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.”

October 10, 2018: Hurricane Michael Pummels Florida Panhandle - Just as Scientists Predicted

 

10/10/18: Hurricane Michael, a near-Category 5 storm piles into the Florida Panhandle, causing billions in damage. It is the strongest hurricane to strike the area since record-keeping began in 1851. Original estimates put Michael at the “tropical storm” level, but the hurricane gained intensity as it passed over much-warmer-than-normal waters in the Gulf of Mexico. 

(See, Hurricane Dorian: 8/30/19.) 

Or, as climate experts might put it in a tweet – assuming they were orange jerks like the president: “We told LOSER Republicans this would be the direct result of rising global temps! Climate deniers are pathetic. SAD. Their corporate masters are a disgrace. #Losers #WePredictedThis.”

Damage from Hurricane Michael.

 

* 

RICHARD PINEDO, “a California computer whiz caught by the Special Counsel Mueller’s office selling fake online identities to Russians,” gets a six-month prison sentence, meaning score one for his team. 

Pinedo is a small fish but may know where the big fish swim. CNN explains: 

Prosecutors told the judge that Pinedo gave them “significant assistance” and that his admissions and testimony “saved the government significant time and resources in the investigation.”

 

Pinedo helped the investigators identify previously anonymous Russians who allegedly ran the social media propaganda scheme during the election. He then explained to investigators how the scheme of using false identities worked….

 

Pinedo testified before a federal grand jury in DC, which approved the indictment of the Internet Research Agency, Concord Management and Consulting and the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as “Putin’s chef.”

 

In other words, Mueller’s investigators pull one loose thread, and several begin to unravel. We have one Russian and two possibly complicit American companies. Keep digging Mr. Mueller.

January 31, 2019: Scary Fox News Story Proves Not so Scary!

 

1/31/19: Well, that didn’t take long. Earlier this week, Fox News reported. You decided. The president tweeted. The State of Texas was absolutely crawling with illegal voters and democracy was on the run! (See: 1/28/19.) 

Um…maybe not. 

David Whitley, Texas Secretary of State, has gone silent on his claim that 95,000 illegals were registered to vote, and 58,000 had done so, and we needed a giant wall to protect voting booths. 

When a coalition of 13 civil rights groups challenged Whitley’s numbers he had to retreat. He said he’d get back to them “within the next week.”

 

Meanwhile, officials in all 254 Texas counties went to work checking the lists of naughty voters and nice. Within days, Dallas County found that 1,715 people on the Whitley list were in fact citizens. Harris County quickly knocked 18,000 of 30,000 “illegals” off its list. That gave the State of Texas an error rate of at least 60%; and county officials weren’t close to done. 

As the Dallas News reported, “Williamson County’s Chris Davis, president of the Association of Texas Elections Administrators, said more than half of the 2,033 voters on his county’s list were being removed after the state’s revision.” 

Travis County officials told reporters they had knocked 634 names off their list and had barely started. Bruce Elfant, registrar for the county, probably spoke for registrars in all 254 counties when he told reporters he had been removing a lot of names, which had been tedious. “It would have been nice if they would have vetted this more carefully [emphasis added] before they sent it out to election administrators.” 

In fact, what President Trump had originally said was “the tip of the iceberg,” was starting to look like another GOP ice cube, in a country club cocktail of disinformation, served by an undocumented worker. It was another in a series of wild claims meant to scare the ill-informed base. 

 

Save us from shipments of undocumented cucumbers. 

Now that this threat from illegal immigration was blunted, we could focus on how the case for the Great Wall of Trump was progressing. 

Democrats don’t seem interested in paying for all the bricks Trump needs for his wall. But Customs and Border Protection proves once again that we really need a wall 20, or 30 or 1,000 feet high. Thursday, CBP announces the biggest drug bust involving fentanyl ever, proving we need… 

What! 

It turns out this shipment, 254 pounds of fentanyl, and just under 400 pounds of meth, worth $4.6 million, came right through the Port of Nogales, Arizona, hidden in a truckload of cucumbers.

Hide the drugs in the vegetables.

 

* 

DID SOMEONE MENTION criminals? New court filings in the case of Roger Stone show that federal prosecutors have a trove of information seized in the raid on his home, office, and found on computers and other electronic devices. 

