The FBI detained Ted Malloch, who claims to have been an informal adviser to the 2016 Trump campaign, at a Boston airport this week upon landing in the U.S. and issued him a subpoena to testify in front of special counsel Robert Mueller on any knowledge he has on possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, according to a report Friday.
In a statement obtained by the Guardian, Malloch said the FBI stopped him at Boston’s Logan International Airport Wednesday and interrogated him about his relationship to the Trump campaign and former campaign adviser Roger Stone. Malloch also said the officials questioned whether or not he had ever visited the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has lived in asylum for more than half a decade.
Malloch agreed to appear before Mueller’s grand jury in Washington, D.C., on April 13.
Malloch, an outspoken Trump supporter, told the Guardian that when the FBI stopped him they “seemed to know everything about me.” He said that the FBI’s treatment of him was “objectionable.”
“They did not need to use such tactics or intimidation,” Malloch said. “I was a U.S. patriot and would do anything and everything to assist the government and I had no information that I believed was relevant.”
Malloch reportedly went on to tell the FBI that he aided the Trump campaign in an informal and unpaid manner, and never privately met with Stone.
It was rumored in 2016 that Malloch, a known ally of U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, was a candidate for the position of ambassador to the EU. The rumors subsided after the Financial Times reported on multiple discrepancies in Malloch’s autobiography, including the fact that onetime U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once called him a “genius.”
