Ball of Thread

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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