Stone won’t be going to trial anytime soon, and the Mueller investigation is far from over. First, prosecutors will have to produce copies of any legally pertinent information they find and hand them over to Stone’s defense team, a process known as “discovery.” Second, a team of lawyers will have to examine the material that turns up and exclude “privileged” information such as client-attorney communications. 

Finally, Mueller and his team will have to build their case against Mr. Stone, and potentially others, as may be revealed: 

This discovery is both voluminous and complex.  It is composed of multiple hard drives containing several terabytes of information consisting of, among other things, FBI case reports, search warrant applications and results (e.g., Apple iCloud accounts and email accounts), bank and financial records, and the contents of numerous physical devices (e.g., cellular phones, computers, and hard drives). The communications contained in the iCloud accounts, email accounts, and physical devices span several years. The government also intends to produce to the defense the contents of physical devices recently seized from his home, apartment, and office. 

Those devices are currently undergoing a filter review by the FBI for potentially privileged communications.

 

To keep this development in perspective, a single terabyte is equivalent to 75 million pages like the one you are (hopefully) reading.

 

* 

IF WE GO BACK to November 2018, we already knew that an unusually high number of sealed indictments (as many as 36), had been filed with the federal courts in Washington D.C. It was inadvertently revealed that one of those 36 listed Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. 

Several legal analysists have suggested that Robert Mueller’s team, knowing the president might move to interfere with their work after the midterm election, filed the necessary papers in advance. In other words, the “winning” names would be revealed only when investigators finished their work, or whenever Trump and his minions moved to shut the show down. 

Sealed indictments could not be revoked. 

We know now that one of the 36 was filed in Stone’s name. We can be confident another was aimed at Jerome Corsi, or so Corsi believed. Corsi has since been cooperating with investigators. (See: 1/25/19.)

 

Axios also has an excellent story out this week, highlighting the granular detail revealed in previous court filings. For example, on July 27, 2016, we know Candidate Trump issued his famous call, “Russia, if you’re listening…” It was then he expressed the hope the Russians would find Hillary Clinton’s emails. The very next day, as revealed in an indictment of 12 Russian hackers, Mueller’s team knows the Russians set to work. As revealed in court documents, “the Conspirators…attempted after hours to spear-phish for the first time email accounts at a domain hosted by a third-party provider and used by Clinton’s personal office.” 

“That,” says Axios, “shows Mueller has access to much more intelligence than is publicly known. Remember, these are Russian government employees. So Mueller has remarkable and thus far unexplained visibility.” 

Mueller has also hinted he has far more information than those outside the investigation imagine. In a court filing aimed at members of a Russian troll factory, his team reported that three employees of the Internet Research Agency, the troll factory, traveled to the U.S. in 2014. Two have since been indicted. 

Not the third. 

Mueller has indicated in court filings, “that he knows the precise IRA official to whom this unnamed [third] male traveler filed his Atlanta expenses after the trip.” As Axios adds, “The information could have come from U.S. intelligence or another country. But Mueller leaves the impression he may have a cooperator inside the troll factory.”

 

* 

IN A POLL RELEASED TODAY, 62 percent of Americans believe the president knew that his associates, Cohen, Manafort, Stone, Don Jr. and others, were purposely misleading investigators and Congress. 

Only 32 percent think he didn’t.

February 21, 2019: White Supremacist Plots to Kill Nancy Pelosi, Start Race War - Mueller Probe Winding Down

 

2/21/19: Yesterday the news exploded with interlocking developments, few of a promising nature for the president. 

On Tuesday, Trump posted his most direct attack on the free press via Twitter, singling out The New York Times as “THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.” 

Then the story broke that a white nationalist, Christopher Paul Hasson (a U.S. Coast Guard officer) had been arrested and charged with plotting murder on a mass scale. Since at least 2017, Hasson has been stockpiling arms and ammunition and compiling a list of targets. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi made the list. So did news anchors at MSNBC and CNN, the very people Trump attacks constantly for spreading “Fake News.” Hasson had plans to poison thousands if he could manage, in hopes of sparking a race war, with a final muddled goal of creating a “white homeland.” (I think it’s safe to assume he was probably all in on the Great Wall of Trump.) 

“Much blood will have to be spilled to get whitey off the couch,” Hasson complained in one email draft. Whites who wouldn’t join the fight would have to “die as will the traitors who actively work toward our demise.”

