Ball of Thread

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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 into Manafort’s trap. Plus, Marcy explains how Vladimir Putin probably helped spark the Russia investigation.

Finally, she deconstructs the “collusion” canard. To this day, the purposely distracting focus on this non-crime was used to cloud undeniable evidence of a conspiracy involving Trump’s associates and Russia.

Want to know more? Join the Ball of Thread Patreon for bonus episodes 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.

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 found was a bunch of guys trying to rip off Donald Trump.

But Donald Trump’s narcissism turned those guys trying to rip him off into something else. As Marcy Wheeler shows in this Ball of Thread, Trump’s narcissism turned the FBI’s investigation into people trying to monetize their access to Trump into an attack on him personally.

Thus was born the conspiracy theory that has become a defining theme of Trump’s 2024 campaign and life–war on the “deep state.”

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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 Christopher Steele came together and blew up. She also reveals the untold story of Steele’s relationship with Deripaska and Deripaska’s absolutely brutal double-game. 

Find out how Russian disinformation helped shape the stories about the dossier, blurring the Trump campaign’s relationship with the Kremlin and strategically polarizing the United States.

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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.