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.
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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.”