 

Naturally, it turns out that the names on Hasson’s hit list match up almost perfectly with those the president constantly vilifies: 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren: Trump has tweeted: “Goofy Elizabeth Warren, sometimes referred to as Pocahontas…a lowlife!”  

Sen. Chuck Schumer: “Nancy Pelosi and her sidekick, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, want to protect illegal immigrants far more than the citizens of our country. The United States cannot stand for this.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal: “How does Da Nang Dick (Blumenthal) serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee when he defrauded the American people about his so called War Hero status in Vietnam…” 

(Yes, that was Trump complaining about somebody ducking service in Vietnam.)

 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “The Democrat Agenda is a Socialist Nightmare.” 

Beto O’Rourke: “He will never be allowed to turn Texas into Venezuela!” 

MSNBC host Joe Scarborough: “Crazy Joe Scarborough.” 

Rep. Maxine Waters: “She has just called for harm to supporters, of which there are many, of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!”

 

Be careful, indeed. Where Waters had told supporters to make Trump supporters “uncomfortable” (a mistake, yes), Hasson had stockpiled 15 rifles, 1,000 rounds of ammo and assorted brands of poison. 

When asked by reporters if he thought he needed to tone down his rhetoric, Trump said he didn’t think there was a problem and Press Secretary Pinocchio insisted that words of hate don’t matter.

 

* 

Politically damaging, but not criminal conduct. 

SPEAKING OF TRUMP LOYALISTS, there’s good news and bad for the president and his red, white, and blue fans. First the good: There are rumors that the Mueller probe is wrapping up its work. The Washington Post notes that only 12 of 17 prosecutors are still on the job. Several have contacted old bosses about future moves. Now, the bad: We don’t know what the final report will say but the Post explains, “An adviser to President Trump said there is palpable concern among the president’s inner circle that the report might contain information about Trump and his team that is politically damaging, but not criminal conduct.” 

Unfortunately for Team Trump, we know that as lawyers leave the investigation, they may be assigned to prosecute cases against individuals who have been identified by the probe as having criminal liability. Two prosecutors who have left the Mueller office are pursuing the case against Roger Stone. 

According to the Post, Mueller has always viewed his job as that of an investigator not a prosecutor. That means evidence he and his team gather may be handed to other federal authorities for continuing action. Or, as Winston Churchill once said, “This is not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning.”

 

We found out today that two more potential witnesses in the Russia/Trump saga, whether a story of felonious behavior or financial sleaze, have been identified (to the public). As CNN explains, Senate investigators have been seeking for months to question a Moscow-based American businessman whose ties to Trump go back to 1996. For some odd reason, that businessman, David Geovanis, is not anxious to return to the U.S. 

The facts are straightforward, the bizarre possibilities many. Geovanis helped organize a 1996 trip to Moscow by Trump, when Trump was not yet tinted orange, but already dreamed of building a Trump Tower Moscow. Later Geovanis worked for the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. The oligarch’s ties to Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort have riveted investigators. 

What makes the story even more fun is that witnesses called to testify before the Senate Judicial Committee told CNN they were asked about a photograph from that period. In it, Geovanis is seen posing with three scantily clad women. “The portrait, once displayed in a Russian gallery under the title ‘The Capitalist,’ depicts the subjects in front of a picture of the former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. It’s not clear whether the portrait is a single photograph or a composite,” CNN notes. 

A third witness “has alleged in written testimony, seen by CNN, that Geovanis may be valuable in the mystery of whether Russia has material on Trump that could be personally embarrassing to him.”

 

Geovanis was born in Brockton, Massachusetts. Like Trump he went to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He landed in Moscow and went to work for a Russian outfit called Brooke Group, which owned land earmarked for the site of a proposed Trump Tower. “When Trump came to town to promote the project, sources say, it was Geovanis’ job to show him around.” 

You know, show him the World War II monuments, take him to the zoo – maybe line up some hookers? 

 

A mysterious call that went to Howard Lorber. 

That “hookers” part is just a liberal blogger’s joke. Still, it’s worth noting that the owners of Brooke Group were Bennett LeBow and Howard Lorber. Both were big donors to Trump’s 2016 campaign. Lorber became a person of interest in the investigation recently when it was revealed that a mysterious phone call had gone to his number. That call was one of three Don Jr. made before, during and after a secret meeting with Russians at Trump Tower in June 2016. 

