Want to know more? Join the Ball of Thread Patreon for bonus episodes on breaking news and to ask your questions, which could be answered in a bonus episode. For as little as $1 a month, you can support us and help spread the word.

This is a special free bonus episode of Ball of Thread related to the hack of Donald Trump's campaign and the genuine threats to his life. To get your questions answered, support this podcast, and access all of the bonus episodes related to the series and current threats, join the Ball of Thread Patreon. ****************** Check out "Taking Out the FBI," the full episode this accompanies. Read the accompanying post on emptywheel. *********** Jim Jordan and James Comer have spent the last year and a half running their House Committees as Super PACs designed to frame the Bidens while attacking the FBI for ever having the gall to investigate Donald Trump. These efforts have mostly been ignored outside the MAGA Cinematic Universe, flaming out completely when House Republicans couldn’t find the votes to impeach and effectively being rendered null by Joe Biden swiftly passing the baton to Kamala Harris.  But Jordan and Comer have succeeded in a way only Marcy has seemed to notice. They have made Donald Trump less safe. The threats to Trump’s life are genuine, as we saw in Butler, Pennsylvania. However, the most aggressive targeting of the former president may be from Iran. Marcy notes the Islamic Republic has been running influence operations targeting MAGA since 2020. The Intelligence Community has accessed that Iran hacked the Trump team after targeting both campaigns in 2024. In this Ball of Thread bonus, Marcy connects the attacks on the FBI covered in Episode 5 to developments of the last few weeks to unspool the hidden dangers of the backlash to the Russia investigation, which became the Twitter Files, which now may leave law enforcement hampered in the effort to contain the risks to Donald Trump.

We don’t need to guess how Project 2025 could wreck the government. We just need to look at what Donald Trump has already done to pervert and decimate the FBI. In this Ball of Thread, Marcy ties together a vast net of threads to explain how the ex-president targeted everyone in the Federal Bureau of Investigation who had the gall to investigate him. That, conveniently, also allowed him to gut some of the Bureau’s Russian expertise. The story begins with a legal settlement with two former FBI employees who Trump has made an object lesson by making them star villains in his “Deep State” conspiracy theory.  For the first time, Marcy walks through a litany of public servants who faced Trump and his allies' wrath. She also reveals how this attack on our nation’s most important law enforcement agency has already resulted in a general panic that, at least, slowed key investigative steps from being taken both before and after January 6th. Want to know more? Join the Ball of Thread Patreon https://www.patreon.com/posts/110215627 for bonus episodes on breaking news and to ask your questions, which could be answered in a bonus episode. For as little as $1 a month, you can support us and help spread the word.