A quick update from Marcy. Get the whole story at https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/03/19/the-significance-of-amy-gleasons-fabulous-disappearing-act/

Marcy Wheeler ties it all together. In this last bonus episode of Ball of Thread, Marcy explains how the confirmation of Ka$h Patel and the Trump administration’s abandonment of Ukraine confirm the big ideas behind Ball of Thread. Eight years ago, Kash Patel helped Trump turn a legitimate investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia into a grievance n…

The final Ball of Thread answers how Donald Trump won and defeated the rule of law, for now. His grievance myth. That’s how he got here. That’s why we must expect retribution next. The series will conclude with a final bonus episode, "So Let's Talk About Merrick Garland."

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…

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 pardo…

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 connection…

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 Co…

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 …

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…

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…

On March 22, 2017, Devin Nunes went to the White House to announce his “concerns” about intelligence gathering on the Trump transition team. This began a multi-year scandal that saw House Republicans picking up Paul Manafort’s plan to discredit the Russian investigation. In this Ball of Thread, Marcy Wheeler explains how the dueling reports produce…

You may have watched Donald Trump speak directly into a camera and ask Russia for some specific help to win the 2016 election and wondered, “What the hell is going on here?” So did Australian diplomat Alexander Downer. That’s because Downer knew that at least one member of the Trump campaign had advance knowledge Russia might have a lot of emails i…

Paul Manafort was in Spain in January 2017 when the “Trump dossier” was published. He was there to “re-establish” his relationship with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch to whom he owed millions. When the former chairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign returned to the United States, he presented Republicans with a plan to discredit the entire Trump/Russi…

You remember “Russia, if you’re listening” and the flood of social media disinformation. But you’ve never heard the strands of Putin’s attack on the 2016 election tied together like this. Want to know more? Join https://www.patreon.com/BallofThread to ask your questions, which could be answered in a bonus Q&A episode coming soon. For as little as $…

If there is an exact date when Americans should have known their democracy was doomed, it could be April 25, 2024. That’s when the Supreme Court entertained arguments that Donald Trump, as an ex-president, enjoys “absolute immunity” for his actions while in office. The Republican-appointed men on the court made it clear that they not only wanted to…