So, let’s just say: Wow! 

Here’s the photo that Senate investigators wanted to know about – and just for fun, I think you should imagine Donald J. Trump standing there, himself, “The Capitalist” in every sense of the word.

Then imagine the sultry Russian women cavorting with a younger, less jowly version of our president under the sheets.

Geovanis and the babe.

BLOGGER’S NOTE (5/18/2022): Mr. Geovanis seems to have slipped from the news after this story broke. A U.S. Senate report released in August 2020, when Republicans controlled the investigating committees, did mention him. A couple of fresh tidbits of note: In 2007, Citizen Trump sent Vladimir Putin a love letter. “As you have probably heard, I am a big fan of yours,” Trump wrote, after Putin was chosen Time magazine’s “Person of the Year.” 

He even underlined “big fan” in pen. 

The Senate report also noted that Geovanis had said he believed Trump may have had a “brief romantic relationship” with a former Miss Russia, during his stay in Moscow; but this was never proven. The report goes on to say that Geovanis had known “ties to Kremlin-linked oligarchs” and contacts that are “associated with Russia’s intelligence and security services.” The Senate report adds, “Geovanis also has a reputation in Moscow for a pattern of conduct regarding women that could make him, and potentially those around him, vulnerable to kompromat operations.” 

Not much else turns up when I do a quick internet search on Geovanis. Wikipedia says he became a Russian citizen in 2014. I don’t see any stories about him after the August 2020 report. We can report, however, that Mr. Geovanis never got within reach of Senate investigators. If he has ever traveled to this country again, it is unknown to us.

November 18, 2019: Let Trump Come Forth and Testify Under Oath

 

11/18/19: A second week of public testimony begins. It would be safe to say the first week ended with President Twitter Thumbs in a dark place. His mood is not likely to improve if aides let him see the results of an ABC poll. Seven in ten Americans believe his efforts to get Ukraine to dig up dirt and help him win the 2020 election were wrong. Nearly six in ten (57%) believe he should be impeached, including 6% who think he should be impeached but allowed to remain in office. 

Only 1 in 4 Americans believes the president did nothing wrong. Even the First Lady probably knows he did. 

See: Stormy Daniels, et. al.

 

____________________ 

The president “could come right before the committee and talk, speak all the truth that he wants if he wants.” 

Speaker Nancy Pelosi

____________________

 

 

We can expect that number in favor of impeachment to continue to rise if Speaker Nancy Pelosi manages to call the president’s bluff. Republican lawmakers have been insisting that the whole impeachment inquiry is rigged and wrong and an abomination. Why can’t the president (and a lawyer or two to tag along) defend himself? Pelosi has invited Mr. Trump to do just that. Come before the House Intelligence Committee and tell your side of the story. 

“If he has information that is exculpatory, that means ‘ex,’ taking away, ‘culpable,’ blame, then we look forward to seeing it,” she said during an appearance on Face the Nation. The president, she explained, “could come right before the committee and talk, speak all the truth that he wants if he wants.” 

And like a lemming rushing for the cliff – if a lemming had the capacity to lie – Trump has said that he just might do it!

 

It took a pair of tweets to say he might, but you could feel the fury in the president’s thumbs as he tapped: 

Our Crazy, Do Nothing (where’s USMCA, infrastructure, lower drug pricing & much more?) Speaker of the House, Nervous Nancy Pelosi, who is petrified by her Radical Left knowing she will soon be gone (they & Fake News Media are her BOSS), suggested on Sunday’s DEFACE THE NATION....

 

....that I testify about the phony Impeachment Witch Hunt. She also said I could do it in writing. Even though I did nothing wrong, and don’t like giving credibility to this No Due Process Hoax, I like the idea & will, in order to get Congress focused again, strongly consider it!

 

So: to sum up. Trump will “consider it.” This is reminiscent of his claim that he looked forward to testifying under oath in the Mueller probe, which he never managed to do. Pelosi is “crazy.” The “Fake News Media” is terrible because they keep reporting what witnesses say. The whole impeachment inquiry is a “No Due Process Hoax,” even though all the witnesses testifying last week did so with Republicans having equal time to question what they said.