March 30, 2018: Another Shady Character Surfaces in the Mueller Probe

 

3/30/18: Anything new with the Mueller investigation? Friday, as first reported by The Guardian, Trump campaign figure Ted Malloch was intercepted at the Boston airport after a flight from London. 

Malloch was served a subpoena, separated from his wife, and had his cellphone confiscated by the F.B.I. 

Malloch padded his resume but claimed he had no assets in bankruptcy.

Why would Malloch, who most Americans, including this dedicated blogger, have never heard of before, be of interest to the Mueller investigation? Malloch has close ties with Nigel Farage – who has close ties with Julian Assange of WikiLeaks – who helped expose the damaging Clinton/Democratic National Committee emails – which helped the Big Orange Buffoon get elected. 

In an email response to the Guardian story, Malloch, 

described himself as a policy wonk and defender of Trump, [and] said the FBI also asked him about his relationship with Roger Stone, the Republican strategist, and whether he had ever visited the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has resided for nearly six years.

 

It turns out Malloch was “floated in media reports as a possible US ambassador to the EU,” in 2016. European officials, “alarmed by the possible pick and his lack of diplomatic credentials, openly criticised Malloch, particularly after he compared the EU to the Soviet Union.” 

It probably didn’t help his chances of landing the post when it turned out he had padded his resume. Malloch claimed, variously, that he had been “a fellow at Wolfson and Pembroke colleges at Oxford, that he had been called a ‘genius’ by Margaret Thatcher, and that he was the ‘first’ to coin the phrase ‘thought leadership.’” None of these claims were … technically  … true.

 

So why might this matter? Mueller’s team is digging into links between the Trump campaign and Russia. Of particular interest would be links between Trump surrogates, through WikiLeaks, to Russians. 

What we begin to see is a potential merry-go-round of problems for Trump and his pals. Did Roger Stone knowingly communicate with Russian agents, such as Guccifer 2.0? It seems he did. Did Stone ever work with or through WikiLeaks, which might mean working with or through Russians, to ensure the release of Democratic National Committee and Clinton emails to damage her campaign? Did Malloch help? Where does Strategic Communications Laboratories Group (SCL), the London-based data-mining company and Cambridge Analytica, its American arm, fit into this scheme? (See: 3/15-21/18 for more detail.) 

Who has ties to SCL? It turns out Michael Flynn, already cooperating with the Mueller investigation, was on the SCL payroll.

 

Finally, we learn this week, that Stone is nervous. Thursday night, Sam Nunberg, once the brains behind the Trump run for president, said during a television interview that Stone had tried to “curry favor with Trump by suggesting he had met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange prior to the 2016 presidential election.” 

“He’s always trying to ingratiate himself to Trump,” Nunberg continued. “I don’t care about Trump. It’s irrelevant to me if I have a relationship with him again. Roger does. They have a long relationship.”  

Stone has denied in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of places, that he had prior knowledge of coming leaks of emails that would damage Clinton. And, no, he never worked with Assange to make it happen. Now, Nunberg was claiming Stone told Trump he met with Assange. This did not sit well with Stone, who quickly took to Instagram to blast his former friend and ally. 

Nunberg, he said, was a “psycho,” “a cocaine addict” and a “lying asshole.”

POSTSCRIPT: Additional checking proves that Malloch is Donald J. Trump’s kind of guy. That is, a sleazebag. In March 2017, he lost a default judgment to two banks, after he tried to declare bankruptcy, and dump debts to the institutions, to the tune of $5.9 million.

Michael Kopsick, a lawyer for One Bank, one of the two institutions effected, told the Financial Times that, in essence, you would have to be a blithering idiot to appoint Mr. Malloch to any post of importance. Malloch had, said Kopsick, “appeared to have made ‘never-ending’ efforts to obfuscate the true state of his finances. ‘Anyone who would consider putting him in a position of trust regarding financial matters should read the bankruptcy court file,’ he said.”