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PODCAST

Ball of Thread

emptywheel"s Marcy Wheeler

Independent journalist Marcy Wheeler unwinds the true story of the attack on democracy that is bringing the United States to the brink of fascism.

true crime

All Episodes

22:19

The Catturd Deficit

Ball of Thread ·

2025/06/17

Marcy discusses how Twitter became Elon's Machine for Fascism and how we can use it against the fascists.

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15:25

AGENT MUSK: The Best Legal Hope to Take Down DOGE

Ball of Thread ·

2025/03/19

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/

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42:41

Ball of Ka$h — A Conclusion

Ball of Thread ·

2025/02/17

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 narrative. Over and over, Kash added to the tale: with Ukraine, with January 6, with the stolen documents. And now, as Kash prepares to turn the FBI into

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47:01

13| The Grievance Myth

Ball of Thread ·

2025/01/20

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."

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57:28

12 | The Meaning of January 6th

Ball of Thread ·

2025/01/06

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

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18:28

What You Miss About Hunter's Pardon If You Sniff Dick...

Ball of Thread ·

2024/12/16

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

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54:21

11 | The Packaging of Hunter

Ball of Thread ·

2024/12/10

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

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01:10:32

10 | Selling Justice

Ball of Thread ·

2024/11/27

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

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01:00:00

9 | Durham Descends

Ball of Thread ·

2024/11/05

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

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01:12:44

8| Zombie Mueller

Ball of Thread ·

2024/10/22

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

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44:09

7| Barr’s Butchery

Ball of Thread ·

2024/10/11

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

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01:38:19

6| The Mueller Referral

Ball of Thread ·

2024/09/13

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

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08:11

Bonus Episode: Endangering Trump

Ball of Thread ·

2024/08/20

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

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01:07:06

5 | Taking Out the FBI

Ball of Thread ·

2024/08/16

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

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56:56

4 | Devin Nunes' “Collusion"

Ball of Thread ·

2024/07/23

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 produced by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence helped polarize the nation. She also reveals how Democrats' reliance on the dossier helped play

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01:10:57

3| TAPPED (into narcissism)

Ball of Thread ·

2024/07/05

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 incriminating Hillary Clinton. The Australians reached out to the FBI. The investigation into Trump's campaign ties to Russia began. And what the FBI

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57:42

2| The dossier that broke America

Ball of Thread ·

2024/06/19

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/Russia investigation. In the second episode of Ball of Thread, Marcy Wheeler unwinds how the dossier collected by former British intelligence agent

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58:57

1 | By the nuts: Russia's attack on the 2016 election

Ball of Thread ·

2024/05/30

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 $1 a month, you can support us and help spread the word.

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27:14

Introduction - Things look bleak for the home team

Ball of Thread ·

2024/05/13

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 delay the trial against Donald Trump related to his actions around January 6th, but at least three of them seemed eager to throw out the charges

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39 results

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