Episode description

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.