The Russia investigation is continuing to proceed, whether the president and his allies are fond of the idea or not. Although the House Intelligence Committee moved to end its investigation, other lines of inquiry are still very much open.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, for instance, has proven that he will leave no stone unturned in his inquiry into the Trump team. That inquiry has so far culminated in charges against four former Trump associates and an array of other interests.
As a part of the ongoing inquiry, it’s now come out that a Trump ally and InfoWars contributor named Ted Malloch was detained and questioned by the FBI earlier this week before being issued a subpoena compelling him to testify before Robert Mueller’s grand jury next month.
Malloch — who has since been released — was detained and questioned this past Wednesday after arriving back in the United States at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Malloch had been in London before coming back here.
He told The Guardian that the FBI had questioned him about his involvement in the Trump campaign, his relationship with Trump ally Roger Stone, and whether or not he had ever visited the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Wikileaks head Julian Assange has stayed for years.
Wikileaks, of course, helped release emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee to the world, although the organization itself isn’t known as the one to have stolen the emails. Instead, the emails came from Russian hackers. It’s just recently come out that an internet persona of the hacker or hackers behind the DNC email theft — “Guccifer 2.0” — has been identified as a specific officer in the Russian intelligence service.
Although the communications haven’t, as revealed, yet proven condemning, Trump ally Roger Stone communicated with the Guccifer 2.0 persona via Twitter. He also seemed to have advance knowledge of Wikileaks email dumps, and he admitted at one point to communicating with Assange himself, but claimed it was through an intermediary. He named that intermediary as journalist Randy Credico, but Credrico has denied the claims.
The Guardian sums up Malloch’s take on all of these issues by writing:
‘Malloch said in a statement on Thursday – after he was released – that his role on the Trump campaign was informal and unpaid, that he had only met with Stone on three occasions and never alone, and that he knew nothing about Wikileaks and had never visited the Ecuadorian embassy.’
Even still, Malloch had his phone confiscated and will be appearing before Mueller’s grand jury on April 13.
As just one example of the president’s questionable at best staffing decisions, Malloch’s name had at one point been floated as a possible United States Ambassador to the European Union under the Trump administration. That idea fell through, however, in part thanks to reporting on lies in the conspiracy supporter’s autobiography.
Malloch’s detention and subpoena comes against a backdrop of a still very much alive investigation being carried out by Robert Mueller, whose team went so far as to subpoena Steve Bannon at one point recently. That subpoena was dropped in the face of an agreement by Bannon to come and testify.
Featured Image via Jabin Botsford/ The Washington Post via Getty Images
